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An Agrarian History of Portugal, 1000-2000: Economic Development on the European Frontier
Author(s): Dulce Freire (Editor), Pedro Lains
- Publisher: Brill
- Publication Date: December 8, 2016
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 364 pages
- ISBN-10: 9789004311534
- ISBN-13: 9789004311534
Book Description
This book follows the renovation of European economic history towards a more unified interpretation of sources of growth and stagnation. To better understand the diversity of patterns of growth, we need to look beyond the study of the industrialization of the core economies, and explore the centuries before it occurred. Portuguese agriculture was hardly ever at the European productivity and technological forefront and the distance from it varied substantially across the second Millennium. Yet if we look at the periods of the Christian Reconquista, the recovery from the Black Death, the response to the globalization of the Renaissance, to the eighteenth century economic enlightenment, or to nineteenth century industrialization, we may conclude that agriculture in this country of the European periphery was often adaptive and dynamic. The fact that economic backwardness was not overcome by the end of the period is no longer the most relevant aspect of that story.
Contributors are: Luciano Amaral, Amélia Branco, Dulce Freire, António Henriques, Pedro Lains, Susana Münch Miranda, Margarida Sobral Neto, Jaime Reis, Ana Maria Rodrigues, José Vicente Serrão and Ester G. Silva.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“A pioneering collaborative effort, based largely on a rich but ‘hidden’ literature in Portuguese. It opens the distinctive and fascinating history of Portuguese agriculture over a millennium to the outside world.” – Cormac O’ Grada, University College Dublin
“This book is a very significant contribution to the economic history of Europe.Since the formation of Portugal to the present, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of Portuguese agriculture by the best specialists in the subject.” – Vicente Pinilla, University of Zaragoza
“This book is a very significant contribution to the economic history of Europe.Since the formation of Portugal to the present, it offers a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of Portuguese agriculture by the best specialists in the subject.” – Vicente Pinilla, University of Zaragoza
About the Author
Dulce Freire, PhD (2008) in Contemporary History (FCSH-UNL), is research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. She works in rural and agricultural history in Portuguese and Iberian contexts. She is coordinator of the FCT research project: “Portuguese agriculture: food, development and sustainability, 1870-2010”, and chair of the Rural History Network/ESSHC-IISG. Among her publications are To Produce and To Drink. The wine issue in the Estado Novo, 2010 and Rural world: transformation and resistance in the Iberian Peninsula (20th Century), 2004.
Pedro Lains, PhD (1992) in History (European University Institute, Florence), is research Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. He researches mainly in Economic History of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Among his publications are História da Caixa Geral de Depósitos, 1876-2010, 2011 and Agriculture and Economic Development in Europe since 1870, 2008.
