Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 141

This book, edited by Nadine Vivier, is the result of work by an international group of historians brought together by the COST network A35 in the working group dedicated to ‘State and rural societies’. The aim of the book is to show the evolution and changes of the relations between rural societies and the state in Europe from the second half of the eighteenth century to the twentieth, that is, the historical period in which the effects of the Industrial Revolution progressively modified and reduced the economic and social relevance of the agrarian sector in Europe.

The book includes the introduction and 13 broad surveys and in-depth studies, which discuss a variety of aspects of the rural economy and life in which public authorities intervened during the analyzed centuries. This is not a new subject, but this book is particularly interesting because it concentrates on a number of different areas of Europe: Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. This provides an opportunity to observe why and how the European states intervened and changed the rules in some important economic and social matters such as the property rights, the market regulations, the tax system, agrarian contracts, rural credit, demographic policy and rural education. Although many European governments recognised industrial development as a source of rising income, they continued to regard the countryside as the basis of national prosperity. They sought to increase agricultural output in order to guarantee a healthy and increasing population, and this oriented state intervention towards improving productive systems and the standard of living in rural areas. This book explains the reasons for this intervention and how policies of rural development were implemented effectively, and also allows scholars to make some interesting comparisons in the European context.

Each contributor illustrates that the efficiency of state intervention in the agrarian sector and rural life obviously depended on the quality of public policy formation and on the ability of government to enforce the new rules. The chapters chart the implications of the different national approaches, noting, for example, the effects of differing levels of private sector involvement, or the varying amounts of public money invested in agriculture. These observations will allow scholars to think critically about the factors that determined the success or the failure of governmental agricultural policies. The chapters demonstrate that these factors included the historical timing of government intervention, the levels of resistance to changes within village society, and also the sensitivity of political ‘élites’ to the social and economic needs of the countryside. Although each national contribution confines itself to some of these aspects within a particular time-frame, the extensive and detailed introduction draws together the conclusions of all the historians involved in this working group and, at the same time, enables a deeper appreciation of the relevance of each article to the overall aims of the volume.

The introduction clearly explains the major concerns of the state in relation to European agriculture. These included efforts to modernise systems of agricultural production, particularly yields, the improvement of rural education, and also in securing electoral support from rural areas for the government. It also illustrates the difficult relations that existed in many countries between the state, landowners and intermediate bodies (such as the agricultural societies, ‘comices agricoles’, farmers’ unions and municipal councils), and the breadth of state intervention in economic and social matters, for example by limiting private property rights in the name of public utility, or through the financing of the development of rural schooling and training.

Other contributions shed more light on particular themes. They illustrate how Physiocracy and Cameralism tried to stimulate agrarian growth in the eighteenth century, and show the different ways in which the French and German authorities gathered agrarian statistics, the fundamental data on which assessments of efficient agrarian policy were based. Chapters also highlight how agricultural policy in Belgium was influenced strongly by the growth of the ‘Catholic bloc’, between the late nineteenth century and World War I; the formation of agricultural public institutions and the model of state intervention in the Iberian Peninsula; and the evolution of French governmental policy towards the development of rural society, the laws regulating agricultural education, and collective agricultural practices. For the German areas, articles show how agrarian reforms and farm modernisation were financed (as in the case of the Duchy of Brunswick), and also the origin of the Prussian Chambers of Agriculture as institutions representing the needs of farmers to the Ministry of Agriculture as well as helping the development of agrarian sector and the promotion of rural education. Furthermore, other contributors explain the direct intervention of the state or its support to private institutions for the development of rural education in Hungary (through the first College of Farming), Italy (particularly in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), and Sweden (where the state had to overcome elite opposition to taxation to fund new rural schools and vocational training in the nineteenth century). Rural education also features in contributions concerning Portugal, Spain and France, as well as in a chapter on agricultural education and training in the United Kingdom between 1850 and 2000. This breadth of analysis will provide scholars with a detailed overview of changes in the economic and social role of the agrarian sector, and the consequence of shifts in the state’s agricultural policies.

This book ought to be found in every academic library because it will stimulate scholars to develop new analyses and comparative research into the relation between states and rural societies across Europe. It also provides an opportunity for scholars to enlarge their knowledge of other national historiographies by using the broad and up-to-date bibliographies provided by each contributor’s references.