ABSTRACT

This book investigates the causes and effects of modernisation in rural regions of Britain and Ireland, continental Europe, the Americas, and Australasia between 1780 and 1914. In this period, the transformation of the world economy associated with the Industrial Revolution fuelled dramatic changes in the international countryside, as landowning elites, agricultural workers, and states adapted to the consequences of globalisation in a variety of ways. The chapters in this volume illustrate similarities, differences, and connections between the resulting manifestations of agrarian reform and resistance that spread throughout the Euro-American world and beyond during the long nineteenth century.

part |2 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|14 pages

Agricultural modernisation during the long nineteenth century

3Connections, comparisons, and commodity frontiers

part I|2 pages

Land and labour in the Americas

chapter 2|14 pages

Living with sugar

19Small farmers and the challenge of expanding sugar plantations in Campinas, Brazil, 1774–1830

chapter 3|13 pages

“The General Strike”

W.E.B. DuBois’s interpretation of slave resistance during the American Civil War

chapter 4|16 pages

Agrarian modernisation in Chiapas, Mexico

Reform, resistance, and revolution, 1876–1911

part II|2 pages

Transatlantic agrarian comparisons and connections

chapter 5|10 pages

Agrarian resistance to modernisation and nation-building in the Confederate South and southern Italy

64East Tennessee vs. Northern Terra di Lavoro in 1861

chapter 6|15 pages

Natural harmony and “true civilisation”

The ideological impact of the Irish Land League on Anglo-American liberalism

chapter 7|14 pages

Books and dirt in a transatlantic world

Negotiating agricultural knowledge in nineteenth-century Maine and Westphalia

part III|2 pages

Agronomy within and beyond the Euro-American world

chapter 8|16 pages

Agricultural education in nineteenth-century Hungary

106A response to the challenges of the “age of modern globalisation”

chapter 9|14 pages

From European roots to Australian wine

International exchanges of agricultural knowledge in the nineteenth-century Australian wine industry

chapter 10|16 pages

From the Western to the Eastern model of cash crop production

Colonial agronomy and the global influence of Dutch Java’s Buitenzorg Laboratories, 1880s–1930s

part IV|2 pages

European rural politics and institutions

chapter 11|15 pages

What is a peasant movement for?

155Making sense of rural European political responses to globalisation between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

chapter 12|15 pages

Turning the landless into socialists

Agrarian reforms and resistance as drivers of political mobilisation in Finland, 1880–1914

chapter 13|17 pages

Learning to make Irish agriculture modern

Civil society elites, the state, and coping with the challenges of globalisation in the 1890s