HISTAGRA coordinates several sessions at the EURHO 2025 in Coimbra
 

The HISTAGRA-CISPAC Group, through several researchers, is coordinating the following sessions in EURHO 2025:

 

Miguel Cabo Villaverde:

 

S14 | Rural violences in Europe (1880-1950)

 

Organizers

Miguel Cabo Villaverde – USC-HISTAGRA-CISPAC 
Óscar Rodríguez Bascuñán – Universidad Complutense de Madrid

 

This session proposes to analyse the violence used in the countryside as a tool for imposing political domination, an action of social control, a mechanism for conflict resolution, a social expression of norms and values, an interaction with the state and a source of images and representations fed by outside observers. The project is framed chronologically between 1880 and 1950, a sufficiently broad period to observe the role played by violence in the rural environment and the changes it brought about in contemporary society.
Studying violence in its different forms makes it possible to analyse conflicts within the community, whether due to the weight of political and social factors, economic transformations or personal relationships between neighbours themselves. Rural society, in general, is a privileged place to question the capacity of the spatial sphere to generate models of violence, a specificity in the causes and forms of violence, subjects, norms, institutions involved, responses, changes in attitudes and differentiated representations.
The traces of this violence in judicial sources, in government and military reports, in the press and in the literature raise a score of questions that this session aims to address. What were the main causes or motivations for this violence? How was the violence staged and why did its forms or repertoires evolve? Who were the actors? Can a social profile of the subjects of violence and its victims be identified? What role did the prevailing gender convictions play? How did the cycles of collective violence play a role in interpersonal violence? Was there a trend towards a decrease in violence in social relations? Did social attitudes towards violence change during this long period? If so, who or how were these changes promoted? Were there societies, regions or states that were more violent than others? What were the particularities of violence in rural society compared to the emerging urban centres? Were there types of violence more associated with rural than urban areas? How did the authorities manage violent practices? Did they deploy specific policies to control and pacify the rural world? How did the press represent violent episodes coming from the rural world? Was there a defined narrative about rural society shaped by the accounts of violence coming from it? Are there different representations of rural and urban violence? In short, the session seeks to
revitalise historiographical interest in a rural space in which political activity, social and economic relations and the values that gave meaning to community life had a specific definition and evolution.
 

Ana Cabana Iglesia, Alba Díaz-Geada e Uxía Otero González:
 

S17: Family farming from a gender perspective in the 20th century.
 

Organisers
 

Ana Cabana Iglesia - USC-HISTAGRA-CISPAC
Uxía Otero González - USC-HISTAGRA-CISPAC
Alba Díaz Geada - USC-HISTAGRA

 

Throughout the 20th century, many European agricultural systems experienced periods of hegemony of different production systems and agricultural development paradigms: traditional ecological agriculture based on the maximum use of land resources, agriculture linked to industrialisation and the increases in production, profitability and competitiveness of the Green Revolution and, finally, the period marked by the change towards sustainable agriculture that respects the environment and people's health, guaranteeing agricultural and livestock biodiversity. Our aim in this session is to learn about the role played by rural women in these different production systems, paying attention to their productive and reproductive work and, at the same time, to analyse the different models of rural women that were constructed according to each of these models of economic development. We propose to pay attention to the study of the processes of historical construction of the sexual division of labour within the farm and the family and to investigate as subjects those who remain ‘on the margins’ of historiography. To this end, we propose three themes of study: 1) reproductive work, understood as all work that is outside of the purchased, and which includes care for the maintenance of life;  2) environmental knowledge and the role of women in safeguarding ecological and cultural diversity; and 3) the processes of construction of certain models of femininity, in the context of different models of economic and rural development and in relation to the agrarian policies through which these were implemented. We consider it relevant to study historically the changes that have occurred in family and community reproduction, the transformations observed in cultural transmission and the changes that have occurred in gender models. We must pay attention to the historical subjects involved, to the causes and timing of the generation of new values, and to their long-term consequences. Research that addresses these questions from different spatial contexts on four continents is welcome. Researchers are invited to submit case studies and comparative works, as well as theoretical or conceptual reflections.

 

Marco Antonio Álvarez Sánchez:

 

S18 | Access to Credit and Social Change in Southern Rural Europe (18th and 19th centuries): New Perspectives
 

Organisers
 

Enric Saguer - University of Xirona
Ricard Garcia-Orallo - University of Barcelona

Marco Antonio Álvarez Sánchez - USC-HISTAGRA-CISPAC

 

The study of credit purchases in the rural world of the 18th and 19th centuries was generally approached from the perspective of linking indebtedness with impoverishment and dispossession. Access to credit, especially for the poor, was seen as a sign of precariousness and economic hardship, often associated with interruptions in the family life cycle or recurrent crop failures. Obtaining credit, therefore, could signal the beginning of a debt bug, leading to foreclosures, insolvencies or forced sales. In addition, the difficulties of the poorest social sectors in accessing credit purchase were highlighted, as they generally lacked mortgageable assets. Thus, they were often condemned to usurious credits, characterised by high interest rates and predatory conditions. Without denying the impact of these factors on disadvantaged groups, this session aims to present work based on a different perspective, suggesting that part of credit buying, even in pre-industrial societies, could be linked to long-term investment strategies aimed at improving the wealth of indebted households.  This hypothesis opens the door to a more complex scenario in which, under certain circumstances, even social sectors with limited resources could benefit from the flow of credit to acquire land and improve their stock of productive factors. From a bottom-up approach, which highlights the active role of households in the economic transformations experienced in certain areas of 18th and 19th century Europe, the papers presented in this session will attempt to highlight the importance of access to credit in phenomena such as the rise of social groups from near poverty or the waves of land purchase by peasants and small landowners - often related to cycles of productive specialisation - observed in various areas, as well as to unveil the agents and institutional mechanisms that facilitated the circulation of credit.

 

Daniel Lanero Táboas:

 

S21 | Agricultural techno-scientific services and rural society before World War II: precedents for postwar extension services or alternative socio-political devices?

 

Organizers
Juan Luis Pan Montojo – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Mícheál Ó Fathartaig – Dublin Business School & National University of Ireland
Daniel Lanero Táboas – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

 

This session will deal with the mechanisms and systems of connection between experts (agrarian technicians and scientists) and farmers, and the discourses and proposals made by the former between the nineteenth century and the 1950s. This chronology will enable us to analyse the channels that were created to advise farmers, spreading new technology and support initiatives from below – before the new model of agrarian extension heralded by the USA, and applied to diffuse the green revolution package, came into existence. The purpose of the session is to explore and present new evidence on the connections, dialogues, and knowledge exchange between rural civil society and technicians who worked for public institutions at different geographic levels, and in the context of the construction of national systems of agricultural innovation. These relationships must be addressed bearing in mind their potential (and sometimes sought after) bi-directional sense, and not taking for granted top-down hierarchical links, with institutions and public servants simply as purveyors of knowledge and farmers as receivers. We want to analyse concrete discourses and practices of connection between the apparatus that were set up and their proclaimed beneficiaries; how they worked; and how they evolved. To better understand those services and their work we find imperative a connected approach: comparisons between states must be undertaken (in the papers and in the discussion), and institutional models or specific actions that were copied or adapted should also be considered. This does not mean that every contribution must be comparative. However, livestock contests, intensive courses, demonstration fields, lectures, etc., and, also, professional alignments between public employees and other types of centres and services need to be studied in a context in which there were very strong connections and transnational epistemic communities; as well as, and at the same time, different cultural and administrative solutions.

David Soto Fernández

 

S27 | Agroecological landscapes and food systems in Europe in the long term

 

Organizers
Guiomar Carranza Gallego – Universidad de Jaén
David Soto Fernández – USC-HISTAGRA-CISPAC
Gloria I. Guzmán Casado – Universidad Pablo de Olavide

 

Over the last six decades, industrial farming has led to a loss of land cover diversity and landscape degradation. This entails a worrisome bio-cultural loss of an age-old legacy of site-specific knowledge, farm practices, landscape mosaics, crop varieties, livestock breeds and cultural foodscapes that peasants had accumulated over centuries. There is a consensus in the European Union on the need to promote sustainable agriculture and, consequently, to link back to the territory the provision of basic environmental services of agroecosystems, now outsourced, such as the conservation of genetic diversity, of pest and disease control and the replenishment of soil fertility among others. Such services are provided optimally through organic management of agroecosystems but also through the proper management of landscapes, where the physicalbiological cycles that ensure the sustainability of agricultural production are closed. Consequently, the management of agroecological territories requires a land-use planning performed on a larger scale than the farm gate level, a task for which there is hardly any accumulated knowledge. The comparative study of past and present agricultural landscapes, associated with larger units of cultural management of agrarian systems in their historical dimension, can be extremely useful for this purpose. In this sense, history can cooperate to rescue peasant and scientific knowledges about landscape organization through the study of past agrarian systems. This study requires the use of historiographic techniques in combination with other disciplines. This session aims to bring together research that incorporates different disciplinary contributions to the historical study of agricultural landscapes.

 

Bruno Esperante Paramos 

 

S31 | Agricultural tractors, social change and rural communities in 20th century

 

Organizers
Bruno Esperante – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

 

Agricultural tractors have played a central role of the great agriculture technology transformations in 20th century. Although the international agrarian historiography has made progress in understanding the mechanisation of agriculture from an institutional and market perspective, the effects of mechanisation in peasant community’s reproduction strategies have yet to be discussed in depth and in international comparison.

Thus, the main question of this session is: How did agricultural tractors change peasant communities’ reproduction strategies in 20th century? This question is directly related to the Marxist hypothesis of social change, which it is often pointed out that social relations are closely linked to productive forces. So, when productive forces change, peasants change their mode of production, and when their mode of production changes, all their social relations change. Therefore, we expect to discuss the hypothesis that links the diffusion of agricultural tractors with the final crisis of peasant reproduction in the 20th century. For this reason, we will also discuss how agricultural tractors have shaped new social relations and new socials classes differentiations for 21st century.
Agricultural tractors are an industrial innovation aimed at saving labour. But we also know, both from agroecology and from the peasant economy theory, that peasant innovation strategies are not always aimed at saving labour. This is especially true in agriculture with family labour based. On the other hand, we know that in the intensive organic and solar energy-based agriculture that dominated the world until the first third of 20th century, many agricultural tasks required large investments of labour from human and animal energy-base source. For this reason, peasant reproduction strategies were often directed towards innovations that reduced human physical effort, but not towards those that completely replaced it. Moreover, we know that fertilisation needs, and structural nitrogen deficits required livestock, so the complete substitution of animal traction for agricultural tasks was not appropriate either.
However, all this changed, especially after the Second World War, which the rise of agribusiness, new marketing techniques to make agricultural tractor desirable and, overall, innovations needed to make it cheap, easy to use and adaptable to many types of land and agricultural work. The peasant had to face up to this change, which structurally overtook them. As a result, many things changed: ways of working, gender roles, generational roles, marriage policies, community hierarchies, sociability, leisure, etc. Many changes in reproduction strategies that, in a long-term perspective, became known as Le Fin des Paysans era in late 20th century.

We would like to receive proposals working on different perspectives (social, economy, environmental, gender, culture, sociology, anthropology) addressing the same question: How did agricultural tractors change peasant communities’ reproduction strategies? We encourage the submission of proposals that promote indepth, pluralistic and from below analyses, and dealing with the 20th century and any territory, both Global North and South.

The latest aim of this session is to publish the papers as a special issue in a high-ranking journal or as a book in a well renowned international editorial.

 

 

 

Paper proposals should include a title, the name and affiliation of the authors and a short abstract (150-200 words) presenting the topic, its scope and focus. Participants may not propose more than two papers in the conference sessions.
 

Dates for submission of proposals:
 

15 November 2024 to 20 January 2025.
 

More information and registration:
 

https://ruralhistory2025.org/call-for-papers/