Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 135

Danish history writing traditionally considers the late nineteenth-century cooperatives key to the success of the Danish road to economic development. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, middle-sized peasant-farmers united in cooperatives enabling them to produce butter competitively to the British market. The success story of the so-called Danish model was largely ascribed to these middle-sized farmers, who gained importance not only in economic matters but also socially and politically. The Danish historian Thorkild Kjærgaard has described this predominant narrative as the ‘peasant-farmer line’ in Danish history writing. In their new book, Markus Lampe and Paul Sharp challenge this narrative.

The authors have both contributed significantly to the economic history of Danish agricultural development in previous articles, and their new book brings their research into a more complete account. This makes for a very original interpretation of the Danish success story. Their main argument throughout the book is that the cooperatives – their focus is on the important cooperative dairies – did not represent a turning point but rather a continuation of earlier Danish agricultural success. Throughout the book, they trace the roots of this development from the eighteenth century to the establishment of the first cooperative dairy in 1882 and their subsequent rapid spread.

In sixteenth-century Schleswig and Holstein – the German part of the Danish monarchy and personal union – estate owners developed a characteristic kind of field system called kobbelwirtschaft. This field system replaced the three-field rotation with an eleven-field rotation, which entailed more intensive cultivation and larger amounts of livestock. Estate owners often combined this rotation system with a centralized dairy on the estate; a combination termed the Holstein system. The system spread to estates in Denmark proper from the mid-eighteenth century when German elites started to buy estates in Denmark and imported German agricultural expertise. By 1800, most demesnes were using kobbelwirtschaft, some of which combined it with dairy production. Sharp and Lampe show that the first dairy cooperatives between 1882 and 1890 were more likely to be established closer to estates with a centralized dairy, and in a series of further arguments, they convincingly demonstrate that the introduction of the more centralized and rationalized Holstein system on Danish estates paved the way for Danish agricultural modernization.

Throughout chapters 4–7, Sharp and Lampe dive into different aspects of this process of agricultural modernization. They show how the landowning elite developed new rationalized accounting practices and techniques and disseminated their knowledge through agricultural journals and societies. These developments were important for the spread of high-quality butter production, firstly on estates and community dairies, later through the cooperatives. Estate owners, shipping entrepreneurs, and merchants worked together to establish trade links between Denmark and the British market long before 1864, which is conventionally recognized as the turning point for Danish reorientation towards the British market. Through a trickle-down effect from estate production to farmers, these early, elite efforts of technological innovation, market integration, and human capital formation were crucial to the later success of the cooperatives.

In chapter 8, they add another important corrective to the traditional story of Danish agricultural modernization. Denmark is usually understood to have been a liberal paragon amidst an increasingly protectionist Europe by the later nineteenth century. In contrast to this view, and based on previous research, the authors demonstrate that Danish trade policy in fact offered considerable (implicit) subsidies to dairy production, thereby directly intervening in favour of a specialized sector.

Sharp and Lampe effectively complicate the traditional narrative of Danish agricultural modernization. Importantly, however, they continue to emphasize that the cooperatives were indeed crucial for the economic development by the later nineteenth century. While early elite innovations acted as the long-run preconditions for their success, the cooperatives were still important. The organizational form of cooperatives contributed to raising the productivity of dairy production more than both estate and community dairies (although the contribution of new technology was comparatively higher). Sharp and Lampe also turn against another common assumption by arguing that the cooperatives were capable of eclipsing both dairy production on the estates and private community dairies not due to a unique national homogenous culture among peasant-farmers, but rather due to the lack of internal competition and by being better to ensure product quality. While the authors briefly speculate on what would have happened had the cooperatives not been established, their focus remains on the question of their contribution to economic growth. However, the cooperative movement was influential in many other social and political aspects as well as important for explaining, for example, why Denmark not only successfully economically developed but also why and how it became one of the most egalitarian societies in the world.

Can the ‘Danish model’ effectively be implemented to ensure economic development today? In the final chapter, the authors argue that the discrepancy between the traditional ideal image of the Danish model and its actual historical preconditions goes a long way in explaining failed attempts to emulate the model in the twentieth century. In this sense, the book is a much-welcomed warning about looking to ideal ‘models’ of development without taking care to understand how these models were products of specific historical conditions. Nevertheless, the authors argue that with this in mind, the Danish model still has important lessons for development policy today.

Sharp and Lampe’s book is an important corrective to the traditional story of Danish agricultural modernization with a special interest for economic and agricultural historians. Any new writings of Danish economic and agricultural history will have to consider their findings. The reconsideration of the role of the cooperatives also have implications beyond the economic history of Denmark, and it will be interesting to see how Sharp and Lampe’s findings and arguments will affect social, cultural, and political histories of the period as well.