The main target of this book is to explore how the involvement of rural populations and communities in different kinds of markets (mainly for agricultural commodities) has influenced the management of rural land in Europe. Most of the papers focus on precisely what were the forces driving agricultural change in rural Europe. Although the importance of these changes were very different from the Middle Ages until the present days, a common approach that emerged was to stress the importance of urban and external markets in order to give incentives to changes in the management of rural land. The transition of agriculture and its producers, respectively, into a highly market-integrated sector and strongly market-oriented peasants formed the driving force and prima causa of European agricultural revolutions during early modern times. Expansion of market allowed for an intense process of specialization, with clear competitive advantages with respect to earlier land uses.
Author(s): Vicente Pinilla (ed.)
Series: Rural History in Europe, 2
Publisher: Brepols
Year: 2009
Language: English
Pages: 248
City: Turnhout
List of Contributors
List of Figures Tables & Annexes
The Series Rural History in Europe
1. The impact of markets in the management of rural land / Vicente Pinilla
2. Markets as agents of local regional and interregional trade. Eastern Normandy at the end of the Middle Ages / Isabelle Theiller
3. Land management responses to market changes. Portugal, seventeenth-nineteenth centuries / José Vicente Serrão
4. Peasant economy–markets and agricultural production in southern Sweden 1711–1860 / Mats Olsssson & Patrick Svensson
5. Boserup meets Thuenen: Markets and farming intensity in pre-industrial Westphalian peasant agriculture, circa 1830 / Michael Kopsidis
6. Explaining agrarian specialization in an advanced organic economy. The province of Barcelona in the mid-nineteenth century / Ramon Garrabou, Enric Tello, Xavier Cussó, Marc Badia-Miró
7. Foreign markets, globalisation and agricultural change in Spain, 1850-1935 / Vicente Pinilla & María Isabel Ayuda
8. Agriculture and reindeer herding in Mid-Norway. Changing structures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century / Aud Mikkelsen Tretvik
9. Women’s work, masculine ideals and milk on the market. Co-operative organizing and economic agency / Ann-Catrin Östman
