When Do Landed Elites Voluntarily Give Up Power? The Europe Experience

This chapter looks at the historiography concerning the negative effect of land inequality on economic growth and rural poverty. It shows how growing economic opportunities brought about by trade and industrialization provided incentives for some sections of the landed elite to dismantle Old Regime privileges. In much of North-Western Europe the landed elites from the late nineteenth century, against a background of declining rental incomes, organized with the Church family farmers into competitive mass political parties. The electoral success of these parties attracted other groups, changing the party’s core constituency, and leading to the eventual decline in the political influence of the landed elite. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, rising population densities allowed the landed elites to continue to benefit from low wages and high rents, while restricted suffrage and electoral fraud guaranteed that their political influence remained strong until the land reforms following the Great War. In Southern Europe the landed elites were more successful in maintaining their economic and political power, as tariffs protected their farm incomes and they adapted to political challenges by developing new forms of electoral fraud and patronage.