Agriculture and the Pursuit of Economic Growth

This chapter looks at agriculture and its contribution to economic development and political change in interwar Europe. Agriculture was still the leading sector in most places, with farm productivity greatest in countries with high per capita incomes and few workers employed in farming. The first section considers the difficulties in measuring long-run economic growth and agrarian change, and the diversity of European agriculture. This is followed by explaining why some countries had relatively small and dynamic agricultural sectors, but others suffered from low productivity, limited work opportunities, and poor living standards. Section three examines the debates over late industrialization, especially in the light of the Russian Revolution, where efforts to encourage farmers to produce large amounts of cheap food for urban consumers were seriously compromised by the ideological need to avoid the reappearance of a class of capitalist farmers. The final section shows that new constitutions and universal male suffrage made farmers the largest group of voters in most countries, but they faced significant organizational difficulties, and ideological shortcomings, to influence government policy.