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Books > History > World history > From 1900
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Agricultural Knowledge Networks in Rural Europe, 1700-2000 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,323
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Agricultural Knowledge Networks in Rural Europe, 1700-2000 (Hardcover)
Series: Boydell Studies in Rural History
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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An examination of how farming expertise could be shared and
extended, over four centuries. All kinds of knowledge, from
traditional know-how to modern science, are socially contingent and
the product of an age-long and permanent social struggle. This book
unravels the creation and the exchange of agronomic knowledge in
rural Europe, from the early eighteenth century up until the end of
the twentieth. It explores the spreading of knowing through the
lens of "knowledge networks": where did agricultural knowledge come
from and how did one learn to run a farm? Who was involved in this
process of knowledge exchange? Which strategies and communicative
methods were employed and what kind of networks were active? The
answers to these questions mirror, as the book illustrates, the
inventiveness of the actors on the scene: the creativity of a
French naturalist in establishing links with local farmers to stop
the circulation of a devastating grain moth, the power of the
agricultural press to instill "proper values" into Hungarian
farming practices or to shape the identity of the Galician agrarian
movement, and the agency of post-war British farmers in selecting
their own information, from sources such as lectures to the Young
Farmers' Club, visits by public advisors and representatives of
commercial firms, and radio programs. From the start of the
agricultural Enlightenment, increasingly farmers have been besieged
by a growing army of experts, telling them what to do, when and
how. In a sense farming has become one of the most patronised
professions. But farmers can resist and carve their own path. The
chapters here reveal the continuous tensions between science-based
agriculture and practice-based farming, between the expert image of
an ideal agriculture and the (less known) self-image of being a
good farmer. The dominant process, as this book shows, is that of
an instrumental top-down transmission of knowledge from "the lab to
the field". But between these two poles, complex and flourishing
networks developed, functioning as trading zones in which knowledge
and experience could be circulated, put to the test, forgotten,
altered, rejected - and sometimes imposed.
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