COPING WITH CRISIS: THE RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY OF PRE-INDUSTRIAL SETTLEMENTS
Rural Worlds: Economic, Social and Cultural
Histories of Agricultures and Rural Societies
Series Editor: Richard W. Hoyle, University of Reading, UK
We like to forget that agriculture is one of the core human activities. In historic societies most people lived in the countryside: a high, if falling proportion of the population were engaged in the production and processing of foodstuffs. The possession of land was a key form of wealth: it brought not only income from tenants but prestige, access to a rural lifestyle and often political power. Nor could government ever be disinterested in the countryside, whether to maintain urban food supply, as a source of taxation, or to maintain social peace. Increasingly it managed every aspect of the countryside. Agriculture itself and the social relations within the countryside were in constant flux as farmers reacted to new or changing opportunities, and landlords sought to maintain or increase their incomes. Moreover, urban attitudes to the landscape and its inhabitants were constantly shifting.
These questions of competition and change, production, power and perception are the primary themes of the series. It looks at change and competition in the countryside: social relations within it and between urban and rural societies. The series offers a forum for the publication of the best work on all of these issues, straddling the economic, social and cultural, concentrating on the rural history of Britain and Ireland, Europe and its colonial empires, and North America over the past millennium.
Series Advisory Board:
Paul Brassley, University of Exeter, UK
R. Douglas Hurt, Purdue University, USA
Leen Van Molle, KU Leuven, Belgium
Mats Morell, Stockholm University, Sweden
Phillipp Schofield, Aberystwyth University, UK
Nicola Verdon, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK
www.ashgate.com/ruralworlds
Coping with Crisis: The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre-Industrial Settlements
DANIEL R. CURTIS
Utrecht University, Netherlands
First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright Daniel R. Curtis 2014
Daniel R. Curtis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Curtis, Daniel R.
Coping with crisis : the resilience and vulnerability of pre-industrial settlements / by Daniel R. Curtis.
pages cm. -- (Rural worlds : economic, social and cultural histories of agricultures and rura societies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-2004-6 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-3155-7423-3 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-3171-5963-6 (epub) 1. Crisis management--Europe--History. 2. Organizational resilience--Europe--History. 3. Disasters--Social aspects--Europe--History. 4. Communities--Europe--History. 5. Europe--Rural conditions--History. I. Title.
HD49.C873 2014
307.720940902--dc23
2013051054
ISBN 9781472420046 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315574233 (ebk-PDF)
ISBN 9781317159636 (ebk-ePUB)
In memory of Ken
Lo! Where the heath, with withering brake grown oer,
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;
From thence a length of burning sand appears,
Where the thin harvest waves its witherd ears;
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,
Reign oer the land and rob the blighted rye;
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,
And to the ragged infant threaten war;
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil,
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil .
George Crabbe
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
We never think entirely alone: we think in company, in a vast collaboration; we work with the workers of the past and of the present. [Across] the whole intellectual world, each one finds in those about him the initiation, help, verification, [and] encouragement that he needs.
Antoine Sertillanges, La vie intellectuelle, 1920.
I have always been interested in the places where people live. I often find myself asking: how did these people end up living here? Is it by choice or necessity? How do they spend their time and how do they make a living? Travelling can take you to some of the most picturesque or exciting spots in the world, but I have always had a fascination for the mundane and the ordinary. Indeed, my favourite place in Italy is not Florence as one of the cultural centres of the Renaissance, the villas and vineyards of the rolling Tuscan hills, the antiquities of Rome, the Alpine mountains, or the tranquil lakes of Como or Garda, but is actually encapsulated in a small, rather drab and ordinary town in Apulia which goes by the name of Ascoli Satriano. Between the nineteenth century and the Second World War, this town was home to the mass ranks of agricultural labourers working for wages on large latifundist estates. Since the mid twentieth century, the story of the town has been one of perpetual decline and stagnation: the population has halved in size, former residents have emigrated north in search of work, and much that remains is the elderly or the underemployed youth. Ecological and environmental degradation has reduced local agricultural yields to such low levels that there is a concomitant reliance on state subsidies. Yet as an outsider and a visitor to this town well off the tourist trail some years ago, it provided a special sense of atmosphere and soul not to be replicated in any of the towns of greater grandeur in Italy. This book is written with that exact aesthetic in mind placing great value in the ordinary people and the places they reside.
Of course this is an academic book, and thus has academic influences too, which may be clear to those historians who encounter this work by chance. In particular, I have from my earliest days as an undergraduate been inspired by the Annales School with their belief in approaching historical developments over the longue dure and their passion for the story of the ordinary the peasant, the farmer, the worker, the soil. However, my explicit focus on power and property as the basic foundation point for divergent historical developments in the pre-industrial period has some roots in the Neo-Marxist School in particular, my greatest intellectual influence being that of Prof. Robert Brenner. These frameworks are not altogether fashionable anymore, however, and it is with that realisation that in more recent years I have become influenced by other ideas such the New Economic Geography associated with Paul Krugman and the Douglass North-inspired New Institutional Economics. The most fascinating work and inspiration for this book, however, is almost certainly the twin publications of
