Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 325

Quantitative-econometric research on European pre-modern agricultural growth has strongly intensified during the last two decades. The present volume, which is based on contributions to a workshop organized by Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson at the University of Lund, presents a very good overview of the state of the art in this innovative field of recent economic history.

The contributions encompass a long period from the early medieval times to the post-war period after 1945. They mainly focus on the period 1700–1950. Two points distinguish this book. First of all, it does not concentrate solely on Great Britain and the Low Countries or even on north-west Europe but, rather, presents a genuine pan-European perspective. What becomes very clear in reading the book is that paths of agricultural growth differed across Europe. The lack of a full-scale agricultural revolution according to the ‘British model’ did not automatically mean complete stagnation. For example, looking at Spain and Italy it seems that despite all difficulties and long phases of stagnation their agriculture developed more dynamically than previously supposed. Additionally it becomes clear that in some cases liberal agrarian reforms had the potential to push agricultural growth onto a new and more dynamic trajectory, as convincingly proven for southern Sweden, but that in other cases long-term developments were much more important and any ‘reform impact’ much weaker. Consideration of the ecological aspects of agricultural innovations, as is done in the chapters concerning the Iberian Peninsula by Helder Adegar Fonseca and Jaime Reis on the Alentejo 1750–1850 as well as by Vicente Pinilla and Ernesto Clar on Aragon 1885–1985, is a promising way to deepen our understanding of stagnation or comparatively slower agricultural growth in the (semi-)arid Mediterranean region before 1950.

Besides presenting the astonishingly diverse European experience concerning agricultural growth, the second strength of the book is in the intense use of the concept of total factor productivity (TFP), which is the best measure to assess the performance of agriculture and to identify phases of growth and stagnation. Moreover, it is convincingly shown that despite all difficulties and remaining uncertainties the data-demanding concept of TFP can be successfully applied to the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, thus opening new perspectives for research.

The essays demonstrate that concentrating on a small region, for example Friesland in the Netherlands, 1700–1850 (Merjin Knibbe), Scania in Sweden, 1702–1864 (Mats Olsson and Patrick Svensson), the Alentejo in Portugal, 1750–1850 (Helder Adegar Fonseca and Jaime Reis), Navarre in Spain, 1780–1910 (José-Miguel Lana-Berasain) leads to really promising results of quantitative-econometric research for the pre-1870 period. The astonishing variety and density of quantitative archival sources, which is available for most European regions even for the early modern period, offers new opportunities for research. To demonstrate this is not the least merit of the book. However, John Beckett and Michael Turner’s chapter on English agricultural productivity 1700–1914 reveals that, by using farm records, a ‘bottom-up approach’ can be successfully applied even for an entire country.

Giovanni Federico’s chapter on Italy 1861–1940 is exemplary in showing that dealing intensively and carefully with the available data necessarily leads to a reappraisal that challenges the hitherto conventional wisdom concerning phases of agricultural stagnation and growth. Carol S. Leonard tries the same for late Tsarist Russia using a much more disparate set of data. Comparing her results concerning Russian annual TFP-growth for the 1890s and 1900s to European ones in the book and in the literature in general suggests that Russia’s agriculture not only escaped agrarian stagnation around 1900 but realized a very, if not the most, successful agricultural catch-up growth among the less developed European countries: a challenging thesis indeed, which we hope will lead to further debates and research.

Alexis Wilkin’s chapter discussing agricultural growth during the Carolingian age indicates that there was more agricultural growth and development than assumed in the older historiography. His stimulating essay introduces the reader to one of the most controversial debates on the economic history of early medieval Europe. Likewise, Frank Konersmann connects rural social and economic history in discussing the important role of the so called ‘peasant merchants’ for the commercialization of agriculture and progress in farming in south-west Germany, 1760–1860.

This carefully edited sixth volume of the series ‘Rural history in Europe’ financed by the ‘European Action COST A35’ of the European Union presents an important contribution to modern agricultural history using state-of-the-art econometric methods and theoretic models. It should be read by everyone who is interested in the historical dynamics of agricultural growth.