Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 112

CORN, for readers unfamiliar with the acronym, is the Comparative Rural History of the North Sea Area research network, financed by the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research from 1995. No one who has been involved in CORN conferences will doubt the considerable contribution the network has made to establishing connections between scholars working in similar fields but within their own national communities. Many of its meetings have been given permanent form by earlier volumes in this series, and with this volume Erik Thoen, the network’s mastermind, and Leen van Molle put us further in their debt.

This is the first of the CORN series by number but at least the eighth to appear. It is based on the papers given at one of the earliest CORN conferences but revised in 2004–5 so that they offer an up-to-date and indispensable account of the historiographies of the contributing nations. That said, readers should be warned that there are some important omissions. Most regrettably there is no account of French rural history after 1800. The area adopted is very much the southern North Sea area so there are no essays describing either Scottish agrarian history or that of the Scandinavian countries. Moreover, Drendal takes the whole of France as his remit and Blickle – in one of the shorter chapters – the whole of Germany. The accounts are generally weak on post-1945 developments. This is, in effect, an account of national schools of history writing and an appraisal of their strengths and weaknesses. Some contributions drift towards being annotated bibliographies: others are more ruminative discussions of what has been done and still needs to be done. Most readers will value the book for the individual accounts, but reading the volume all the way through, one cannot but be impressed by just how different the national schools are, and how far we are from an agenda for European rural history.

A number of the authors make comments on the recent fortunes of their national schools. There is an element of common experience between England, France and North America (as described by Doug Hurt in a recent paper in the Review). The great enthusiasm for agricultural history in the 1960s has ebbed away. Drendal, for instance, comments that the ‘Postan-Duby’ thesis of economic change within a Malthusian context ‘achieved a canonical status so widely accepted that, unlike in Britain, hardly any one discusses it any more’ (p.97). Historians turned to the new questions posed by the “linguistic turn”’. Beaur speaks of the ‘thirty glorious years’ in French rural history, 1945–75, then ‘the wind changed very quickly during the 1980s, rural history suffering a decline in proportion to its previous ascent ... It became fashionable to declare ... that there was nothing much to say any more, nothing to prove and no more discoveries to be made’ (p.119). In some countries rural history has never really come to the forefront: this point is made by the Belgian contributors and Blickle doubts whether there is enough work in nineteenth and twentieth-century German rural history for it to count as a sub-discipline. Overall though, the contributors end on positive notes, a number talking specifically of the reinvention of the discipline in the 1990s, in some cases with new journals or societies taking the place of the moribund. The volume’s editors, in their opening chapter, date the turning point to the establishment of Rural History in 1990, although whether that that journal has ever achieved its initial aspirations (which are helpfully reprinted in a footnote) must be doubted. (It is odd judgement too given that the three authors writing on England, Campbell, Overton and Collins, are decidedly not Rural History people and that journal makes a weak showing in their bibliography.) My own feeling is that agricultural or rural history has probably gained by ceasing to be a tool for the explanation of the big events of history, whether the Industrial Revolution in England or the French Revolution, concentration on which served to focus historian’s interests on limited periods and directed them towards certain conclusions.

If this volume often shows that rural history is no longer a fashionable discipline, it proves that it is a mature discipline. The danger, in a way, is that contained in one of the editor’s judgements. Challenging Hurt’s assessment that rural history is now ‘practiced virtually everywhere [but] it lacks visibility and respect as an autonomous sub-discipline’, Van Molle and Thoen point to the ‘renaissance in agrarian and rural history within the context of food history and environmental history, which are both in full expansion internationally and comparatively’ (p.22). I incline to the view that when a discipline is seen to inform everything, to be so internalized an element in historical thought that everyone is doing it, it has actually disappeared from the agenda. In many respects this has been the fate of economic history. Lots of people claim to be economic historians in some respect or another: fewer of them do anything which is recognisably economic history. There is an important argument to be made for maintaining agricultural or rural history as a distinct discipline. Moreover, it needs to hold its place in the undergraduate curriculum and here perhaps is our greatest present weakness. It is fashionable to speculate about what people thought, but not to discuss what they ate, where it came from and how it was produced, to describe their experience of work, but not the products they made. This is a general problem of the relative standing of the economic against the cultural. It is found as much in twentieth-century history as medieval, and in Geography as much as History. And, one has to say, that there is a deep-seated prejudice in the minds of many colleagues in favour of the urban (modern, vital, weekday) over the rural (backward, stagnant, weekend). Of course, historians are deeply present-centred in that they take what seems interesting in their own times and investigate it in the past, and so it may be that the increased political interest in food supply may yet divert some into historical enquiry of the same issues. This book, and the CORN network as a whole, makes the case for rural history very thoroughly by mixing evidence of achievement and vitality with an agenda for the future.