Introduction

Europe was transformed in the century between 1815 and 1914, as per capita incomes doubled despite rapid population growth, and electoral democracies steadily replaced the old hierarchical, feudal societies. Progress was then checked by the First World WarFirst World War, quickly followed by the collapse of world trade and mass unemployment of the 1930s. The economic and political difficulties of interwar Europe have been frequently told, but rarely from the perspective of the agricultural sector, where two-fifths of the population still earned their livelihood, mostly as small, family farmersfamily farmers. Indeed, as David MitranyMitrany, David noted in his book, Marx against the Peasant (1951, London: Weidenfeld: 17), ‘the emergence of the peasant as an active factor in the political and social life of Europe was perhaps the most telling and certainly the least expected effect of the First World WarFirst World War and a striking phenomenon in the social history of the Continent between the two wars’. The European experience in this period is therefore perhaps best understood in an agrarian country such as Ireland, where agriculture and the land question were inseparable from the wider changes in society, than in industrial England, where the importance of agriculture had greatly diminished.