Special issue on ‘Agriculture and economic development’

Although often somewhat neglected, for example, in favour of stories of industrialisation, the role of agriculture for economic history and development has been receiving increasing focus in recent years – see, for example, the brief overview presented by Sharp (2018). And yet the relevance of agriculture is clear when one considers that it is only very recently that most of the world’s population has lived in cities. This special issue thus addresses the important role of agriculture for development, and I am happy to present here a wide range of studies addressing many aspects of agriculture in economic history. For the sake of comparison, we have also included articles covering regions outside the usual geographical scope of the Review.

We start, however, with a Nordic case – that of Iceland. Árni Daníel Júlíusson, in ‘Agricultural Growth in a Cold Climate: The case of Iceland in 1800–1850’, argues against the traditional idea that Iceland’s decisive break to modernisation was around 1880–1910, when salted cod became the main export. He describes the exports of sheep products and shark liver oil in the early nineteenth century and contrasts it with the eighteenth century, where there was no such growth of exports. He emphasises the role of peasant farming and Copenhagen merchant houses for this development. Also considering trade, but for the case of Spain, Maria-Isabel Ayuda and Vicente Pinilla, in ‘Agricultural Exports and Economic Development in Spain during the First Wave of Globalisation’, consider the evolution of Spanish agricultural exports and the determinants of their expansion. They demonstrate that, despite facing certain obstacles, agricultural trade contributed to economic growth although mostly for those areas where production was concentrated.

Moving towards the east, Antonie Doležalová, in ‘A Stolen Revolution: The Political Economy of the Land Reform in Interwar Czechoslovakia’, presents a revisionist account of a non-violent interwar land reform, which she argues failed to achieve what it was set out to in terms of redistribution and reduced land inequality and presents reasons for why this was the case. Then, Natalia Rozinskaya, Alexander Sorokin, and Dmitriy Artamonov, in ‘Peasant’s Inequality and Stratification: Evidence from Prerevolutionary Russia’ provide a detailed statistical analysis of inequality in the Russian province of Simbirsk during a period of market transformation in the late-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. They find that communes were at this time losing their ‘equalising’ function and that for most provinces, inequality was increasing and that this happened more rapidly than in other countries, making Russia more socially and politically vulnerable.

Moving into more modern times, Gloria Sanz Lafuente, in ‘Atoms for feeding: Radioisotopes from the laboratory to the market, 1946–1960’, provides the first study on the role of nuclear technology for agro-industry, and in particular, highlights the early diffusion stage of product and process innovations and technology transfer from this new technology. Then, we return to the Nordic countries with Kristin Ranestad on ‘Connecting formal education and practice to agricultural innovation in Denmark (1860s-1920): A note on sources and methods’. The importance of agriculture, and dairying specifically, for Danish development is of course well-known, and she describes the wealth of sources available for understanding the role of human capital for this through the construction of an innovative new database.

Finally, this special issue also includes two book reviews with an agricultural flavour. I hope you enjoy it and that it provides inspiration to future work on the role of agriculture for economic history and development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).