ABSTRACT
The chief effect of the world economic crisis on Yugoslav peasant society was to accentuate the position produced by the high peasant birth-rate. With only about 28 per cent of the total area of Yugoslavia fit for cultivation, it was not possible for the increasing population to find repaying occupation on the land, without a thorough change in the methods of cultivation. So long as extensive rather than intensive farming was practised, more labour available on the land could not sufficiently increase production to pay for its keep. 1 To maintain the former standard of living it would have been necessary for between 150,000 and 250,000 peasants to leave the land annually. Up to 1929 the steady flow of immigrants to the U.S.A. accounted for a proportion of this surplus, but when the American depression made further immigration out of the question except for a minute trickle, there were very few other countries in need of unskilled labourers.
