1st Edition
Agriculture and the Great Depression The Rural Crisis of the 1930s in Europe and the Americas
What role did the agricultural sector play in the economic crash of 1929? Taking evidence from country cases across Europe and the Americas, this edited volume explores short-, medium- and long- term perspectives on the primary sector.
The monograph brings together the voices of an international panel of contributors who examine issues such as falling prices, industrial production, unemployment and the stagnation of aggregate demand. Together, they frame the interwar period as a pivotal turning point in the decline of subsistence agriculture and the growth of agricultural subsidies, which remain a key policy tool in many economies today.
This illuminating book will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in economic history, agricultural history, globalization and economic development.
1 Introduction – Agriculture and the Big Crash
Gerard Beaur and Francesco Chiapparino
PART I The crisis in a long-term perspective
2 The Great Depression as Great Transformation? Global food regime crisis and (inter-)national transition pathways, 1925–39
Ernst Langthaler
3 Agricultural crisis in Spain (Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries)
Vicente Pinilla
PART II The mechanisms of the crisis
4 The 1929 crisis from the perspective of a food-Importing country – The United Kingdom, 1928–35
Paul Brassley
5 International markets, policy, and mobility. ‘Rural Italies’ in the 1930s recession
Francesco Chiapparino and Gabriele Morettini
6 From boom to burst – Argentine’s primary sector and the 1930s Crisis
Julio Djenderedj Ian and Juan Luis Martiren
7 The effects of the Great Depression on the agricultural economy of the tobacco-exporting countries in South-eastern Europe
Socrates D. Petmezas
8 The 1929 crisis in Hungary’s dual agriculture
Zsuzsanna Varga
9 The impact of the crisis on the Polish agriculture (1929–35)
Tadeusz Janicki
PART III The crisis and the policies
10 Swedish agriculture and the crisis of the 1930s
Mats Morell
11 Spanish agriculture and the Great Depression
Juan Pan-Montojo and James Simpson
12 Mexican agriculture in view of the crisis of the first globalization – Between the revolutionary crisis and the Great Depression (1914–29)
Alejandro Tortolero Villasenor
13 The problem of the wheat and the political answers to the agricultural crisis in France of the 1930s
Alain Chatriot
14 Agriculture in Switzerland and the crises of the 1920s and 1930s
Anne-Lise Head-Konig
15 Conclusion – Agricultural crises and government responses during the interwar period in the Atlantic trading network
Price V. Fishback
Biography
Gérard Béaur, CNRS & Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France.
Francesco Chiapparino, Universita Politecnica delle Marche, Dises (Dipartimento di scienze economiche e sociali), Ancona, Italy.
"What [the book] elaborates and makes it worth using, are the differences between countries and, what I consider its main value,
the importance of the longer-term view. The interaction between the Great Depression and agriculture becomes clearer, better understood and seen by analysing it from a historical perspective –in this case from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it applies the historical approach also to the development of agriculture itself and, therefore, it brings to the
forefront the role of the maturation of agriculture and its declining profitability, as well as its importance for the nation-state."Anton Schuurman, Historia Agraria
"The book provides...both an extremely valuable contribution to the economic history of agriculture in the Great Depression and an invitation to social and cultural historians to shed more light on the experiences, the struggles and the perceptions of rural people trying to come to terms with the repercussions of the crisis on their livelihoods, and to global, comparative and transnational historians
to investigate the interconnections and currents on which the knowledge to combat the Great Depression traveled."Juri Auderset, Neuere und Neueste Geschichte
