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The first peasant and his fellow travellers: state control over Greek agricultural institutions under Metaxas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2019

Dimitris Panagiotopoulos  and
Juan Carmona-Zabala
Dimitris Panagiotopoulos*
Affiliation:
Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, Agricultural University of Athens
Juan Carmona-Zabala
Affiliation:
Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

State control over Greece’s agricultural institutions increased during Metaxas’s authoritarian regime (1936–41). Analysing such state control allows us to address, in the Greek context, two questions with regard to fascist agrarian regimes. First, considering the trajectory of agricultural policy before the emergence of these regimes, how much of what they did was new, and how much was not? Second, how did the cadres of agricultural specialists participate in, or at least accommodate, the new regimes? Our research shows that Metaxas received support from the agronomists who had been active in Greece under previous liberal administrations. Such support did not take the form of laudatory statements or ideology-driven activism. It was rather a discreet acceptance of the new circumstances, combined with defection from one’s previous political camp. Metaxas’s dictatorship inherited most traits that made it a fascist agricultural regime from previous liberal administrations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , October 2019 , pp. 147 - 160
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

Notes

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56 Κριμπάς, ‘Το ιστορικό’, 30–1.

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58 Πολιτική Επιθɛώρησις, 1st September 1945, pp. 673–674.

59 Further examples are discussed in Πλουμίδης, Έδαφος και μνήμη. Bogiatzēs discusses a series of fellow travellers and outright supporters of the regime in Μπογιατζής, ‘Από τη “Συντηρητικήν Επανάστασην”’.

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