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.

The regulation of poor migrants increasingly became a problem for local governments in eighteenth-century West Flanders and Flandres Maritime. Conflicts arose about which parish migrants should address for requesting poor relief. Migrants moreover physically moved over the boundaries of the different national French and Flemish legislative systems. This article will analyse how local parishes dealt with these problems in practice by focusing on a local agreement: the Concordat of Ypres of 1750. This Concordat offers an abundance of archival material and provides a unique insight into the practices of settlement and poor relief in continental Ancien Régime Europe. The aim of the article is to understand how out-parish relief functioned within the agreement. With that aim in mind, I will analyse, inter alia, the micro practices of how out-parish relief was paid (for example, removal or out-parish relief), how it reached the poor and, more importantly, how the number, expenses on and spread of out-parish poor evolved through the years. This article strengthens the claim that extensive relief practices were not unique to England and Wales. It also provides further insights into the relations between rural and urban areas (as most migration and settlement literature had either an urban or a rural focus) and sheds light on the differences of interests between local and central administrations.

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.

This article examines mechanisation during the period of export-led growth in Chilean agriculture, c. 1850–90. According to conventional wisdom, since labour was cheap, landowners did not modernise their haciendas. The introduction of machinery was late and superficial; the large estate remained backward and inefficient. This view is flawed by lack of quantitative evidence and a narrow approach. Using imports and stocks data, and case material from the National Agricultural Society's bulletin, the article presents an alternative interpretation. The development of the market for agricultural equipment involved a fruitful exchange of technical expertise between the foreign importing companies and local landowners and experts. Mechanisation solved labour supply bottlenecks, and developed primarily on harvest tasks, above all the threshing of wheat. The scale and pattern of mechanisation were consistent with the development of this process in other countries’ older agricultures. The area mechanically harvested was much larger than previously estimated. Mechanisation was a significant transformation in the agricultural sector.

This article explores the outlines of an ‘agrarian-industrial knowledge society’ that developed from about 1895. Farmers, breeders, experts and leaders of dairy companies worked in close cooperation to increase the fat percentages in milk. The challenge was to measure these percentages on the farm, and process the information in a systematic way. Feedback mechanisms resulted in the selection of productive cows, because the fat content of milk is highly inheritable through the male as well as the female line. Data gathered from dairy companies and herd books in the Netherlands has uncovered considerable geographical differences in this process of knowledge-based growth. Focusing on Friesland, a Dutch province with a rich tradition of dairy farming, the importance of institutions is illustrated. A dairy counsellor, societies for milk measurement and cattle examination as well as price systems introduced by dairy companies advanced the biological quality of cows.

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.

This article explores the development of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England's (CPRE) policy response to the increasing demands for rural land by the armed forces and other war effort-related government departments prior to and during the Second World War. The CPRE was supportive of Britain's war effort, but nevertheless throughout the war sought to remain an effective advocate for the preservation of the rural landscape – a landscape that was regularly evoked by state propaganda to stimulate the population's support for the war effort, yet was subject to alteration and degradation by that very effort. The result was a generally private campaign of lobbying characterised by opposition to some war effort-related proposals for rural land use, acquiescence to others, and consistent efforts to seek to ensure that requisitioned land was returned to its prewar use. Central to the CPRE's capacity to influence was a consultative mechanism created by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938, which established the CPRE as a stakeholder that government ministries were required to consult with over their proposed use of land in rural areas for airfields, training camps, war industry, and other purposes. The immediate postwar legacy of this work, both for the CPRE and the rural landscape, is also examined. This article therefore contributes, albeit from a tangential perspective, to the growing historiography on the militarisation of landscapes, defined by Coates et al. as ‘sites that have been fully or partially mobilised for military purposes’.2