This monograph analyzes the developments in rural life in detail and at the same time places them in a wider context, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of theoretical writings on modern agriculture. What is revealed is a profound transformation in the rationality of farming, one which touches every aspect of the lives of rural people.

Since the 1950s, the rural districts of central Italy have undergone a series of significant transformations. After World War II the area was still dominated by a share-cropping system, the mezzadria, an integrated rural production system which satisfied most of the subsistence needs of the rural community. In 1950 the mezzadria was at the centre of a political struggle which resulted in these districts losing half of their population and three quarters of their farmers in a rural exodus. The collapse of the mezzadria created major fractures in rural society. "Agriculture" emerged in the sense that farms began to concentrate exclusively on field production and in the process they became increasingly dependent on industry and subservient to it. This monograph analyzes these developments in detail and at the same time places them in a wider context, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of theoretical writings on modern agriculture.

Political movements across the world have such diverse characteristics and aims that it is difficult to examine them as a collective group. Movements that are class-based are usually portrayed as formed by economic categories of people driven by material interests. By contrast the study of ethnic or nationalist movements has concentrated on the complexities of identity formation within culturally defined groups driven by strong passions. Jeff Pratt argues for the need to set up a new analytical framework that extends the study of identity formation, and the ethnographic analysis of economic and social processes, to all political movements. Setting up a new analytical framework, he argues that political processes involve two linked components: a 'discourse' (an identity narrative which positions us within social history) and a 'movement' (the process of organisation whereby local social divisions are transformed by their incorporation into a wider movement). He illustrates his arguments with a vivid mix of case studies from across the last century including Basque nationalism, Andalusian anarchism, Italian communism, the break-up of Yugoslavia, to the 'newer' political movements in Europe, in French Occitania and the Italian Lega Nord.