Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 113

This volume announces the emergence of a new annual publication on rural history (‘The yearbook of rural history’) based in Austria but with editorial input from across central and southern Europe. The publication aims to promote new trends in the study of the agrarian world, especially ‘actor-centred’ models of rural behaviour and the influence of cultural history (the editors point to the British journal Rural History as an inspiration). Now that the series is some three volumes old (beginning in 2004) it is not yet clear that the themes of the new journal are really so far removed from the preoccupations of more ‘traditional’ publications such as Agricultural History Review or the Zeitschrift für Agrargeschichte und Agrarsoziologie which have been by no means moribund in recent times. But the Jahrbuch is certainly to be welcomed.

With the founding of the series, it is entirely appropriate that this first volume is devoted to historiographical reflection on rural history in several European countries, setting out the traditions on which current agrarian history can both draw, and seek to supersede. This is perhaps a particularly germanophone preoccupation, as the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of historical writing tend to be more explicitly addressed in germanophone scholarship than elsewhere. In this and many other areas, a little international comparison draws out strongly the preoccupations of particular nations and regions. The chapters cover east-central Europe (or more accurately, work on regions traditionally seen as being dominated by the manorial and demesne economies called Gutsherrschaft in German) by Markus Cerman; the GDR by Arnd Bauernkämper; Austria by Ernst Langthaler; Germany by Robert von Friedeburg; Italy by Margareth Lazinger; the Alps by Jon Mathieu; Switzerland by Peter Moser; France receives two chapters by Gérard Béaur and Nadine Vivier respectively; and Spain by Gloria Sanz Lafuente. Additional pieces examine the works of Austrian agrarian historians Karl Grünberg and Hermann Wopfner, and there are reviews of the CORN (Comparative history of the North Sea area) book series, and Michael Kearney’s 1996 challenge to peasant studies.

While the editors are to be congratulated on pulling together such a diversity of perspective for both this volume, and the editorial oversight of the journal, it seems a shame that England and the Low Countries have not been included. Much scholarship in recent years has challenged the idea of the ‘backwardness’ of continental agriculture, including some work valorized in this volume. It would have been interesting to involve directly historians from those countries bordering the North Sea who in the CORN series have generally taken the view that this was indeed the core (perhaps a better acronym?) region of agricultural development during and after the early modern period. As it stands two new book series have now emerged in recent years that seem to reflect the pricing zones – one for the European north-west and the Baltic, and one for the central and southern regions of the continent – that were identified by Braudel and Spooner for the early modern period. The longue durée indeed! It is to be hoped in the future that more historians than Béaur and Vivier will seek provide a bridge between these zones.

Reading the contributions collectively, it is striking the degree to which the development of agrarian history in each country is perceived as being largely driven by developments within, and peculiar to, that same country. Apart from a few mentions of Annales, one would get the impression that cross-border co-operation among historians was only in its infancy. This is less true within the germanophone world itself, where personnel have moved easily between institutions in different countries and language presents no barrier. Yet only the discussion of Alpine historiography by Jon Mathieu brings international comparison in any depth, as part of an argument that the complex linguistic, environmental and political boundaries of this mountain region have both necessitated and facilitated such comparison.

Many of the authors point to specific domestic political constellations as being critical in providing impetus to important phases in conceptualizing national agrarian history. These range from the late nineteenth-century debates over labour-shedding and agrarian crisis in Germany, classically interpreted by the ‘Historical School’ of national economy around Theodor Knapp; to the resurgence of Marxism in post-war Italy and the response to the land reform of 1950; or debates around agricultural reform in Switzerland in the mid-1980s. In some cases the influence of these phases has proven enduring, especially the inheritance from late nineteenth-century reformers, who saw agricultural progress as a socio-political question linked to the behaviour of the Junker landowning class and state protectionism, that in turn promoted the idea that a dominant legal and political regime, the Agrarverfassung, determined agrarian change (or the lack of it). German agrarian history has given a prominent position to the legal status of peasants and land, and social structural analysis, ever since. Yet the balance of themes within germanophone work also represents a particular definition of ‘agrarian history’ that has been more broadly conceived than in Britain. If social historical themes such as histories of legal status, the village commune, and peasant revolt have predominated over economic concerns, it seems incorrect to claim, as Robert von Friedeburg does in this volume, that agricultural history has been neglected compared to England. From this reviewer’s point of view (writing from England, but having conducted research in Germany), this divergence reflects the way sub-disciplines have been categorized rather than actual research.

Yet for all this particularism, there are shared developments that emerge from these texts. The nineteenth-century juridical training of historians across Europe generated a strong preoccupation with tenurial and legal relations as the bedrock of agricultural history. This combined with a view of the peasantry that saw it as fundamentally antithetical to modernity, often linking tenurial and legal forms to rural ethnography. Across a range of countries the rapid dissolution of the old rural world in the early decades of the twentieth century inspired a strong political and historical interest in agrarian studies, which from the 1930s tapped into new serial and quantitative techniques of study epitomized in the work of Labrousse or Abel. By the 1970s, however, dissatisfaction was emerging with sociological models of rural society and regional studies that did not seem to be advancing the discipline. The central economic preoccupation with ‘progressive’ farming on the English model superseding peasant and feudal inertia began to look increasingly unsatisfactory, in underplaying the capacity to innovate of ‘traditional’ agriculture, the experience of social differentiation (within and between households) and rural industrialization, and giving insufficient attention to individual choices. By the 1980s, agrarian history was stagnant and unfashionable, a decline particularly precipitate in France, but has recovered from the early 1990s. Multiple new foci have emerged: gender studies, ‘alternative agriculture’, ecological approaches to modelling rural change, and especially anthropologically-influenced approaches that examine the farmer as innovator and actor, and the micro-politics of rural communities.

The chapters thus leave many questions unanswered. Did the international exchange of ideas among historians have more influence than is credited here? Or did agricultural history respond to common changes in the economy, society, and intellectual fashion that were exogenous to agricultural history itself? A clearly divergent region is Spain, where the 1980s saw the rise of agrarian history to one of the most prominent themes in history. This anomaly is not addressed, though it seems hard to divorce it from a flourishing of interest in the dynamics of rural society after the Franco era, in a state where the old regime and a large agricultural sector persisted to a very late date.

The volume gives a broad if uneven view of historic and current developments in agrarian history. It is unlikely that anglophone readers will go to a book published in German for a digest of recent developments in Italian, Spanish or French agricultural history (although they are all fine essays). Ernst Langthaler’s discussion of Austrian agrarian history and Peter Moser’s of Switzerland are particularly worth visiting, however, both indicating how the myth of the soil-bound and virtuous peasant influenced agrarian history throughout the twentieth century. By exploring the paradox of a ‘peasant’ and rural political discourse purveyed by a state that ruthlessly pursued industrialization both generally and within the agricultural sector, Moser offers a particularly nuanced exposition of recent Swiss work, including his own; and may provide some comparative insights for other countries.