The Formation of Agricultural Governance

Jordi Planas, Anton Schuurman and Yves Segers (2022), The formation of agricultural governance: the interplay between state and civil society in European agriculture, 1870-1940, DT-SEHA2204 (Documentos de Trabajo de la Sociedad de Estudios de Historia Agraria), published at https://ideas.repec.org/p/seh/wpaper/2204.html.

The role of the state in agricultural governance and policy has attracted much attention from historians and other researchers. In their relationship, the state and agriculture are mostly seen as two separate, autonomous actors; the former being the active partner, the latter the demanding partner. In our opinion, this relationship is, on the contrary, a dynamic and multi-layered interplay between state and agricultural civil society that evolved over time. In this paper we focus on the relationship between state and agriculture in Europe in the period roughly from 1870 to 1940, which we consider to be the formative period of this interplay. Throughout these years, the result was a metamorphosis from the mobilization of the peasantry and the growing influence of agrarian organizations to a form of self-government or co-government of the agricultural sector at the national level.

We will discuss this working paper at the EUHRO-conference in June 2022 in Uppsala in Session S5A Agricultural associations and state intervention in the European agriculture, from the late nineteenth century crisis to the Great Depression.

By publishing it as a working paper in the series of the Sociedad de Estudios de Historia Agraria we hope to make it available to a wider audience. We are eager to get reactions and comments to this paper to improve it for further publication. Please send your reaction to one of the authors as mentioned in the paper.