The concept of a ‘crisis’ was omnipresent in the period of economic depression in the 1930s. What is more, the agricultural crisis was part of a never previously experienced despair in Europe and the whole of the Western world. Historians have extensively researched the crisis in agriculture, however, without reflecting on the consequences of the use of the concept and the discourse related to it. In this article – inspired by refreshing historical research on parliamentary practices – I investigate the language and figures of speech used in the Belgian Parliament to frame the agricultural question in a particular way. The case of Belgium is unique because farmers’ associations were well represented in parliament, in spite of the declining importance of agriculture in the active population and national economy. Since 1840 onwards, Belgian governments had embraced free trade and pursued an economic policy with little or no trade obstructions, dictated by the interests of the export industry. The depression of the 1930s urged a re-evaluation of the relationship between the state and the economy, which extended to agriculture. The Belgian free trade tradition – already exceptionally abandoned during and immediately after the Great War to cope with food scarcity – seemed to crumble during the interwar period as farmers’ associations asked for protectionist measures from 1929 onwards. This article contributes to our understanding of this paradigm shift from free trade towards agricultural protectionism. Furthermore, it gives an insight into the complexity of the interest groups campaigning for agricultural protectionism and using specific metaphors and discourse to influence politics.

New roads and, later, railways were essential for the modernisation and rapid economic development of north-western Italy in the early nineteenth century. The new routes also encouraged an increasing number of foreign travellers to visit the region. They opened up fresh tracts of countryside and provided novel viewpoints and points of interest; many travellers took the opportunity to record these views with topographical drawings and watercolours. In this article we make use of some of these views to examine how the modernised transport routes released new places to be celebrated by tourists and became themselves features and objects of especial interest and comment. We examine the works of three artists, one English and two Italian, who depicted landscapes of contrasting rural Ligurian landscapes. Their drawings and prints are contextualised and interpreted with maps, field data, archival documents and contemporary descriptions of roads and railways by travellers and in guidebooks.

The emergence of factor markets during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was of crucial importance for long-term economic development. Despite Flanders and Brabant being situated in one of the most densely urbanised regions within Europe at the time, the current historiographical debate lacks a quantitative analysis of the market for land in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. This article focuses on the transmission of rural property in the southern Low Countries from the 1400s up until the end of the eighteenth century. Using time-series data on the rural land market for a selection of case studies within Inland Flanders and Brabant has enabled me to present a long-run analysis of the changes in the market value of land, the market activity and the overall nature of the rural peasant land market. My findings show a tendency towards fewer but larger holdings being transferred on the land market. The path-dependent nature of this process had a significant impact upon the changing proto-capitalistic nature of agriculture within the southern Low Countries. As per capita market activity declined and the average transfer size increased, the farmers’ dependency on the lease market grew effectively speeding up the pauperisation processes in Inland Flanders.