The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed, in the Western world, an agricultural revolution arguably greater than that of the eighteenth century, yet agricultural historians have so far seemed rather reluctant to give it the scrutiny it demands. The publication of War, Agriculture, and Food is therefore particularly welcome, both in itself and, one hopes, as a portent of further such studies to come. The editors describe the volume as ‘a collective intellectual product’ which owes much to discussions at conferences in Lisbon (2008) and Leuven (2009). Its contributors are distinguished academics from a wide range of countries, including Austria, France, Germany, the United States, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. The United Kingdom contributors are some of the most noted analysts of twentieth-century British agriculture: Paul Brassley, Clare Griffiths, John Martin and Brian Short. One therefore expects, and finds throughout, a high standard of scholarship, well supported by statistical data.
The Introduction identifies the book's chief purpose as investigating the extent to which the Second World War ‘challenge[d] and change[d] the outlook and nature of European post-war farming and countryside’, in order to discover whether the war produced distinct new developments or simply accelerated those already under way. The diversity of conditions in the countries studied makes this a very difficult task. Some remained neutral; some were occupied; some were democracies and others were under authoritarian rule. This variety of subject matter is organised through four main themes. Two opening chapters offer an international perspective on the state of European agriculture in the 1930s, and the world trade in agricultural products between 1935 and 1955. These are followed by case studies of the effects of state regulation on agricultural policy, in Austria, Britain, Hungary and Spain. The third section examines the relationship between the state and the farmer in Britain, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland. The fourth part of the book is likely to be the most interesting for historians of rural life, dealing as it does with rural identities in Britain, France and Germany. Chapters by Clare Griffiths and Edouard Lynch demonstrate the differing public attitudes to farmers in Britain and in France between the wars, and how these changed as a result of the Second World War. British farmers had been regarded as unadventurous and inefficient, but their contribution to the war effort, and the rapidity of mechanisation in the 1940s and 1950s, turned them into symbols of dynamic progress. In France, however, the inter-war respect for the peasantry disappeared during the Occupation, as agricultural productivity proved inadequate and farmers were perceived to be profiteering at the expense of the urban population.
If there is one dominant trend amid the various sets of circumstances examined in these essays, it is surely the state's role in promoting or enabling agricultural efficiency and industrialisation, whether through collectivist planning or organised capitalism. War forced governments to be responsible for national food supplies, ‘with resultant demands for protection, or the establishment of an international order in agricultural trade’. In other words, it helped pave the way for the Common Agricultural Policy.
