Advances in Agricultural Economic History: Volume 2

In the wake of a major reform period, 1788–1807, Danish landlords voluntarily sold off about half of their agricultural land to their tenants and thus transformed tenure from primarily leasehold to a dominance of freehold. One explanation could be that nominal rents were rigid when grain prices boomed. Quantitative and qualitative evidence presented here suggests that real rents were in fact declining although there was a large surviving elements of rents paid in kind. Moreover, it is demonstrated that tenants, despite their declining real payments, were equally interested in buying. Essentially, land sales represented a gain to both buyers and sellers. The main reason for this was the lingering of labor services, so-called boon works, as an important element of rent. According to a contemporary estimate, the landlords' benefit from this labour was one half and even sometimes one third of the tenant's opportunity cost. Hence boon works represented a major cause in the difference in efficiency between peasant production under leasehold and that under freehold.

The Italian agriculture in the 19th century enjoyed a quite poor reputation among historians, for its innovative record. This article deals with a possible counterexample, the wide diffusion of steam threshing since the 1870s. It was a highly capital-intensive machine, and thus its success seems to contrast with the scarcity of capital, which plagued the Italian agriculture. Indeed, the pattern of diffusion in time and space was influenced by the cost of capital, but the constraint was eased by outsourcing. Steam-threshers were owned by specialised entrepreneurs and rented to farmers and landowners. This successful institutional arrangement casts a lot of doubt on the negative effects of the alleged institutional rigidity on technical change.

This paper considers the non-linear agro-weather price relationship for Britain and Germany during the period 1870–1913. A comparison of Britain and Germany during this period is particularly interesting because of differences in economic structure and trade policy. The share of agriculture in the German economy was significantly larger than in Britain and agricultural protection in Germany contrasts with Britain's unilateral free trade stance. In these circumstances national specific weather shocks are found to have larger sectoral and macroeconomic effects on the German economy.