Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 363

The offspring of conferences held in Lisbon and Louvain, this volume seeks to examine the ways in which the Second World War challenged and changed the nature of post-war European farming and the outlook of its practitioners. In a series of chapters rich in statistical detail, a number of authors consider such issues as capital investment, productivity, mechanization and the development of agricultural institutions in various eastern and western European countries. In most cases the War represented a basic discontinuity, in the sense that normal trading conditions were interrupted while state intervention often precipitated fundamental changes both in production patterns and attitudes towards farming itself. Studies of individual national experiences, including Spain, Hungary, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland, follow in the wake of fine essays by Paul Brassley and John Martin, and Ernst Langthaler, dealing respectively with international trade and the role of state control in Britain, and Nazi-occupied Austria. If the significance of state control in Britain should not be overemphasized, institutional change under National Socialism substantially re-ordered farming in Austria with considerable benefit for post-war development. In Germany herself, a very different rural world obtained. Walther Darre’s Blut und Boden ideology cherished the notion of a traditional peasantry and, while the German state was able to exploit occupied territories for food, the peasants enjoyed stable prices and guaranteed markets. For them, as Gesine Gerhard observes, the war represented an interlude from the pressures of modernization and mechanization rather than the accelerator of change. Wholesale transformation would be a post-war phenomenon.

State intervention, of course, was a basic leitmotif of farming in many European countries throughout the war and during the early post-war decades. In an essay complementing his previous studies of state intervention and control in Britain, Brian Short considers the various means whereby the County War Agricultural Executive Committees exercised their extensive powers. Like them or loathe them, the farming community had no option but to collaborate with ‘Warag’ plans and instructions for the duration of the war and the following decade. Short shows how the social makeup of ‘Warag’ committees reinforced class solidarity and highlighted carefully orchestrated social divisions. The appointment of local landowners (or, in the case of Wales, prominent figures in the Nonconformist fold) left little doubt in most people’s minds that traditional (‘natural’?) leaders remained very much in the driving seat. Whatever evils might befall the land, the rural status quo would remain intact and social change in the countryside would have to await the post-war influx of affluent townsfolk.

The war, of course, was a major driver of change, establishing in most countries the idea that government should accept a degree of responsibility for national food supplies and rural policies. The same conflict somewhat modified the overall public perception of farmers as a class. In France, for example, Edouard Lynch notes that the unwillingness of farmers to comply with stringent food directives led to deep distrust of the rural community by the urban working classes. As the black market in food expanded into the post-war years, distrust evolved into hatred as French people perceived the farming world to have profited from the wartime emergency. Many English farmers too were thought to have had a ‘good war’ in the sense that wartime surpluses were believed to have boosted their standard of living. But, once the dust had settled, the war was over and government propaganda assimilated, the British public came to appreciate the importance of farmers to the war effort on the home front. In her chapter on the image of the farmer, Clare Griffiths highlights the growing credibility of farmers among the urban public, which intensified as the industry became more forward-looking and entrepreneurial in the post-war decades. Farming was now a key element in the economy and, as governments strove to nudge the country towards self-sufficiency in food, the farmer enjoyed growing political influence.

The editors have assembled a distinguished body of contributors who have painted a compelling canvass of a farming world on the cusp of almost unprecedented change. If the volume contains few brave new insights, it offers a valuable overview of the wartime and early post-war agricultural world, along with detailed considerations of the experiences of individual countries, which will be appreciated by students of those economies. Apart from a photo of a self-satisfied and well-dressed English farmer looking ruminatively over a gate, and some poorly reproduced offerings in Carin Martin’s chapter on Sweden, the book is innocent of illustrations. Given its alarming price and the richness of wartime photographic archive material one might reasonably have expected a few action pictures to illustrate the well-composed text.