ABSTRACT
The scale of job creation must have increased significantly with the shift away from luxury production and the rapid nineteenth-century growth of a comfortable, often wealthy middle class throughout western Europe. European agriculture, through the centuries, has been conditioned on the one hand by the nature and fertility of the terrain, on the other by the patterns of landholdings and types of agrarian contracts. All western societies have contained a core, of varying size, of permanently poor unable to sustain themselves and their families; indeed, recent studies point to such a condition of poverty as likely to be passed on from generation to generation. The readiness of charitable organizations to redeem debts or pawned objects, as in general the relative willingness to give short-term assistance to families, were not casual but resulted from society’s awareness of the fragility of the family economy.
