Agricultural Knowledge Networks in Rural Europe, 1700–2000

This edited volume brings together a group of compelling case studies prefaced by an informative introduction that offers a solid road map to recent work on the history of knowledge. As the editors note, over the last several decades there has been a noticeable uptick in scholarly interest in the historical circulation of agricultural knowledge. Following broader trends in the history of science and the history of knowledge, scholars have moved beyond older approaches that treated knowledge as a product of intellectual elites that simply got disseminated to farmers. As a result, a set of much more fruitful multidirectional questions has emerged.The chapters provide snapshots of knowledge exchange in Europe from the eighteenth century forward, with a good balance of geographical coverage between the better-studied Western European countries and those in Eastern, Southern, and Northern Europe. The volume begins with chapters from Janken Myrdal, Pierre-Etienne Stockland, and Verena Lehmbrock on enlightened agricultural improvement in Sweden, France, and the Germanies respectively. Sarah Holland and Zsuzsanna Kiss provide case studies of nineteenth-century agricultural associations in England and Hungary, while the final five chapters explore knowledge exchange in twentieth-century France, England, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The chapters offer a number of interesting empirical findings. To name just one, who would have predicted Myrdal's discovery that Sweden was producing more agricultural books each year than Great Britain in the middle of the eighteenth century?Some of the strongest moments in the volume come when the authors analyze the interplay between elite agricultural experts and practicing farmers. Lehmbrock's chapter, for example, brilliantly dissects an unusual source from early nineteenth-century Bavaria. The central focus of her article is a detailed multivolume handbook authored by a small-scale farmer who offered a searing critique of the favored practices of the agricultural enlightenment, such as clover planting and clever new crop rotations. Lehmbrock uses the handbook to illustrate both the reach of enlightened farming advice and the ways that social hierarchy shaped an uneven landscape of knowledge transmission. Steven van der Laan's chapter on early twentieth-century pig breeding provides a similarly sophisticated look at the interactions between academic experts and experienced practical breeders. Building on a body of work that has shown the complex ways in which Mendelian genetics shaped (and sometimes did not shape) twentieth-century breeding practices, van der Laan examines how the progeny system that emerged from attempts to improve Dutch pig stock was a combination of both academic and practical expertise.Another theme that emerges across several chapters is the intersection of agricultural knowledge exchange and political projects. Kiss demonstrates how nineteenth-century Hungarian agricultural societies were also covert vehicles for the organization of Hungarian nationalist sentiment, and Miguel Cabo and Lourenzo Fernández Prieto give a nuanced overview of how technical knowledge featured in the press organs sponsored by the early twentieth-century agrarian movement in Galicia. Reading through the volume, one is left with the impression that there is much more to be discovered about the role that technical agricultural knowledge networks played in the political mobilization of rural Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Eugen Weber once argued that innovations such as chemical fertilizer were a major force in the secularization of the French countryside. However, that claim is surely too simple, as Laurent Herment's chapter reveals. Herment maps out the complicated landscape of commercial, governmental, and local knowledge that guided farmers’ new forays into chemical fertilizer, and it is hard to see anything like a simplistic “faith in science” emerging from Herment's story. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see how these new histories of knowledge might be further integrated into the broader cultural and political histories of rural Europe.The chapters offer a series of snapshots that show how Europe's knowledge landscape changed over the three centuries under review. For example, Stockland's chapter on efforts to combat the Angoumois grain moth traces out the correspondence networks of Duhamel du Monceau, a prominent figure in the Old Regime republic of letters. Holland, in turn, introduces us to a larger, more regionally dense field of associational activity in nineteenth-century Yorkshire, though one still shaped by the efforts of local notables. When we reach postwar England with Paul Brassley, the field is even more crowded and institutionally articulated. The media landscape had a much broader social reach, as he shows through a cache of oral history interviews; governmental efforts now had greater strength and impact, as did the technical representatives of commercial firms. With all of these changes, however, Brassley also shows the continued importance of informal information-sharing among farmers.This points to another interesting feature of the studies this volume brings together: They document significant changes but also reveal a great deal of continuity. Van der Laan's pig breeders returned to progeny testing, a technique that eighteenth-century breeders had promoted; Cabo and Prieto's twentieth-century Galician agrarian reformers were still pitching clover and potatoes to their audience, the same message that Lehmbrock's enlightened improvers had been broadcasting a hundred and fifty years earlier. These persistent and recurring practices are, in many ways, as interesting as the transformations that the volume explores and are worth more serious analysis from historians of science.Scholars studying the emergence of modern Europe's knowledge economy have sometimes felt comfortable giving agriculture only a cursory glance (or no attention at all), and we can hope that with the addition of volumes like this one, that will no longer be possible. Without a better understanding of how farming knowledge was translated and transmitted, we miss out on key features of the last three centuries’ knowledge landscape. That leads me to one minor criticism of the volume's otherwise excellent introduction. Readers looking for an overview of recent methodological debates about knowledge transmission and transformation will be well served by the editors’ survey of the recent literature. However, Segers and Van Molle also offer a somewhat lengthy discussion of social network analysis that seems out of place, given the variety of methodological strategies on display in the book's main chapters. Because of the complex questions raised by agricultural knowledge-making, an approach like social network analysis, which focuses primarily on mapping directional flows and patterns of social contact, seems a limited tool. Differences in power, resources, and institutional structure are all central to the stories told in the volume, but the content claims that were being circulated and debated mattered a great deal, too. Many of the most interesting findings in the chapters come in moments when specific knowledge claims remain in view. That one minor caveat does nothing to detract from the fact that the editors did an admirable job creating a volume that deepens our understanding of their central question: Over the last three centuries, how did people learn to run farms

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