Description

This book unravels how the agricultural sector and the rural world in Europe became more and more organised within capitalism in the years 1870-1940, and this with the aim of tackling the important challenges of the time. The focus is not so much on the myriad of individual farmers' actions, but on the collective efforts undertaken through the interplay between the state and the agricultural civil society. A wide variety of actors, from landowners associations, farmers' unions, cooperatives, scientific institutions and researchers to farmers themselves (or civil society) played a critical role in the process of drafting a policy agenda, developing agricultural policies and were instrumental in implementing them in close relationship with the state. The result was a metamorphosis from mobilisation and representation of agrarian interests to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level, which would only reach its highest point after the Second World War. These issues are explored by established rural historians, covering a period of seven decades (1870-1940). The papers provide a wide geographical perspective, from the north of Europe to the Mediterranean.