Organizers
Beatrice J. Adams – College of Wooster
Pamela Walker – University of Vermont
Brooke A. Thomas – University of Alabama

The work of writing Black women into the narratives of the Modern Black Freedom Movement has generated some of the most compelling recent works in the field of American History. However, scholars still struggle to characterize the roles Black women played in furthering Black freedom more broadly. This panel will explore the range of roles rural Black women played as grassroots activists in the Jim Crow South.
The panel contends that rural Black women played an invaluable role in supporting local civil rights activism. By centering their activism, it interrogates scholarly assumptions about the emergence and development of the Modern Black Freedom Movement. The first paper approaches Black families as sites of activism for Black mothers. Using correspondence from a transregional antipoverty organization, it explores the ways motherhood shaped rural Black women’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. The second paper shifts from Black mothers to rural Black women more broadly to reframe the history of the Mississippi Health Project. Arguing that rural Black midwives helped to shape the project’s policies, the paper examines the intersection of health, activism, and rural Black women. The third paper focuses on the leadership of Black women, specifically one Black woman, Eva Clayton, who eventually became one of the first African American representatives elected to the House of Representatives from North Carolina since Reconstruction. The paper uses Clayton’s role as the head of the Soul City Foundation as a lens to examine her intersecting political commitments to Black freedom and rural places. The final paper in the panel uses the activism of rural Black women in Florida to interrogate the spatial limits scholars associate with the Modern Black Freedom Movement.

Organizers
Daniel R. Curtis – Erasmus University Rotterdam

Today, across the world, women (and girls) are widely involved in agricultural tasks, and yet despite land being an important determinant of rural welfare, social status, and empowerment, women are far less likely than men to independently own or control it (Agarwal, 1994). This observation is well known in contemporary development studies, and yet the long-term dimensions of this, and how it relates to the present, are less understood. Indeed, when we look to premodern rural history, scholarship from various Eurasian contexts has for a long time tended to emphasise cultural norms that were antithetical to the notion of women cultivating land independently (that is, outside of marriage)—instead contributing to farms and farming as wives and daughters. The presumption is that female landownership within rural communities tended to be low, and if owned independently by women, was only used indirectly as leasers. Nevertheless, pioneering new scholarship about women and land has started to tell new stories about female desire to own land and fight for legal titles and inheritance, challenging these entrenched perspectives (Candido, 2023; Capern et al., 2019). In some places and periods, women’s landownership might have been much higher than previously thought.
Overall, the objective of this session is to better understand the long-term dimensions of women’s relationship to land. Rather than polarised positions of women being either significant or insignificant landowners and land users and seeing this as “the norm”, this session is interested in understanding differences between places and continuities and/or change in this status. So, for example, in those
places where independent female landownership and land use was low, did this have long established roots and simply persist over time, or did this start to change in certain areas—and if so, where, how, and why? And in those places where independent female landownership and land use was high, what were the driving conditions that facilitated this situation?
This session is important because while a plethora of work has been devoted to the subject of distribution, redistribution, and inequality over the past 15 years (Alfani, 2021), women have been decidedly absent from these discussions. One of the barriers to furthering our understanding of this issue is the lack of empirical quantitative evidence for reconstructing female landownership and access to land as a proportion of total land available, and how this changed from year to year or across the long term. This is an important precondition before we can start to more productively analyse what women did with their land and how they have used it across the centuries to secure economic or social objectives.

Organizers
Davide Cristoferi – Université Libre de Bruxelles
Valentina Costantini – University of Glasgow

The aim of the panel is to bring together new contributions that examine two novel aspects. On the one hand, the relevance, extent and forms of pig breeding; on the other hand, the trends and typologies of pork consumption in Italy and Europe between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, particularly in the Mediterranean area. Both topics have recently been the subject of conferences (Flaran 2023) and publications (Kreiner 2020; Jørgensen 2024). While revisiting the history of pork production and consumption in medieval and early modern Europe, scholars have highlighted the geographical, chronological and thematic gaps in this field of research. In this respect, our panel will emphasize ontributions that depart from the previous historiographical paradigm to show the evolution and persistence of pig farming and pork consumption in the long term. This will allow us to present a more nuanced and complex interpretation of the role of the pig in medieval and early modern society, especially in relation to environmental constraints and market demand. The panel is intended to be organized as a double session with four papers studying Italy and four papers analysing the Iberian Peninsula. An introduction and the discussion of each paper will allow the comparison among the different case-studies at both regional and sovra-regional level.

Organizers
Karen-Beth Scholdthof – Texas A&M University
Cherisse Jones-Branch – Arkansas State University
Jeannie Whayne –University of Arkansas

The role of the environment in understanding health or disease outcomes in rural and agricultural communities can be enriched with a particular focus on historical case studies that reveal the influence of science or scientific thinking on outcomes. This has relevance today in showing that problem-solving is the nature of the human experience. Increasing concerns about the role of the environment in climate change, health outcomes, and social justice, has coincided with a public suspicion about the process and utility of science and the humanities. We are intrigued by the possibility of bringing together tools of humanists and scientists to understand and contextualize how humankind has and does problem-solve and persist through times of crisis.
Through a series of case studies focused on rural and agricultural perceptions about disease/health and the environment, we can evaluate how concerns about the present can be interpreted through known historical outcomes. “One Health” is the term used to frame the complexity of the interactions between the environment, plants/crops, humans, and animals (wild and domestic), that drive disease/illness outcomes (K-BG Scholthof. 2024. Annual Review of Phytopathology, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-phyto-121423-042102). One Health-related environmental conditions include parameters that such as socioeconomic status, race and gender, and the physical/geographic climate (e.g., water quality, weather).
In the late nineteenth century, a seminal advance was germ theory – the determination that many illnesses could be attributed to infections by microbes. In rural and agricultural communities, this knowledge was of key importance in beginning to understand how human, animal, and plant disease was predicated on environmental conditions that were permissive for microbial infection. We are interested in broad questions about how rural people interpreted and acted on their local environment, with a focus on health and disease. Studying the co-dependence of humans, animals and/or plants on local environmental vagaries can be used to historically document what precipitated or resolved disease processes. Our intent in this panel is to 1) more broadly interpret historical health threats in rural areas being attentive to a One Health framework; and 2) to suggest the utility of these historical interpretations to understand and comment on existential health threats today considering current environments (such as built and lived environment, climate change, social justice, and ongoing interactions between humans, animals, and plants).

Organizers
Manuel Bastias Saavedra – Leibniz University of Hannover
M. Carolina Jurado – Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires

Early modern monarchies traditionally claimed rights over wastelands, forests, woodlands, waters, and other natural spaces as parts of the Royal Estate. This was also true of the Crowns of Portugal and Spain, extending these claims to the territories occupied in the process of colonial expansion in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. While much attention has been paid to the 18th-century idea of eminent domain of the Prince in European doctrine, royal claims to lands and its appropriation was far from straightforward. Recent studies have pointed out that the effective control of lands and other parts of the royal estate involved a tense process of confrontation of different rights, which questioned their royal status, the adoption of different judicial routes, and the mobilization of different sets of unwritten norms. This panel proposes to explore the different modalities by which the land and other natural spaces under the rule of the Crowns of Castile and Portugal became royalties, highlighting the agencies deployed, the categories used, and the procedural frameworks of their development. We also seek to examine the conflicts inherent to the royal claim on uncultivated lands and other natural spaces deployed on indigenous and/or Spanish possessions and their resolution. To this end, we welcome contributions that focus on case studies on different parts of the Iberian world, encouraging conceptual and methodological discussion that contribute to a collective reflection. We welcome papers that address questions, such as: What legal categories and normative frameworks sustained the royal claim to resources in the domains of the Iberian Crowns? How were vacant and royal lands defined in practice? How were these frameworks challenged, and how did they change over time? How did royal claims interact with other claims to dominion (e.g. dominio directo and dominio utile)? When does the category of eminent domain come into the discussion, and how do actors adjust to these new doctrines and /or confront them?

Organizers
Martina Motta – Università degli Studi di Pavia
Manuel Bastias Saavedra – Leibniz University of Hannover

Before land began to be imagined as a productive space, requiring cultivation and exploitation of resources, local communities described their territory in a multitude of different ways. The space representation followed collective conventions, it was usually expressed in toponyms, and the community had a practical knowledge of its different places. Inhabitants knew who a pasture on a river bank belonged to, they knew its hay yield, and they did not need to know its exact measurements. From the 17th century onwards, this “internal” observation of space by the community is confronted by an “external” observation by the new central states. The collective environmental image has been replaced by a space constructed through new conventions, whose purpose was to evaluate, control and exploit the territory. In this epochal transition, the new visual representations and cartography became unrecognizable to village communities. This panel explores the tension that exists between the internal observation of the community and the external observation that views the space under a different lens, through questions such as: What kind of media did communities and owners use to describe their space?; How were these spaces described?; What functions did drawings serve in defining space?; What kinds of agents and forums were involved in visual representations of space?; How did drawings relate to other representations of space? Whose interests and interests did drawings represent?

Organizers
Claire Strom – Rollins College

Hunger—the lack of adequate food—is ubiquitous in human history. No society has existed without hungry people and, until the last several hundred years, few have existed without periods of widespread hunger or famine. Methods of dealing with hunger are equally old, varying from individual actions to try and gain more food, to help from the wider community to religious charity, to government intervention.
Fighting hunger, however, has changed over time. Urbanization increased human density, making periods of hunger dangerous to social stability and affecting governmental policies around food relief. Technological advances have improved the global food supply and made it easier to preserve and transport. Corporations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have grown and assumed an outsized role in fighting hunger. And, finally, attitudes toward hunger–and the poverty that usually causes it–have fluctuated, varying from a belief that humans can and should eradicate need to a sense that poverty is an inherent representation of idleness or inadequacy and should not be rewarded. This session will explore four different responses to hunger in the twentieth century. Rebecca Sharpless will look at the hunger and malnutrition that affected the American South in the early twentieth century and the work of three social scientists in addressing the problem. Moving from individual academic recommendations to political action, the next two papers will look at government intervention to address food shortages. Marcela Hennlichova and Stanislav Holubec will compare governmental responses to hunger during World War I, looking at policies in Prague, Vienna, and Paris. Kornelia Aljec will examine the postwar famine in Yugoslavia that resulted in the government reestablishing ties with the West. These renewed ties bought material assistance, but also expert guidance to modernizing the agricultural sector. Finally, Claire Strom will discuss the partial abdication of governments from the responsibility of addressing hunger in the late twentieth century, with a growing western reliance on non-profit food banks.

Organizers
Magnus Bohman – Kristianstad and Umeå University
Inger Olausson – Swedish National Maritime and Transport Museums

The history of horticulture is a novel research field in many parts of the world. It is distinguished from established fields such as garden history, which emerges more out of art history and landscape architecture. It is also distinguished from agricultural history through its typical objects of investigation: garden produce such as vegetables, fruits and ornamentals – all of which are different from agricultural produce due to scale, crop species, and intensity of cultivation. In fact, the contributions of horticulture to the scientific development of agriculture are often overlooked. Horticulture relates to many aspects of rural history, life and economy. Thus, it enables to study important issues such as food security, gendered and class-based division of labour, urban-rural dynamics and eco-cultural perspectives.
A paramount aim of the session is to develop this dynamic research field further. Therefore, it welcomes proposals from many disciplines. However, in order to bridge gaps and find common denominators in terms of theory, methods and sources, we especially welcome proposals that consider long-term, comparative and inter-disciplinary perspectives. Objects of study may include for instance the cultivation of different types of crops and their end-uses (in rural and urban environments, commercially and for self-sufficiency), labour conditions (including gardeners, employees and family enterprises), horticultural techniques (such as soil management, plant protection, tools, machinery and buildings, cultivation on open field and in greenhouses), issues related to trade and transportation, and crop improvement (for example adaption and breeding, and preservation of historical plant material). Traditionally, research on food supply issues has focused primarily on agricultural production. However, recent research has revealed a significant importance of horticultural produce throughout history, in towns and on the countryside and in all social strata. All these examples demonstrate the wide range and relevance of the research field.

Organizers
Remon Ramon-Muñoz – University of Barcelona
Silvia A. Conca Messina – University of Milan
Ana Duarte Rodrigues – University of Lisbon

How has olive oil quality evolved over time? Why do some regions within the same country produce better grades of the same product than others? This session aims to address these questions by examining the olive oil sector—a typically Mediterranean product—from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Despite recent expansion into new areas, Mediterranean countries have consistently dominated the production and trade of olive oil (Ramon-Muñoz, 2000; Istituto di Servizi per il Mercato Agricolo Alimentare, 2023).
The quality of olive oil that the Mediterranean countries have produced has evolved due to a combination of supply and demand factors. However, this session will primarily focus on the supply side. First, it will explore agricultural practices and transformations that have contributed to improving product quality over time. Second, it will examine the relationship between the adoption of new machinery, industrial methods, and the resulting improvements in product quality. Finally, it will consider other factors influencing quality, such as the role of legislation, scientific societies, and other institutions. By adopting a regional perspective, the session aims to discuss papers that cover any stage of the production and distribution chain—from the olive grove to the final consumer. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, technological, scientific, and organizational innovations; patents; cultivar selection and exchange; soil improvement; and regional responses to policies and regulations aimed at improving product quality.
While some research exists on the modernization of the Mediterranean olive oil industry, much less attention has been given to systematically comparing olive oil quality and its determinants across regions and countries over time (Ramon-Muñoz, 2013). By providing new evidence on it and from a diversity of perspectives, this session can contribute to broader academic discussions. First, it will contribute to the history of science, fostering the discussion on the conceptual framework of artisanal epistemology, vernacular science, hybrid epistemology as a category (Smith, 2018). Second, it will also add to the history of agriculture, horticulture and botany (Duarte Rodrigues et al, 2019), as the selection of cultivars has also an important influence on product quality and market success. Third, it will contribute to the growing literature on technological change in agriculture and agribusiness industries, focusing on how technology has driven quality improvements and their consequences (Bigliardi & Galati, 2013). Fourth, it will enrich the field of food history, particularly the history of food quality and its determinants, a topic that has attracted attention in the study of products like wine, meat, milk, and butter (e.g., Dupré, 1999; Stanziani, 2007, 2015). Lastly, this session will contribute to regional economic history, illustrating how divergent patterns of development can emerge within the same sector and providing new insights into regional inequality in the Mediterranean basin (e.g., Rosés & Wolf, 2019; Molema & Svensson, 2021).

Organizers
Alp Yücel Kaya – Ege University
Socrates D. Petmezas – University of Crete; IMS/FORTH, Rethymno
Yücel Terzibaşoğlu – Boğaziçi University, İstanbul-Turkey

Past research on the landed estates (çiftlik) in the Ottoman lands in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab provinces has focused primarily on some particular aspects such as the “formation of the çiftliks”, their legal status and their relation to market-oriented agricultural production (especially in relation to grain exports to Europe). Similiarly, most recent research on the çiftliks tend to reproduce or revisit the same old questions, without sufficiently establishing the place of landed estates in the broader regional agrarian economies. There is still little research on such questions as the land use and labour regimes, the social-property relations, their spatial distribution and geographical differences and variation. In fact, the historical evolution of the large landed estates was not uniform across the different Ottoman regions along the eastern Mediterranean as these landed estates reflected local agrarian practices and regional historical development.
In particular, the organization of agricultural and livestock production, the use of land and commons and the different forms of land tenure and labour organization (sharecropping, wage and dependent labour) had only rarely been the subject of detailed local studies and regional comparisons. The practical management of the estates by the landlord or (in his usual absence) its representatives (stewards, communal elders or intermediaries who farmed the charge of steward) in relation to the actual mode of land use and animal husbandry had been either a neglected subject of research in local studies or treated from a very general and ‘distant’ point of view. Did the peasant commune held collective rights and obligations in the management of the estate’s arable lands and/or commons, and how their rights and obligations were effected or changed in the long historical process? The same is true in what concerns the difference between ‘ownership’ and ‘management’ or decision making. We do not know in detail and precision how extended families (or group of families) of estate-landlords took decisions on major or everyday issues. We would like to learn more about the ways individual small-owners ended up (in the end of the 19th century) holding a ‘share’ (however minuscule) on a large landed estate.
In this context, and as part of an ongoing collaborative research agenda, these two proposed panels will address, in the wider setting of the eastern Mediterranean, the following issues: What was the balance between land cultivation, livestock husbandry and other activities? What was the role of transhumance? What were the terms under which production and labour (wage labour, sharecropping, tenants, small peasant farmers, large-scale cultivation, labour contracts, labour mobility / immobility) were organised in different regions and periods? If, how (and how often) were arable lands distributed among tenants and how collective constraints and communal ‘solidarities’ were imposed in the process of crop-rotation and fallow? How are çiftliks inscribed within the wider context of Ottoman economy in different regions and eras? What is their relationship with urban economy and society (absentee landlords, urban entrepreneurs, wage labourers, seasonal migrants)? How did this relationship change over time? What are the implications of studying çiftliks in the context of current discussions on unfree labour, commons, property and communal rights, primitive accumulation, institutional change and economic growth?

Organizers
Sergio Riesco Roche – Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Carlos Faísca – Universidade de Coimbra; CEIS20
Dimitris Angelis-Dimakis – University of Crete, IMS-FORTH

The traditional pattern of modernization involves a decline in the primary sector, both in terms of its share of national wealth and its contribution to the labor force. All this, as we learned from the British reference, gives way to a sustained industrialization over time that gives way to a progressive tertiarization of society (Mokyr, Allen). However, this pattern is not at all satisfactory for creating an interpretative framework on the role of the primary sector not only in today’s world but in all processes of social change. Often, such situations are sometimes accompanied by democratizing processes and sometimes by authoritarian paths. In this framework, agrarian reform as an institutional process in a broad sense (Ostrom), can be an analytical meeting point, singular and at the same time differential, to explain the peculiarities of the aforementioned processes of social change. If the concept of liberal agrarian reform has triumphed as a modeler of the processes of change associated with the nineteenth century, why does agrarian reform not relate to the twentieth century in the same way? The existence of pending structural problems in world agricultures in the century of conflicts has endowed the concept with an extraordinary semantic charge. During the interwar period, it served to define new nationalities in Eastern and Central Europe and to exclude others from access to land ownership, especially visible in modern Greece. If the “Spanish War” is often referred to as a prologue to World War II, land issues played a central role in the difficulties of establishing democracy in Spain (Simpson and Carmona, 2020; Robledo, 2022). It seems more or less clear that the victorious powers in 1945 embarked on the path of a more or less stable primary sector, consolidating a capitalist agriculture on the basis of viable medium-sized farms in the midst of a Green Revolution that was first latent and then visible throughout the world. In this process preceding the great globalization, it was possible to observe how unequal access to land was a major problem in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, thus limiting any democratization process. During the 1960s and 1970s, the issue of agrarian reform took on an enormous protagonism, especially in Latin America, either in the form of revolutions, as had occurred in Mexico and later in Bolivia, or in those cases in which major alterations took place in Chile, Peru and several Central American countries. (Robles, 2020). Somehow these processes, together with the role of China, rekindled the irredentism present in some parts of Europe, as happened in Portugal during the 1970s. Thus, the aim of this panel is to serve as a meeting point for researchers from southern Europe and Latin America so that, from different perspectives, they can discuss the role of the European Union in the development of the region.

Organizers
Beatrice Moring – University of Cambridge/Helsinki
Beatrice Zucca Micheletto – University of Turin

In a recent article Stefano Fenoaltea has highlighted a set of shortcomings in the field of economic history. He particularly deplores the mechanical use of GDP and statistical data collection systems that were generated for a specific purpose at a specific time, but now have a normative status. He also points out how this type of information use systematically makes for the underrepresentation of female work.
In pre-industrial time the family was generally viewed as a production unit with the male household head as the representative in society, but with the expectation that all household members participated in the activity. Therefore locating economic statistics revealing information about female economic engagement can be difficult.
If we look at censuses and the series of economic statistics we find a certain amount of differences between females in registered employment in Europe. One reason is the variation in registration and age barriers. Another, changes introduced for the definition of work and occupation. The definition of occupation was in most cases permanent work outside the home. The nature of the agricultural enterprises also varied considerably. Certain regions had moved towards ever larger arable units, while others still remained firmly part of a system of family farms with mixed economic activities. In places where the family retained its position as a productive unit, women were indeed working, but the view that the male household head and agricultural servants were the only productive persons resulted in the statistics not recognising female family members as economically active.
It is the aim of this session to explore new data and examine existing ones to penetrate the issue of female economic activity in rural societies of the past. To examine engagement in various activities like textile work as well as traditional farming pursuits to determine the value and importance of female work.

Organizers
Antoni Furió – Universitat de València

The year 2025 will mark the 500th anniversary of the Peasants’ Wars in Germany, a historical phenomenon that has been widely highlighted and studied by historiography since the time of Karl Marx and, above all, Friedrich Engels, who devoted particular attention to it. On the other hand, the Peasants’ Wars of 1525 not only close the Middle Ages and inaugurate Early Modern Times, but also allow us to delve into their nature as either revolt or revolution. Moreover, the Peasants‘ Wars in Germany do not constitute a single, isolated episode, but are part of a cycle of popular insurrections throughout Europe, from the French jacqueries in the second half of the 14th century and the English uprising of 1381 to the remensa wars in Catalonia, the peasant struggles in Majorca, the Irmandinhas revolts in Galicia, all in the 15th century, and the Germanies of Valencia and Majorca in the first quarter of the 16th century, coeval with the Peasants’ Wars in Germany.
This session aims to explore the nature and motivations of peasant revolts and struggles in late medieval and early modern Europe, their protagonists (serfs, free peasants) and demands, based on the cases of Catalonia, Mallorca, Valencia, and the German region of Rheingau. The choice of these four observatories will make it possible to compare both the social composition of the insurgents and the different nature of their demands and ideology, as well as the balance of forces between the contenders, the scope of the revolt, its successes and, in most cases, its final crushing and subsequent repression.

Organizers
Miguel Cabo Villaverde – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela/Cispac
Óscar Rodríguez Bascuñán – Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This session proposes to analyse the violence used in the countryside as a tool for imposing political domination, an action of social control, a mechanism for conflict resolution, a social expression of norms and values, an interaction with the state and a source of images and representations fed by outside observers. The project is framed chronologically between 1880 and 1950, a sufficiently broad period to observe the role played by violence in the rural environment and the changes it brought about in contemporary society.
Studying violence in its different forms makes it possible to analyse conflicts within the community, whether due to the weight of political and social factors, economic transformations or personal relationships between neighbours themselves. Rural society, in general, is a privileged place to question the capacity of the spatial sphere to generate models of violence, a specificity in the causes and forms of violence, subjects, norms, institutions involved, responses, changes in attitudes and differentiated representations.
The traces of this violence in judicial sources, in government and military reports, in the press and in the literature raise a score of questions that this session aims to address. What were the main causes or motivations for this violence? How was the violence staged and why did its forms or repertoires evolve? Who were the actors? Can a social profile of the subjects of violence and its victims be identified? What role did the prevailing gender convictions play? How did the cycles of collective violence play a role in interpersonal violence? Was there a trend towards a decrease in violence in social relations? Did social attitudes towards violence change during this long period? If so, who or how were these changes promoted? Were there societies, regions or states that were more violent than others? What were the particularities of violence in rural society compared to the emerging urban centres? Were there types of violence more associated with rural than urban areas? How did the authorities manage violent practices? Did they deploy specific policies to control and pacify the rural world? How did the press represent violent episodes coming from the rural world? Was there a defined narrative about rural society shaped by the accounts of violence coming from it? Are there different representations of rural and urban violence? In short, the session seeks to
revitalise historiographical interest in a rural space in which political activity, social and economic relations and the values that gave meaning to community life had a specific definition and evolution.

Organizers
Jan Błoński – European University Institute
Agata Koprowicz – University of Warsaw
Paweł Pietrowcew – University of St. Andrews

In reference to the tragic history of the 20th century and the cruelties of Nazism and Communism in the region, Timothy Snyder coined the term “bloodlands” to describe the region of Central and Eastern Europe. However, its earlier history was also characterized by violent oppression and all kinds of conflicts. Rural areas, which unlike cities had no walls or special rights that would physically or symbolically protect their liberties, were especially exposed for the use of violence, both external and internal. The villagers witnessed and were often victims of regular interstate wars, internal rebellions, domination by regional empires and struggles for national liberation, religious turmoil, ethnic clashes, and the brutal exploitation of serfs. Instances of sexual abuse and domestic violence, duels and brawls were also prevalent.
Not only domestic and hostile armies extracted their resources, but their noble owners and villagers themselves rarely fit into the myth of the harmonious village – victims could also become perpetrators, depending on multiple and dynamic conditions. Violence has been used to establish dominance or to realize emancipatory potential, to create in-group boundaries and to exclude others. Especially in the pre-modern period, it also functioned as a mechanism for regulating everyday interpersonal interactions. Its meaning, perceptions and social acceptance of boundaries changed and varied over space and time. As a result, many instances of violence were not recorded in the sources, were omitted, or appeared only when social norms were transgressed.
The violent history of the region has also affected the state of the archives – many documents have been irretrievably lost (or deliberately destroyed) in one bloodshed or another. As a result, the variety, ambiguity, and complexity of violence, the language of the sources (anachronistic and idealistic stereotypes of rural life, the evolving concept and limits of ‘violence’), and finally the material scarcity of the primary sources pose a challenge to research. A thorough study of violence in Central and Eastern Europe from the 17th to the 19th century requires a nuanced and often interdisciplinary approach. The aim of the session is therefore both to present and analyze cases of the use and abuse of violence, and to reflect on different theoretical approaches and perspectives to the study of rural Central and Eastern Europe, using different methodologies (e.g. demographic, micro-historical or visual studies).

Organizers
Alba Díaz Geada – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Alberto José Franco Barrera – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

At present, the dismantling of existing peasant communities and the creation of new forms of exploitation of the labor force in agrarian production continue to advance. At the same time, capitalism expands and renews its growth by dispossession, advancing in the plundering of nature. In this context, while the possibility of understanding historical processes is questioned, successive crises of capitalism once again invite the study of inequality. With this session proposal, we aim to continue to delve deeper into the research of the processes of class differentiation in contemporary rural societies. In order to do it, we propose to start from the field of Marxist discussion around the “agrarian question”. In this regard, it is necessary to keep in mind that, from the Marxist tradition, the efforts to understand the role of agriculture and the peasantry in the development of capitalism cannot be understood separately from the efforts to transform this mode of social relations. How have the advances of the capitalist mode of production, in its different historical phases, affected peasant social differentiation, within the framework of different concrete social formations? How has the articulation of this mode of production with pre-capitalist forms of exploitation affected the internal differentiation of rural societies? How can we explain the instrumental role of the State, in its accompaniment of the construction of a new hegemonic mode of social relations, in relation to peasant societies? How can we explain processes of privatization of the communal, access to land ownership, forced proletarianization, migration or return, in relation to the reproduction of peasant families? How can we explain the relationship between productive and reproductive processes, in their impact on social differentiation? How did class differences change, how did processes of social ascent or declassification occur, how were forms of distinction renewed, at different moments in capitalist society?
We welcome a) theoretical studies or conceptual reflection on the study of class differentiation in contemporary rural societies; b) systematic bibliographic reviews on the study of class differentiation processes in contemporary rural societies, in the field of human sciences; c) studies on class differentiation processes in contemporary rural societies. Research on any people or territory and
comparative studies are welcome.

Organizers
Ana Cabana Iglesia – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Uxía Otero González – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Alba Díaz Geada – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Throughout the 20th century, many European agricultural systems have experienced periods of hegemony of different production systems and paradigms of agricultural development: traditional organic agriculture based on the maximum use of land resources, agriculture linked to industrialization and increases in production, profitability and competitiveness typical of the Green Revolution and, finally, the time marked by the shift towards sustainable agriculture that is respectful of the environment and people’s health, guaranteeing agricultural and livestock biodiversity. Our objective in this session is to understand the role played by rural women in these different production systems, paying attention to their productive and reproductive work and, at the same time, to analyze the different models of rural women that were built in accordance with each of these models of economic development. We propose to pay attention to the study of the processes of historical construction of the sexual division of labor within the farm and the family and to investigate those who continue to be “on the margins” of historiography as subjects.
To this end, we propose three study themes: 1) reproductive work, understood as all work that is outside the market, and which includes care for the maintenance of life; 2) environmental knowledge and the role of women in safeguarding ecological and cultural diversity; and 3) the processes of constructing certain models of femininity, in the context of different models of economic and rural development and in relation to the agrarian policies through which these were implemented. We consider it relevant to historically study the changes that have occurred in family and community reproduction, the transformations observed in the cultural transmission and the changes that have occurred in gender models. We must pay attention to the historical subjects involved, to the causes and times in the generation of new values, and to their long-term consequences. Research that addresses these issues from different spatial contexts on the four continents is welcome. We invite to participate researchers presenting both case studies and comparative works, as well as theoretical or conceptual reflection works.

Organizers
Enric Saguer – University of Girona
Ricard Garcia-Orallo – University of Barcelona
Marco Antonio Álvarez Sánchez – University of Santiago de Compostela

The study of credit markets in the rural world of the 18th and 19th centuries has generally been approached from the perspective of linking indebtedness with impoverishment and dispossession. Access to credit, especially for the poor, has been viewed as a sign of precariousness and economic hardship, often associated with disruptions in the family life cycle or recurring poor harvests. Obtaining credit, then, could signal the beginning of a spiral of debts, leading to foreclosures, insolvencies, or forced sales. Additionally, the difficulties faced by poorer social sectors in accessing the credit market have been emphasised, as they generally lacked mortgageable assets. Thus, they were often condemned to usurious credit, characterised by high interest rates and predatory terms.
While not denying the impact of these factors on the least favoured groups, this session aims to present works based on a different perspective, suggesting that part of the credit market, even in preindustrial societies, could be linked to long-term investment strategies intended to improve the wealth of indebted families. This hypothesis opens the door to a more complex scenario in which, under certain circumstances, even social sectors with limited resources could benefit from the flow of credit to acquire land and improve their stock of production factors.
From a bottom-up approach, which highlights the active role of households in the economic transformations experienced in certain areas of 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the papers presented in this session will seek to underscore the importance of access to credit in phenomena such as the rise of social groups from near-poverty or the waves of land purchases by peasants and smallholders – often related to cycles of productive specialisation – observed in various areas, as well as to reveal the agents and institutional mechanisms that facilitated the circulation of credit.

Organizers
Grace Owen – Durham University

This session brings together three papers that all examine the organisation and structure of the rural workforce in England, for the period c. 1250 – 1850. The first paper explores the role of women in agriculture in the middle ages, focusing upon the number and proportion of women in the workforce and how they were remunerated. It also analyses the limitations of manorial records, in particular accounts, for analysing gender and the implications this has upon our understanding of women and the rural economy. The second paper similarly utilises accounting records to examine he diverse forms of wage payments given to individual workers in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. It analyses and calculates the different forms of remuneration given to workers and how it is essential that these are understood within the wider context of the grain market, remuneration practices, and wage control. This paper highlights the complexity of examining wage rates and that the organisation of workers and how they were remunerated does not always appear to have been economically sound but was influenced by individual practices and preferences. The final paper in this session presents new evidence on the gendered labour division for the period 1700–1850. It explores the structure of the labour workforce and how the transition for women from breadwinner to homemaker can be observed but was not complete by 1850. The conclusions of this research challenges previous perceptions of a decline in the role of women in the agricultural economy. Utilising a variety of methodological approaches and source types, the findings from these three papers reveal a complex landscape of rural labour across the period. Together, these papers collectively enhance our understanding of the shifting structures in the workforce, how work was organised, how labourers were remunerated, and the role of women in the agricultural economy.

Organizers
Antoni Ginot-Julià – Universitat de Girona
Olegário Nelson Azevedo Pereira – MARE – Centro de Ciências do Mar e do Ambiente & Laboratório Associado ARNET – Rede de Investigação Aquática, Departamento de Ciências e Engenharia do Ambiente, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

One of the defining features of rural communities is their historical and cultural heritage. The Iberian Peninsula is distinguished by its extensive coastline, which has resulted in the coexistence of agrarian and fishing rural communities. This reality is reflected in both oral tradition and historical documentation, including ordinances, municipal laws, charters, tax diplomas, and other relevant materials. It is therefore challenging to differentiate between primary sector activities in terms of their socio-economic characteristics. Furthermore, in certain areas of the Iberian coastline, geomorphological changes have resulted in landscapes formation that were conducive to the human settlement, whether permanent or seasonal. Nevertheless, the apprehension of sea perils (both natural and anthropogenic) had compelled human communities along the Atlantic coastline to maintain a prudent distance from the ocean. In the case of Portugal, there is a paucity of documental sources available, in comparison for the medieval Mediterranean. In this case, it is possible to address the familial traits and strategies employed for their settlement and exploitation of marine resources. In this geographic context, a lot of work has still to be done to underscore the importance of this economic activity in the functioning of local and regional economies. The objective of this session is to gain insight into rural communities on both sides of the Peninsula, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, with the aim to creating synergies and opportunities for comparative studies between two similar, yet distinct realities. With these approaches, the session aims to offer a multiple scope on the configuration of a rather understudied human group in the social tissues of the Middle Ages. It is therefore essential to recognise these dynamics and translate them for civil society knowledge through one of the main strategies, musealisation, were it could be distinguished what is and what is not a historically grounded or a shaped by collective imagination phenomenon.

Organizers
Juan Luis Pan Montojo – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Mícheál Ó Fathartaig – Dublin Business School & National University of Ireland
Daniel Lanero Táboas – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

This session will deal with the mechanisms and systems of connection between experts (agrarian technicians and scientists) and farmers, and the discourses and proposals made by the former between the nineteenth century and the 1950s. This chronology will enable us to analyse the channels that were created to advise farmers, spreading new technology and support initiatives from below – before the new model of agrarian extension heralded by the USA, and applied to diffuse the green revolution package, came into existence.
The purpose of the session is to explore and present new evidence on the connections, dialogues, and knowledge exchange between rural civil society and technicians who worked for public institutions at different geographic levels, and in the context of the construction of national systems of agricultural innovation.
These relationships must be addressed bearing in mind their potential (and sometimes sought after) bi-directional sense, and not taking for granted top-down hierarchical links, with institutions and public servants simply as purveyors of knowledge and farmers as receivers. We want to analyse concrete discourses and practices of connection between the apparatus that were set up and their proclaimed beneficiaries; how they worked; and how they evolved.
To better understand those services and their work we find imperative a connected approach: comparisons between states must be undertaken (in the papers and in the discussion), and institutional models or specific actions that were copied or adapted should also be considered. This does not mean that every contribution must be comparative. However, livestock contests, intensive courses, demonstration fields, lectures, etc., and, also, professional alignments between public employees and other types of centres and services need to be studied in a context in which there were very strong connections and transnational epistemic communities; as well as, and at the same time, different cultural and administrative solutions.

Organizers
Maria Cristina dos Santos – Federal University of São Carlos/UFSCar/Brasil
Luiz Bezerra Neto – Federal University of São Carlos/UFSCar/Brasil 
Paulino José Orso – State University of Western Paraná-BR

The occupation of Brazilian territory has gone through different phases in its historical process, marked by land concentration and a growing mass of impoverished workers. This inequality has sparked numerous violent conflicts throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and pressured by social movements advocating for democratization of land access, the State was forced to intervene and implement Agrarian Reform projects, which led to a new configuration in the countryside, now characterized by the presence of camps and family farming settlements focused on food production. This has generated new social demands, including for education, which has never been a priority for the economically and politically dominant classes. As a result, education for those who work and live in the countryside, drawing their means of survival from it, has suffered even more, especially since Brazil began its industrialization process. In this context, pressure from social movements, particularly the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), is necessary to advance the struggle for the education of people living in rural areas. Thus, starting from an analysis of the relationship between the development of capitalism in rural areas, rural development, and education, we aim to discuss the ongoing struggle for land and for public, secular, and socially relevant education, considering the closure of rural schools, especially after the 1980s, when the expulsion of rural workers intensified. The school is the only public institution present in rural areas in most of Brazilian territory, and when it closes, the State turns its back, making access to public services even more difficult for workers. Furthermore, we seek to understand the relationship between education and production in rural settings, especially when social movements invest in agroecological production while large capital, represented by agribusiness, practices intensive agriculture based on pesticide use. However, we cannot forget that rural education has a symbiotic relationship with agroecology and sustainable agricultural production and is a significant achievement for riverside, coastal, quilombola communities, and agrarian reform settlers, among others, playing an important role in shaping future generations. Thus, on one hand, there is a need to reflect on the Brazilian rural environment and its historical processes, and on the other, on the challenges facing education and agroecological production that is free from pesticides. Considering this reality, we propose a forum to discuss the historical development of capitalism in rural areas and its impacts on the economic, social, and cultural landscape, including school education and the distribution of production by rural communities who earn their livelihoods from the land, whether through family farming or traditional practices of indigenous and riverside communities.

Organizers
Eric Léonard – Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, UMR SENS, Montpellier
Antonio Escobar Ohmstede – CIESAS Ciudad de México
Marta Martín Gabaldón – UNAM, Unidad Oaxaca

Agrarian communities and latifundia structures have constituted opposing paradigms in the so-ciopolitical organization, economic structure and development models of the rural world in developing countries, particularly in those that were part of the empires of the Iberian monar-chies. In the Americas in particular, they took the respective forms of indigenous communities or pueblos de indios and haciendas. The oppositions and conflicts between these two kinds of property and organization have structured historiographical reflections and societal projects throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They currently re-emerge in the processes of agribusiness expansion and extractive developments (minerals, energy or bio-resources), con-fronted by attempts to rebuild forms of community organization and collective property.
Contrasting with this binary perspective, the panel aims to examine the relationships and over-laps, at different possible levels, between community and latifundia structures of property and socio-political organization, considering the daily forms of interaction (cooperation, functional exchanges, conflicts…) that interweaved and reconfigured them between the colonial and con-temporary periods.
It seeks to go beyond approaches of opposing or dichotomizing their respec-tive dynamics, to examine the concrete forms of interaction between the two types of struc-tures and the ways in which these translated into links of mutual influence in their processes of construction and (re)configuration in the long run. We are particularly interested in considering the interdependencies that arose through economic, social, symbolic, political and territorial exchanges associated with particular activities and particular social groups within both types of structures. The panel will also seek to illustrate and understand how political and institutional changes at the national or regional level (such as the formation of municipalities or parishes, the nominal dissolution of corporate property of communities and pueblos, the land reforms of the twentieth century, or the dismantling of these in recent times), were subject to appropriations and reformulations at the local and regional levels, which can be analysed through the light of the structural, political, territorial and economic imbrications that haciendas and communities (or certain social groups within them) had developed in previous periods.
More globally, the panel proposes to rethink the frontiers and boundaries between the two types of agrarian structures and socio-political organization, examining the porosities and recip-rocal uses they made of each other. These issues can be explored through the following and non-limiting approaches:
– the complementary forms of cooperation and conflict in the uses of natural resources (land, water, forests, pastures) and their relationships with legal changes;
– the spatial imbrications, boundary confusions, overlaps and shared uses of particular spaces between communities and haciendas: forms of shared governance, contracts and conflicts;
– the functional relationships and exchanges in the markets of labour, inputs (credit, draft animals, intermediate goods), products and services;
– the processes of pueblos and private properties foundation in the geopolitics of the fron-tiers of empires or national states;
– the relationships between the two types of political-territorial structures in the processes of parish formation, municipalization and their subsequent reconfigurations (creation of new administrative entities, socio-political segmentation of communities, etc.);
– the hacienda towns and, conversely, the “communalization” of haciendas (through the pur-chase by communities, indivision among expanding kinship groups, the abandonment of es-tates, or the policies of agrarian reforms, among others).

Organizers
Carolina Uppenberg – Stockholm University
Paul Warde – University of Cambridge

The allocation of labour on small family farms has been a longstanding theme in rural history, underpinning theories and debates around the ‘peasantry’, proto-industrialization, the gendered organisation of households, and attitudes towards productivity, commercialisation and migration. Despite the obvious importance of this issue to rural society and change over time, it remains difficult to secure empirical evidence of the allocation of labour among women, men and children, what this meant for their respective ‘roles’, and all kinds of economic decision-making. Although female labour in agriculture has been a major research topic in recent years, evidence has largely been drawn from hired labour on estates or large farms, rather than the operation of smallholdings, family farms and crofts. Although all kinds of agricultural holdings faced challenges around the seasonality of labour demand and choices relating to non-agricultural activities such as spinning, weaving, fishing and migratory labour, such questions were particularly salient for households with limited access to land. Bound to maintain a functioning household and in most cases pay a rent, women and men on smallholdings were confronted with a variety of options for producing food and fibre or earning, but strongly constrained by the agricultural calendar in the manner that they could allocate their labour, In turn, these decisions had consequences for the availability of labour on larger estates and farms, or other sectors of the economy. Such questions, examined in certain contexts by theorists such as Chayanov or Ellis, also have strongly gendered dimensions.
This session will examine these questions through four cases drawn from northern Europe between ca.1500 and 1900, with a focus on the nineteenth century. In some regions, such as Poland and parts of Scandinavia, more has been studied on manors and larger farms, which may tell us about the gendering (or not) of tasks on those entities, but not the allocation of labour among the peasantry themselves. The session also addresses, through a Swedish case, the changing economic contexts with shifts in relative prices of products and factors of production, and the introduction of new technology. Specific crops, such as the potato, and opportunities to work in rural industries which then themselves came under cost pressures due to industrialization were an important context across Europe and addressed here in the case of Ireland. The session also aims to demonstrate and discuss the varied forms of evidence that can be brought to bear on household labour, from diaries and account books to legal texts, surveys and ethnographic study.

Organizers
Elisabeth Engberg – CEDAR, Umeå University, Sweden

This session centers around resilience and recovery, two interrelated and frequently used concepts in research and policy discourse concerning the capacity of societies, communities, families and individuals to manage and overcome crises of different character. Resilience is a versatile and comprehensive concept originating from system theory, referring to the ability of a system to endure external shocks, while retaining its structure and function. When expanded from systems to societal contexts, the notion of social resilience has become pivotal in global development policies, e.g. the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Societies and the Sustainable Development Goals. In the social sciences, a growing body of literature adopts social resilience as an analytical framework offering fresh perspectives on contemporary societal challenges and crises. Closely associated with the concept of resilience is recovery, defined as the restoring or improving of livelihood, health, assets and institutional systems following a crisis. Although the most frequent use of the concept refers to health-related issues, increasing scholarly attention has been directed towards societal recovery, particularly in the aftermath of natural disasters.
The study of rural populations in the past frequently addresses issues related to both resilience and recovery, although these concepts may not always be explicitly employed. In pre-industrial Europe, war, famine, epidemics and natural disasters were recurring phenomena that periodically exerted substantial pressure upon societies and populations. Rural communities with heavy reliance on subsistence farming, poor economies, and fragile municipal organisations, remained particularly exposed to crises well into the 19th century. A poignant example of this vulnerability is the devastating famine of the 1860s that ravaged Finland, Sweden, and the Baltics.
With the aim to offer new perspectives on research about historical crises, this session invites contributions discussing resilience and recovery in rural societies from different perspectives. For example, while a substantial body of scholarship examines the harvest failures in the1860s, their origin, their outcome and their consequences, considerably less attention has been directed to the question of why some communities seemed to be more successful that others – more resilient – to cope with the crisis. What factors did determine social resilience during a deep social, economic and demographic crisis in different rural contexts in the 19th century? And what can be said about recovery from such crises. Recovery as a process has also received little attention in previous research. The recent large global health crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, was said to have “started with a bang and ended with a whimper”. How and when did a 19th century crisis end, and what characterized a period of societal recovery in a rural setting? And moreover, if there was a connection between resilience and recovery, what form did it take?

Organizers
Giulio Ongaro – University of Milano-Bicocca
Matteo Di Tullio – University of Pavia
Benedetta Maria Crivelli – University of Parma

Recent years have seen a flourishing of studies which have added considerably to our knowledge of inequality dynamics in preindustrial times. Scholars focused also on the determinants of these dynamics and some of these suggests a direct connection between the growth of economic inequality and the functioning of the public finances (i.e. Alfani and Di Tulio in their book on the Republic of Venice). Basically, the argument is that regressive taxation would have fostered this phenomenon, but we still have little knowledge about the mechanisms beyond this process. Why did this happen? How did the public economy’s choices influence these dynamics? How did the management of the common pool resources and the level of municipal and state direct taxation affect the paths of wealth distribution? Which were the correlations and causations mechanisms between the different elements?
Clearly, a depletion or a private use of the common pool resources, thanks to its narrowed management, could have produced important effects in terms of increase of direct taxation and, therefore, of increase of economic inequality. However, the availability of the commons could have affected economic inequality not only impacting on the level of taxation, but also on the capacity of the taxpayers to face the State and municipal fiscal needs. Starting from these assumptions, the panel will focus on the complexity of the relationship between the management of the commons and the trend of economic inequality, dealing (but not exclusively) with the following topics in the long run (1500-1800):
– How did the depletion of the incomes from the commons could have caused the increase of direct taxation at the local level?
– Did a certain management of the common could have affected economic inequality in other ways – such as lowering the incomes (i.e., the fiscal capacity) for a part of the population and/or increasing them for another? In other words, how did the presence, or the absence, or a different way to manage these resources affected the capability of the rural population (or of a part of it) to meet the fiscal needs of the State?
– Did the direct use of the common pool resources or the renting out of them have different effects in terms of the redistribution of the wealth they produced among the rural population?
– More, did the presence of specific resources (public woods, buildings for the lodging of soldiers, and so on) produce, at the roots, the absence of the need to purchase/rent them and, therefore, to impose a tax to pay the purchase/rent?
– Was there an awareness of local/State institution of the connection between the presence (or a certain management) of the commons and the functioning of the fiscal system?

Organizers
Guiomar Carranza Gallego – Universidad de Jaén
David Soto Fernández – Universidad de Santiago de Compostela
Gloria I. Guzmán Casado – Universidad Pablo de Olavide

Over the last six decades, industrial farming has led to a loss of land cover diversity and landscape degradation. This entails a worrisome bio-cultural loss of an age-old legacy of site-specific knowledge, farm practices, landscape mosaics, crop varieties, livestock breeds and cultural foodscapes that peasants had accumulated over centuries. There is a consensus in the European Union on the need to promote sustainable agriculture and, consequently, to link back to the territory the provision of basic environmental services of agroecosystems, now outsourced, such as the conservation of genetic diversity, of pest and disease control and the replenishment of soil fertility among others. Such services are provided optimally through organic management of agroecosystems but also through the proper management of landscapes, where the physicalbiological cycles that ensure the sustainability of agricultural production are closed. Consequently, the management of agroecological territories requires a land-use planning performed on a larger scale than the farm gate level, a task for which there is hardly any accumulated knowledge. The comparative study of past and present agricultural landscapes, associated with larger units of cultural management of agrarian systems in their historical dimension, can be extremely useful for this purpose. In this sense, history can cooperate to rescue peasant and scientific knowledges about landscape organization through the study of past agrarian systems. This study requires the use of historiographic techniques in combination with other disciplines. This session aims to bring together research that incorporates different disciplinary contributions to the historical study of agricultural landscapes.

Organizers
Patrick Wichert – Sheffield Hallam University
Peter Veer – University of Amsterdam & Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision, Hilversum
James Quinn – Norwich University of the Arts

The session will provide a platform from which to expand research discussions initiated at recent EURHO conferences regarding visual approaches to working with film and photographic archives. Visual material has become a fertile ground for cross-disciplinary research and collaborations, creating new spaces for interpretations of historical places, persons and events. An increased interest in the ‘local’ as it relates to wider global issues and contemporary concerns about the impact of the climate emergency, migration and identity have generated renewed interests in historical actions and events.
Many visual archives, particularly film, are dominated by corporate and governmental ‘educational’ examples at the exclusion of private archive materials. With photography becoming more widely available from the late 19th century and, from the mid-20th century, the expansion of ‘home movie’ technology, the availability of personal films and photographs have become a rich new source of material for researchers.
Personal films and photographic collections are being absorbed into official archives, such as the East Anglian Film Archive at University of East Anglia, where digitisation increases their accessibility beyond academic research. Family and place-focussed, these visual archives provide a more diverse view of rural life, one that requires an analytic approach that uses a more affective, haptic, research methodology that is open to gaps, silences, and events taking place in the margins. The session explores the relationship between analogue and digital media not as binary opposition, but as a complementary relationship that generates a back-and-forth between the two to find new readings and to present associated new visualisations through film, photography, mixed media, and painting. It complements a conference proposal submitted by Brigitte Semenek addressing methodological issues in analysing films from rural areas by placing the focus on methodologies (e.g. Grounded, Haptic, Affective) used in the production of exhibitions, films and artworks. Themes could include:
Family archives and place, Using digital archives, Research projects involving specific visual archives, Methodologies used to interpret visual material, Emergent practice-led (or practical) methodologies, Cross- or inter-disciplinary approaches to working with visual archives, Archival material on coastal environments, Returning the digital to analogue.

Organizers
Gérard Béaur – CNRS-EHESS, CRH, Paris, France
Laurent Brassart – Université de Lille III, IRHIS- CNRS, CRH, France
Rosa Congost – Universitat de Girona, Centre de Recerca d’Història Rural, Spain

Curiously, historians were not very prolific on agrarian issues during the Napoleonic period, after the avalanche of works focused on the Revolution. Although they have not been totally ignored, and there are a number of high-quality works that have focused on them, historiography has not made them a priority. The aim of this session is precisely to try and partially fill this regrettable gap for two reasons. The first is that, far from being static, agrarian systems underwent major transformations, if only because of the effects of the conquest and the disproportionate extension of imperial influence. Secondly, it would be wrong to think that the Empire paid only discreet attention to these issues. On the contrary, they were at the heart of the State’s action within the framework of the 130 departments, in the satellite states and beyond in the states invaded or attracted by the reforms undertaken in France. The aim of this session is precisely to help fill this gap, which is regrettable for two reasons. The first is that, far from being static, agrarian systems underwent major transformations, if only because of the effects of the conquest and the disproportionate extension of imperial influence Two priorities guided the Napoleonic State’s action in agrarian issues.
A financial priority : The redefinition of property rights, the redistribution of land, agrarian reforms and the reorganisation of the tax system, which was largely based on the taxation of land, were all aimed at finding the resources needed to implement a policy of expansion for France and recovery for other countries.
An economic priority. The aim of encouraging innovation and putting a lot of pressure on farming and technical experimentation was to create the conditions for growth and agricultural progress to satisfy the demands of the population and businesses.
It is therefore the different aspects of this intervention from the State (or the states that are aggregated with it), and the ways in which they are managed in the agrarian field, that this session sets out to examinate. We welcome proposals that will highlight these perspectives on the scale of the Napoleonic Empire or of all the territories that made it up.

Organizers
Giacomo Bonan – University of Turin
Luca Andreoni – Università Politecnica delle Marche

Recent scholarship has provided important quantitative analyses of wood consumption in the industrial era. Most of the available data concerns the use of wood as an energy source (firewood and charcoal). Scholars have collected aggregate data on a national scale to evaluate the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, with some studies limited to wood and others comparing wood with other energy carriers. The overall trend resulting from these studies shows that the consumption of wood as an energy source remained at pre-industrial levels in the first phase of industrialisation and then decreased once the transition phase was completed. Information on the use of wood as a raw material is more fragmentary, but scholars agree that it increased significantly during industrialisation, since the decline of some traditional uses was largely offset by the increase in the use of wood in various industrial activities. In particular, wood was a key resource in the principal sectors that transformed the European economy between 1870 and 1914: in coal and metal mining, for the pit props; in the railway industry, for the construction of sleepers and rail infrastructure; in the chemical industry, where the largescale production of paper from wood pulp began at that time; and in the construction and furniture industries, where the enormous consumption of wood helped fuel the urban expansion that characterised that period.
The existing research has shown that we can speak of a decline in the use of wood only in relative terms, compared to the rapid increase in other energy sources or raw materials. In absolute terms, the consumption of wood increased. The available information (mainly data on aggregate consumption on a national basis) needs further investigation in order to understand the principal elements in the evolution of the wood economy: both increasing and declining uses; the articulation and geography of the supply chains; prices and customs tariffs; the most valued tree species. Two major problems arise when dealing with this type of investigation. Firstly, the reliability of the sources, both as regards supply (often linked to the uncertain determination of forest areas, particularly on a national scale), and as regards demand site (in particular, the underestimation of wood consumption and other forest products linked to self-consumption in rural areas). The second problem concerns the difficulty in comparing national statistics and the data obtainable from them on an international scale, starting from different sources and with different degrees of reliability. This panel intends to reflect on these two historiographical and methodological issues, exploring empirical implications of source analysis; methodological approaches to international comparison on forests; models for forest data analysis; new reconstructions on the dynamics of the forests (surfaces, production, trade, consumption).

Organizers
Bruno Esperante – Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Agricultural tractors have played a central role of the great agriculture technology transformations in 20th century. Although the international agrarian historiography has made progress in understanding the mechanisation of agriculture from an institutional and market perspective, the effects of mechanisation in peasant community’s reproduction strategies have yet to be discussed in depth and in international comparison.

Thus, the main question of this session is: How did agricultural tractors change peasant communities’ reproduction strategies in 20th century? This question is directly related to the Marxist hypothesis of social change, which it is often pointed out that social relations are closely linked to productive forces. So, when productive forces change, peasants change their mode of production, and when their mode of production changes, all their social relations change. Therefore, we expect to discuss the hypothesis that links the diffusion of agricultural tractors with the final crisis of peasant reproduction in the 20th century. For this reason, we will also discuss how agricultural tractors have shaped new social relations and new socials classes differentiations for 21st century.
Agricultural tractors are an industrial innovation aimed at saving labour. But we also know, both from agroecology and from the peasant economy theory, that peasant innovation strategies are not always aimed at saving labour. This is especially true in agriculture with family labour based. On the other hand, we know that in the intensive organic and solar energy-based agriculture that dominated the world until the first third of 20th century, many agricultural tasks required large investments of labour from human and animal energy-base source. For this reason, peasant reproduction strategies were often directed towards innovations that reduced human physical effort, but not towards those that completely replaced it. Moreover, we know that fertilisation needs, and structural nitrogen deficits required livestock, so the complete substitution of animal traction for agricultural tasks was not appropriate either.
However, all this changed, especially after the Second World War, which the rise of agribusiness, new marketing techniques to make agricultural tractor desirable and, overall, innovations needed to make it cheap, easy to use and adaptable to many types of land and agricultural work. The peasant had to face up to this change, which structurally overtook them. As a result, many things changed: ways of working, gender roles, generational roles, marriage policies, community hierarchies, sociability, leisure, etc. Many changes in reproduction strategies that, in a long-term perspective, became known as Le Fin des Paysans era in late 20th century.

We would like to receive proposals working on different perspectives (social, economy, environmental, gender, culture, sociology, anthropology) addressing the same question: How did agricultural tractors change peasant communities’ reproduction strategies? We encourage the submission of proposals that promote indepth, pluralistic and from below analyses, and dealing with the 20th century and any territory, both Global North and South.

The latest aim of this session is to publish the papers as a special issue in a high-ranking journal or as a book in a well renowned international editorial.

Organizers
Jessica Richter – Institute of Rural History, St. Pölten & Department of Economic and Social History, University of Vienna
Přemysl Mácha – Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences

At the turn of the 20th century, politicians and administrators across Europe had little doubt that agriculture was a special sector of the economy. Its dependence on natural and local conditions, seasonality, weather and climate forced farmers to constantly adapt to uncertainty and change. This alone ensured that farms and associated activities varied greatly between different places. Farming, moreover, defied official categories of work as much as many contemporaries’ dreams of an industrialisation of agricultural production. While some saw farming as a “traditional” counter-model to social progress, others often associated life and work at farms per se with health, idyll, a high work ethic and, above all, a special understanding of nature, animals, plants and soil. This knowledge and the (constructed) features of farming were much discussed in the course of the twentieth century. Repeatedly, they became a political issue: in the context of debates about rural depopulation, state labour market administration or the public promotion of settlements and housing, vocational training and agricultural production. In the 21st century, farmers’ knowledge and their abilities to adapt are increasingly assigned particular relevance in the context of environmental degradation and climate change. Even though farmers are often blamed to contribute to such issues politicians and media attribute to them a healthy farmers’ or common sense that predestines them for best practice. Many researchers, in contrast, point to the importance of practical, experiential knowledge in farming. They frequently envision knowledge as something passed on in families over generations and or in daily practice shared with others. Scholars conceptualise it as “traditional”, situated, local, or as embodied and intuitive, like a “feeling” for living things, soil and a farm’s needs. Some studies focus on human – non-human relations and entanglements. On the basis of this research, the speakers of this session will investigate how farmers acquired knowledge, how they described and implemented it in relation to other forms of knowledge. The papers draw on approaches from history, (historical) anthropology and memory studies. They discuss for different historical contexts in 20th and 21st century Europe how this knowledge contributed or failed to meet specific challenges and how it was assessed in relation to other ways to make sense of the world.

Organizers
Branimir Brgles – Institute of Croatian Language
Hrvoje Kekez – Catholic University of Croatia
Marija Karbić – Croatian Institute of History

The session focuses on several topics concerning Medieval (and Early Modern) historical region of Slavonia. The region is settled between two major lowland rivers, Sava and Drava and in medieval era it was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary-Croatia. In historical sources, we usually encounter the functional dimension of space; its control, the ownership of specific spatial units, etc. However, it is equally important to study the symbolic dimension of space, which is often linked to the development of social identity. The physical characteristics of space are linked to the influence of the environment on historical societies, which has not been sufficiently emphasized in historical research of medieval Slavonia. In terms of systematic research, rural history of medieval and early modern Slavonia has been rather neglected. For this reason, the proposed session would welcome papers focusing on the analysis of written and cartographic sources, as well as field research and archaeological evidence of rural networks, towns and marketplaces in Slavonia and, comparatively, in other Central European regions.

Organizers
Juri Auderset – Institute of History, University of Bern/Archives of Rural History – Archives of Rural History
David Soto Fernández
Peter Moser

Women played key roles in 19th and 20th centuries agriculture, although their diverse labors on the farms were often subject to marginalization due to the hegemonial societal gender norms that also left an imprint on rural spaces. However, women in agriculture also struggled against such power asymmetries and pursued different strategies of making the importance of their work visible. Many farm women developed their own visions of womanhood that often centered on work, the entanglements between production and reproduction and its linkages to the family economy in which the farm and the household were inseparable parts. Their work thus became a crucial site for shaping collective identities, for representing women’s roles in the rural economy and for making political claims, but it also constituted a sphere where the gendered divisions of labor were reinforced, undermined or independently interpreted. It was also the importance of their labor that provided women with crucial resources for negotiating the relationships within the farms but also for forging their social roles beyond the farm gates. Moreover, as the farms became sites of social scientific observation in the late 19th and 20th centuries, the work of women was rendered visible and became a key point of interest in diverse disciplines ranging from the science of work to rural sociology. At the same time, however, the social sciences often rendered women’s work in agriculture invisible because the categories of perception were modelled on industrial capitalist realities and tended to overlook the idiosyncrasies of the agrarian worlds. This panel suggests to take a closer look at how work and conceptions of work shaped rural women’s struggles for recognition and explores these forms of agency in comparative perspective. It invites contributions that explore the relationship between women’s work and visions of womanhood and agriculture.

Organizers
Bárbara Direito – CIUHCT, NOVA FCT
Leonardo Aboim Pires – GHES/CSG – ISEG/UL
Inês Gomes and Marta Nunes Silva – IHC, NOVA FCSH

Cattle has long been a subject of interest for rural historians and for many scholars working in other sub-fields of history, such as economic and social history, environmental history, animal history, food history or the history of science. It has also garnered attention from anthropology and sociology, as well as philosophy. Working from these vantage points and often adopting multidisciplinary perspectives, scholars have engaged different methods, sources and approaches to investigate issues of production, consumption, human-animal relations, agency, health or trade, among others. Informed by the environmental turn in the humanities and social sciences, many studies have drawn heavily on sources from the natural sciences, while the animal turn has favoured the use of multispecies ethnography and animal biography. In turn, cultural historians have continued to examine literary works and other written or visual sources to understand past human-animal relations, increasingly looking at animals in their own right. Proposed by members of the recently funded project titled “Cattle in motion: Knowledge, circulation and environments in the history of cattle in Portugal, 1750-1960”, this panel aims to interrogate these different methods, sources and approaches. It welcomes contributions that discuss methods, sources and approaches used to study cattle in specific time periods and geographies, as well as theoretical contributions.

Organizers
Uwe Müller – Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, Leipzig

Historiography on the history of cooperatives in interwar Europe has focused primarily on the growth of (mostly urban) consumer cooperatives, the expansion of their field of activity and centralization tendencies of various kinds. (Patmore, 2018; Hilson 2017) These trends were caused in many countries by the supply problems during the First World War, and after the war by the closer connection with the labor movement (but also other political parties). In this context, state influence on the co-operative movement grew, which in the authoritarian states of the 1930s (Italy, Germany) led to the dissolution of some co-operatives, while other co-operatives and co-operative associations became de facto state institutions. However, the co-operatives active in rural areas (mostly credit unions) already became an instrument of political upheaval in the turbulent post-war period to a much greater extent than before the war. This was particularly the case in East-Central and South-East Europe in the context of land reforms and settlement movements. At the same time, there was a significant intensification and thematic expansion of international cooperative activities. At the first congress of the International Cooperative Association (ICA) in Basel in 1919, it was decided to set up three specialized committees to focus on co-operative banking and the possibility of creating an International Co-operative Bank, co-operative insurance, and encouraging women in the co-operative movement. The League of Nations and the International Labor Organization (ILO) in particular were concerned with the development of the co-operative system and saw these institutions as a key to social reform and the improvement of international co-operation. The panel will explore the relationship between these (seemingly?) contradictory tendencies of nationalization and internationalization. It starts with a comparative analysis and examination of transnational entanglements of the region. Furthermore, it presents case studies about Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Greece. The panel is open for a further paper or a comment.

Organizers
David Hopkin – University of Oxford
William Pooley – University of Bristol
Timothy Tangherlini – University of California, Berkeley

Historians are apt to lament that we lack sources for the voices of the rural labouring classes, yet folklorists collected hundreds of thousands of narratives from precisely this social group in the nineteenth century. One of the most common of such oral traditional genres is the legend. The legend differs from the folktale in that it was usually told as true, and attached to a specific person, place or epoch, even if the content was fantastical (miracles, witches, werewolves, ghosts…), and even though the same or similar stories were widely distributed. This session focuses on legends as potent sources for historical research. Legends help us understand what past populations believed to be – or were at least willing to claim as – true: as shared belief shaped actions, legends created archivally documented consequences. The possibilities opened by such sources are clarified when combined with other analytical techniques, such as mapping. We can use them to explore social relationships in the countryside, and to address major questions in rural history, such as the impact of feudal relations, the distribution of power and authority within the household, the significance of the commons to peasant communities, and reactions to the rapid economic changes of the nineteenth century. The three speakers in this session have published extensively both on oral traditions and on rural history in nineteenth-century Europe. They will use this session to highlight the possibilities, and some of the limitations, of using such sources, as well as discussing how new digital sources are expanding the field.

Organizers
Iñaki Iriarte – Universidad de Zaragoza
Francesco D´Amaro – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Judit Gil Farrero – Universidad de Zaragoza

Since the late 19th century, different corps of engineers have intervened in European rural environment and, consequently, on European rural societies. Agronomists sought to modernize production by analysing the best farming systems or livestock management practices and recommending or, in some cases, imposing the techniques that should be adopted by farmers. Civil engineers, on the other hand, planned and developed transport networks or irrigation systems, which could include the construction of large reservoirs, significantly impacting the affected societies. Meanwhile, forestry engineers implemented reforestation projects or the economic exploitation of forests according to the criteria established by forest science. These technical corps, either implicitly or explicitly, held a particular conception of nature that underpinned their operations and largely determined the environmental impacts of their actions. This conception of nature was not fixed but evolved in response to a variety of factors. Scientific and technical discoveries, changes in the demand for goods and services driven by income growth and technological change, economic and agricultural policies implemented by different governments, and, ultimately, the varying degrees of resistance from civil society to engineering projects, all shaped approaches to resource management and exploitation and their effects on the environment. Based on this framework, this session aims to bring together specialists working on different engineer´s corps who historically acted upon the rural environment. The goal is to discuss the views these engineers held regarding nature and the environment, trying to discover at what extent it was convergent or divergent in the different corps and how these views evolve throughout the 20th century. This discussion can be relevant for a better understanding of the outcomes of the engineer´s actions in terms of better or worse nature conservation, or even the destruction of natural spaces and resources, and consequently, to approach the degree of sustainability achieved in rural societies through history.

Organizers
Omar Mazzotti – University of Parma
Luciano Maffi – University of Parma

Despite in recent years the role of insects in human activities has been taking on a new connotation in Europe, especially as a function of the gradual revaluation they are gaining in the food sector, the general perception of them is not related to their potential usefulness, due to the negative impact that certain insects have exerted on agricultural and forestry activities over time. Despite the relative importance of entomofauna also as a key component of the natural ecosystem, historical research still needs to be done on this last issue, in particular concerning the analysis of the policies adopted to face the impact of pests on agriculture. Various strategies were developed over time by public actors to provide a valuable tool to counter the devastating effects of certain insects (consider, for example, the fundamental role of phylloxera in radically changing the characters of French and Italian viticulture), sometimes based on an attempt to disseminate the most effective techniques, tools and products to farmers. Until the 19th century, pest management was implemented primarily through agronomic practices and the exploitation of natural antagonists. With the intensification of cultivation, its orientation toward market production, and the advent of powerful synthetic organic pesticides, phytosanitary defense became identified during the 20th century with chemical control of plant enemies.
The goal of the panel is to focus on the damage caused by insects on agricultural production in the 17th to mid-20th century. National and local institutions have often tried to counter these phenomena with forms of territorial defence, albeit partly with little effectiveness, due to the poor timing of intervention or the technical and organisational inability to manage it. We aim in particular to devote the session to analysing the intervention of institutional actors to combat insect invasions, as well as the remedies adopted (natural or chemical), and the consequent environmental impacts. But also the way of expanding knowledge on this issue, useful to fighting the effects of pest invasions, is a focus of our reflection.
Some emerging questions concerning this field of research:
• What impact did pests have on the agriculture and more in general on the economic system from the 17th to the early 20th centuries? Which institutions were engaged in the fight against insect invasions and what means were used?
• Thanks to advances in chemistry, insecticides and pesticides have been extraordinarily popular since the late 19th century. What impact did these industrial products have in defending the agricultural activities from the negative effects produced by the presence of insect pests?
• How has entomological knowledge been transmitted over the centuries in Europe, both scientifically and in terms of popular knowledge and how did this expansion of knowledge translate into a diffusion of this topic in school education? To what extent this increased knowledge was useful and effective in counteracting the effects of pests on the agricultural systems?
The panel aims to answer to these questions with an interdisciplinary approach, fostering the dialogue between the different disciplines that in historical perspective deal with these topics.

Organizers
Sven Lefèvre – Centre for Agrarian History, KU Leuven
Brigitte Semanek – Institute of Rural History, St. Pölten
Edouard Lynch – Université Lumière Lyon 2, France

Debates across various research fields have extensively explored the evolving characteristics and perceptions of rural areas and the countryside since the Second World War. This double panel builds on those discussions by examining the historical representation of rural spaces through moving images, focusing primarily on non-fiction films and television from the post-WWII period. The central aim is to investigate how these media have framed, shaped, reinforced, and sometimes contested perceptions of rural areas and their identities. The panel begins by exploring visual and narrative representations of the countryside, analyzing how cultural narratives, political claims, and the portrayal of rural landscapes have (tried to) influence(d) ideas about the countryside in the past. These evolving perceptions, shaped by media representations, have played a crucial role in shaping public opinion and influencing policymakers. The first part of the panel will address how rural areas have been portrayed in terms of tradition, modernity, and sustainability, considering the cultural and political debates surrounding rural identity. These portrayals provide insight not only into the historical evolution of rural spaces but also into the ways they continue to shape contemporary perceptions and policies. Building on this foundation, the panel also incorporates methodological approaches about how historic rural spaces are represented today on different levels such as contemporary videographic methods such as the video essay, museum exhibitions, and artistic collaborations. These innovative forms of representation provide new lenses through which to view rural areas, revealing the complexities of the rural past and present. By investigating these methods, the panel seeks to highlight how contemporary media not only depict rurality but also actively participate in clarifying the multifaceted identities and relationships that define rural spaces today. The inclusion of these methodological perspectives will offer a deeper understanding of the importance of archiving, cataloguing and working with moving images as archivists, museum workers or historians and their contemporary role in the representation of rural history in contemporary society and in the future. By linking these representations to broader social, economic, and environmental transformations, the panel hopes to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of rurality. It will emphasize the role of moving images as educational tools and ideological platforms, shaping the collective imagination about rural life and fostering a better understanding of the interplay between past and present rural identities.

Organizers
José-Miguel Lana Berasain – Universidad Pública de Navarra -Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa (UPNA-NUP)
Marta Martín Gabaldón – Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México (UNAM)
Manoela Pedroza – Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF)

In recent decades, the social history of property has become a fruitful meeting point for discussing and understanding the social dynamics surrounding the management of natural resources and the distribution of their fruits. Understanding property as a social relationship, the analysis of the alignments of this relationship and the tensions that arise around them allows us to delve into the basic structures of the social order and its dynamics of transformation. The concept of “institutional bricolage” fits well with an approach that emphasizes the centrality of social interactions and popular agency in understanding the historical transformation of land rights. Beyond the literalness of legal codes, we are interested here in analyzing how the everyday practices of social groups contributed to erecting property systems with both exogenous and endogenous components. A relational approach allows for a better understanding of actors’ responses to processes of change and their ability to adapt to new circumstances through practices of institutional hybridization in specific contexts with particular balances of power. In this session, we hope to attract research regarding this issue through theoretical and methodological approaches or case studies in different latitudes or times.

Organizers
Sergio Salazar-Galán – Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain
Francesco D’Amaro – Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain

Water has always played a central role in the society-nature interrelationship. In spite of this, historiographical studies have generally focused on the issue separately. The current civilisational crisis has its deep roots in the negative impacts of human activities on planetary ecosystems, mainly since the industrial revolution and mediated primarily by all spheres of capitalist development. One of the main causes of the crises can be found in the relationship between urban-territorial models and the agro-food system, which have become territorially decoupled, a process that has been accelerated by globalisation. These models have led to, among other problems, the mismatch between food production and consumption, the externalisation of negative socio-ecological impacts to remote locations, changes in natural land cover and land use, the intensification of the use of surface and groundwater (mainly for agriculture), greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, soil, water and air pollution, increased erosion, loss of biodiversity, abandonment of the countryside, social and environmental injustices, among others. Such issues have contributed to environmental conflicts in both rural and urban areas. Water is at the centre of many of them, directly or indirectly, and its historical study can contribute to future decision-making for a just and sustainable socioecological transition. This points to the need to understand the historical socio-ecological processes that have contributed to the sustainable (or unsustainable) management of natural resources, and in particular water, and when they have become in the cause of social tensions and political controversies, even wars. The aim of this session is to exchange experiences on historiographical approaches that analyse the society-nature relationship in an integrated way. In particular, we welcome papers that use such approaches to analyse the role of water and sustainability, with a special focus on the rural world, but without losing sight of the interconnections with the urban world and contemporary society, particularly, since the second post-war period. The geographical framework of analysis is open, with scales that can range from the local to the global, passing through administrative or landscape units, and can address water planning, management and governance in different dimensions (ecological, social, political, economic, etc.). In short, this session will address in historical perspective the existing relationship between ecological as well as socio-economic and political aspects associated with the water cycle in the rural world.

Organizers
Luciano Maffi – University of Parma
Dario Dell’Osa – University of Bari
Omar Mazzotti – University of Parma

The objectives of this panel are to analyze the application of the concept of sustainability to the wine supply chain in Europe from the post-World War II period to the present focusing on the role of institutions, technologies and markets. Sustainability can be pursued by practices that have as a common basis attention to the interrelationships between environmental, economic and social dimensions. In sustainable viticulture, the environmental dimension can be manifested, for example, through reduction in energy consumption, reduction in polluting practices, greater efficiency in water consumption, soil conservation, respect for biodiversity, and landscape protection. Economic sustainability can be pursued through increased productivity and improved profit margins for companies, through the search for new markets, new products, and through the application of process and product innovations. Social sustainability translates into greater attention to the quality of the production process and product, and more generally in developing a sense of responsibility to society. The session aims to encourage the study of the following topics: a) The impact of climate change and sustainability practices on the wine supply chain. The last few decades have brought international attention to the fact that climate change has a major impact on this sector. A concrete example is the fact that areas under vine and wine production are also being developed in areas of northern Europe (southern England and Belgium). Legislation itself has evolved in favor of these practices. In addition, alongside the evolution of “traditional” viticulture, wineries based on the principles and practices of agroecology, organic farming and biodynamic agriculture have developed and consolidated in recent decades. b) The contribution of institutions to the development of sustainable viticulture. The evolution of national and European public policies for viticulture development has often favored the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. The development of viticulture in many European countries provides a clear example of the interaction between the state and agricultural modernizationThe phenomenon is extremely complex, and the data describe a situation that requires proper analysis and appropriate studies from a historical and economic perspective. For example, EU regulations designed to improve quality have been exploited by some producers who have combined public intervention with new opportunities for sustainable growth and market expansion. c) The emergence of new technologies in the vineyard and winery that made production more sustainable. The evolution of the wine sector from the post-World War II period to the present has also taken place thanks to the application of innovations and technologies that have in some way affected the production chain: from the evolution of weather forecasting, soil analysis, laboratory analysis, genetics, machines for work in the vineyard and machines for all cellar operations. d) The role of the market and distribution networks in the development of sustainable viticulture. In recent decades, we have been able to observe an increased consumer propensity to purchase sustainable products; in this regard, we can observe an increasing importance of certifications on wine labels that provide information on the sustainable practices used by the producer. We should consider in particular the certification of organic production and the recent spread of certifications referring to sustainability standards.

Organizers
Francesca Uleri – University of Bolzano
Federica Viganò – University of Bolzano
Monica Musolino – University of Messina

Currently, in the midst of a progressive and solicited shift towards decarbonization and renewable energy, rural areas are playing a crucial role in guiding this transition. Various rural development projects and contributions highlight the significance of rural areas in fulfilling ambitious local commitments to combat climate change while also generating economic and social benefits. Globally, rural areas provide resources and innumerable sites (e.g., hydroelectric plants, agri-solar farms, etc.) for fueling the transition, thus strongly influencing its local advancements. Similarly, energy transitions have the potential to reshape the physical and social (material/immaterial) profile of rural areas. Rural places experience direct materializations of a shift to post-carbon technologies. Renewable electricity sites and infrastructures change the appearance and function of the rural, the way in which it is perceived and lived by residents, conceived by local policy-makers, and perceived by non-residents (e.g., rural users, tourists, temporary workers, etc.). This can result in multiple and contrasting energy and rural development decision-making processes, as well as in conflicting residents and non-residents’ imaginaries about the rural place and associated energy transition dynamics. This mirrors – but also depends on – the co-productive relationship that binds energy and society. Energy availability, its production and consumption models, determine the types of lifestyles that are possible, symmetrically societal structures and processes (e.g., public policies, community activism, etc.) establish and influence the quality, location, and distribution of energy resources. Despite evident interdependencies between discourses of the evolution of rurality (and rural differentiation) and the ones related to Energy Transitions (ETs), these latter remain overwhelmed by metro-centered narratives and urban sociotechnical analyses. The analysis of intertwined changing rurality(-ies) and ETs remains markedly limited, and their outcomes almost completely underestimated. Notwithstanding the relevance and incisiveness of the overlap between new energyscapes and the social construction of rurality (in terms of productive vocation, quality of life, local cultural identity and traditions, place attachment, landscape care, etc.), the conceptualization of a “rural energy transition’”, is still scarcely mentioned in social research. The session seeks to shed light on the interconnections between ETs and rural change. It presents (i) theoretical frameworks that help to conceptualize and understand contemporary rural energy transitions; (ii) different and “localized” cases of contemporary rural energy transitions in both the global North and global South, that help to understand how new energyscapes are embedded in – and adapted to – specific territories through forms of contestation and emancipation. Particular attention is given to historical and cultural factors influencing the differentiation of new energy landscapes in rural areas. Empirical cases can address the following themes, without being limited to them:
• ETs and commodification of rural resources;
• ETs and resignification of wasted lands;
• Imaginaries of rurality and ETs;
• Rural ETs and new technologies;
• Post-productivism and rural economy differentiation: multifunctional agriculture and energy production;
• Left behind places, ETs and green capitalism;
• Trajectories of energy democracy in rural areas;
• ETs and social impacts in rural contexts;
• Survival or emancipatory initiatives in rural areas and ETs;
• Path dependency development model in rural areas.
• […]

Organizers
Pere Benito i Monclús – University of Lleida
Albert Reixach Sala – University of Lleida

This session deals with the effects that mortality crises due to epidemics, famines, wars or other disasters had on the demography and economy of rural communities in different areas of Northwestern Mediterranean from the Black Death to mid-16th century. It specially aims to reexamine through several case studies a topic pivotal in the traditional understanding of the evolution of Late Medieval countryside and the period in general. As it is generally agreed, the lethal plague ravaging Eurasia from 1347 to 1351 and successive outbreaks from the following decades onwards, combined with other disorders, gave place to new dynamics in population, economy and society. On the one hand, the change of trend during the 15th century in the universal nature of epidemic diseases and greater social selectivity has been challenged (Curtis 2020). Related to that, by contrast, it has been assumed that the pandemic between 1347-51 (and generally omitting the possible role of later outbursts) fuelled parallel transformations in family models, marriage and fertility and birth patterns (Edwards & Ogilvie 2022). On the other hand, a wide range of economic processes have been attributed to epidemics (admittedly, almost always limiting the protagonism to the Black Death), food crises or wars during the 14-15th centuries. Firstly, these phenomena have been highlighted for their distributive outcomes with respect to inequalities and social mobility (Alfani 2021), although traditional views on the evolution of stratification in peasant communities have not always been interpreted in terms of “equaliser” (Bois 2000). At any rate, abundant literature on Western Europe as a whole has explored the role of mortality crises caused by the aforementioned disasters both for the dominant groups (impact on manorial income and possible reactions as a result) and the peasant majority (changes in wages trends, living standards, etc.). Going even further, there has been no hesitation in proposing the demographic crisis caused by Black Death (again, without taking into account subsequent epidemic episodes or other events) as a trigger for large-scale phenomena such as the emergence of capitalism (Benedictow 2021, Belich 2022) or divergent trajectories between West and East or Northern and Southern Europe (Pamuk 2007, Pleijt & van Zanden 2016). Nonetheless, the empirical basis on which many hypotheses or historiographical proposals are based, at least for the western dominions of northeastern Iberia and other nearby Western Mediterranean territories, presents important shortcomings and asymmetries. Therefore, a thorough revision is necessary, starting from the archival documentation itself. Seeing that, the proposed session seeks to deepen the following points on the demographic and economic impact of mortality crises in rural society from mid-14th century to mid-16th century: 1) the specific chronological sequence and geography of mortality crises arising from epidemics and other catastrophes; 2) the interaction between different reasons and variables leading to these crises; 3) the employment of serial sources (both direct evidence from records of deaths or burials or indirect evidence mainly from wills) for estimating the absolute and relative demographic effects of epidemics and other disasters; 4) the possible sex and social selectivity of mortality crises; 5) parameters on the evolution of the composition and dimensions of family units, key to correctly quantify figures of population of different territories or communities, as well as possible changing and diverging patterns in the general demographic dynamics of pre-modern Europe.

Organizers
Pedro Namorado Borges – University Institute of Lisbon (Iscte-IUL), Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies, Portugal | University of Coimbra, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Portugal
Samuel T. Brandt – Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Attila Gábor Hunyadi – Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, BBU Cluj, Romania

The rural built environment is testimony to reforms that have sought to modernize the agricultural sector. Some well-documented examples from the developing world include architect Hassan Fathy’s experiments in rural Egypt in the 1940s and 1950s (Fathy, 1973), and the ujamaa villages built in 1970s Tanzania during the regime of Julius Nyerere (see: Scott, 1998). A well-studied example in a developed country is Samuel Mockbee’s Rural Studio in Alabama, USA (see: Oppenheimer Dean and Hursley, 2002). In these cases and others, states and civil society have supported the development of food production, storage, and distribution to consumers through the building and updating of housing and non-housing infrastructure in rural areas. This symposium at EURHO 2025 aims to showcase current research into the architectural traces of rural modernization. It does so through a broad transdisciplinary and international overview, with contributions from various fields (including but not limited to geography, history, and architecture) and on various world regions (including but not limited to Europe and Latin America). As a research topic, the built environment connects not only different disciplines and methods (not least a strong emphasis on the visual), but also brings together the urban and the rural, wealth with poverty, and even the future with the past and present. Architectural history as a component part of global intellectual history also unites strands of thought across political boundaries. Especially in rural areas, it bears elements both of universalism and localism. The prospect of worsening climate change, intensifying migratory movements, increasing food insecurity and diminishing natural resources, makes it pertinent to recover narratives from rural architecture, which have sought to answer questions that remain current. This symposium seeks to contribute to the development of initiatives in line with goals 1, 2, 3, 10 and 11 proposed by the UN in 2024: no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, reduced inequalities and sustainable cities and communities. We welcome papers discussing vernacular architecture as well as architecture designed by professional architects. We are also interested in studies of architecture and infrastructure projects connected to different types of rural land use, including, but not limited to agriculture, ranching, and mining. Studies of any historical time period are also welcome, as are papers addressing rural architecture at a variety of scales (from the individual dwelling to transnational).

Organizers
Nataša Henig Miščič – Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia – Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Janja Sedlaček

Economic nationalism played a crucial role in nation-building in Central and Southeastern Europe, serving as a long-term cultural approach to modernisation. Present both before and after World War I, even at sub-state levels, it was integral to collective self-assurance efforts. Nearly all sectors established autonomous structures in line with 19th-century unification and independence movements. This push for economic national differentiation reflected the desire for parallel cultural, political, and economic systems due to distinct national populations. Establishing these parallel institutions was a gradual process, with nationalist leaders acknowledging the economic factor’s significance in political struggles. We are interested in the role of economic nationalism in the southern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, including both the Austrian and Hungarian areas, as well as in the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Serbia. The panel primarily aims to emphasise and compare the impact and influence of economic nationalism within two different systems: the Orthodox-Byzantine-Ottoman system in the northern regions of the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Serbia and the Catholic-Western system in the southern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Different political and social structures characterised these systems. The contributions will provide new perspectives by examining internal problems and external challenges of institutions from a top-down viewpoint and the experiences of the entrepreneurs and peasantry from a bottom-up perspective. More specifically, we concentrate on the rural areas of the Slovenian territories within the Austrian part and Bács-Bodrog in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Monarchy; Uzice county in the Kingdom of Serbia; and Macedonia, located in the northern part of the Ottoman Empire. These regions were considered peripheral concerning state frameworks, as they were distant from state centres. Bulgaria, Greece, and later Serbia sought to leverage the market dependence of peasants in rural Macedonia, including seasonal labour and economic boycotts, to coerce rival group members into their millet. Church-school communities set up credit institutions with low-interest rates. With the transformation of the church-educational struggle in Macedonia into a struggle involving armed groups within the Ottoman Empire, the methods of economic pressure on the population to join one of the three groups gained strength. Besides, it is crucial to examine the impact of the Export Bank, founded in 1901, and its Uzice subsidiary, the Export Cooperative, established in 1905, on rural husbandry in Uzice County, which includes analysing its income sources—domestic or foreign—and how Custom war of the Kingdom of Serbia and Austro-Hungarian Monarchy affected its operations. Economic nationalism, as an ideologically driven economic program, can significantly impact entrepreneurs, sometimes leading to irrational business decisions. This can negatively affect businesses, potentially causing financial collapse. So, we will examine cases of business failures in Slovenian rural areas linked to economic nationalism. Finally, in the session, we will analyse the dynamics of financial networks and intermediaries in Carniola Province and Bács-Bodrog County during the late 19th century, exploring their connection to economic nationalism. This research will offer a comparative historical analysis of national polarisation, politics, and economic development in Central and Southeastern Europe.

Organizers
Vilhelm Vilhelmsson – University of Iceland
Teresa Petrik – Institute of rural History, St. Pölten

Rural households in early modern Europe were shaped by multiple and overlapping power dynamics. In addition to the gendered family dynamic and the question of ownership (landlord vs. “serf”), most rural households were sites of production and reproduction where labour relations of various shades, and their complex dynamics of power and contestation informed most aspects of daily life. Rural Households were therefore the scene of conflicts not only between parents and children or wives and husbands, but also between servants and masters or day labourers and their employers. These relations were in turn governed by national and regional labour laws, as well as laws restricting vagrancy and unemployment, and cultural notions of hierarchy and household order. This panel seeks to address the labour conflicts that arose within and surrounding European rural households in the early modern era (roughly 16th to early 19th centuries) by exploring how these power dynamics played out in practice and how labour conflicts affected economic and social life in rural communities. Moreover, the panel aims to uncover what these conflicts can tell us about the meaning contemporaries ascribed to the household as an organising principle of work and social relations at large. Papers could explore both hidden and overt tactics of individual or collective resistance, historical actors’ understanding and contestation of labour laws, the use of coercion in managing labour dynamics, the notions and practice of paternalism in household labour relations, wage disputes and employment negotiations and any other aspect related to the practice of labour relations in rural households in early modern Europe.

Organizers
Simona Boscani Leoni – University of Lausanne
Giulia Beltrametti – University of Roma Tre

How is naturalistic knowledge constructed – historically? How do scientists, technicians, administrators, experts, and travellers approach the environment and its resources? How does naturalistic savant knowledge stand in dialogue with local knowledge and practices? This session, which hosts five papers devoted to different research experiences in different European geographic areas, with different long-term chronologies, attempts to trace, at least in part, some of the lines along which this knowledge has been historically constructed. From the Swiss Alps, to the Apennines and the Italian coastline, to the Slovenian Karst, the session will discuss paths of scientific construction of environmental knowledge and use of its resources read in the light of dialogue with local and empirical knowledge of places, practices, and techniques. The attempt is to identify the lines of continuity and discontinuity that lead, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, to the definition of a scientific approach to nature that, with its wellformulated categories, risks not fully grasping the complexity, including anthropological complexity, of environmental knowledge and practices. Additional papers wishing to contribute to this reflection from different chronologies, geographical areas, and disciplinary approaches are welcome.

Organizers
Laurent Herment – CNRS UMR8558 CRH-EHESS
Angelo Carrara – Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto
Alejandro Tortolero – UAMI-México

Voluntary’ migration to the new worlds (in independent countries or European colonies) has been the subject of a great deal of research. Migration networks, the organisation of departures, entry conditions, the conditions under which migrant families settled, and the composition of the immigrant population in terms of age, gender and social class have all contributed to a better understanding of one of the most important migratory phenomena of the last three centuries. Migration in cities has been particularly well studied, if only because migrants arrived in the main ports, which were sometimes capital cities, sometimes cities at the centre of political, cultural and economic power networks. Forced or more or less voluntary migration within agricultural worlds has also been the subject of major and constantly renewed research. From the point of view that interests us here, for example, they have raised questions about the role of slaves imported into the United States in the development of rice cultivation. They have also led to a better understanding of the conditions of transition from agrarian societies based on the mobilisation of enslaved or indentured workers to societies based on the mobilisation of free workers. Yet one of the most concrete aspects of migration, the mobilisation of labour and the development of new plants, has been relatively little studied. By arriving in a new environment, totally different from their original one and wrongly described as ‘virgin’, migrants or enslaved populations could not simply reproduce their know-how. It was not simply a question of adapting practices that had been mastered for a long time; they often had to undertake the cultivation of plants with which they were unfamiliar, in an environment over which they had only partial control. As well as agricultural practices, the process of acculturation of these populations also involved their diet. The aim of this session is to bring together contributions aimed at gaining a better understanding of the concrete conditions under which these populations settled and acculturated.

Organizers
Zsuzsana Varga – Modern Hungarian History Department, Eötvös Lorand University
Zarko Lazarevic – Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubjana
Janja Sedlacek – Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubjana

In post-World War II European socialist countries, the accumulation of resources for accelerated industrialization came to a considerable extent from insufficient investments in agriculture and underpaid peasant labor. This was accompanied by a process of de-agrarianisation, in which the industrial sector initially employed predominantly male labor. Peasant women, therefore, assumed a larger role in agriculture. This increased their workload but also contributed to their gradual emancipation, altering their roles in the family, agriculture, and society. However, the experiences of peasant women were not uniform across socialist Europe; they depended on the unique socio-political and economic context of each country. While the majority of states adopted the Soviet collective agriculture model and modified it according to their needs and social specifics, others, like Yugoslavia and Poland, developed entirely distinct approaches. These variations resulted in significant differences in the status and experiences of peasant women. For instance, in the GDR, peasant women were largely employed on state farms and thus became workers with associated (albeit limited) rights, while peasant women in Slovenia maintained work on private farms to a larger extent.
The socio-economic position of peasant women was already discussed at the Rural History 2023 conference (double panel by Zsuzsanna Varga, Eötvös Loránd University) and in a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (2022) titled Expectations, Opportunities, Realities: Women in Socialist and Post-Socialist Rural Transformations. This panel, therefore, aims to deepen and broaden the already addressed questions and study them comparatively. We welcome contributions on the realities and experiences of peasant women in individual socialist states, as well as comparative studies.
We focus on the role of peasant women within the family, society, agriculture, and the state in post- World War II socialist Europe. These issues will be explored from three main perspectives: the attitudes of authorities and ideology, the actual situation of peasant women, and their self-perception. Some of the key questions include how authorities viewed changing gender roles in agriculture, what policies were implemented (e.g., social security, education, childcare), and how these reflected socialist ideology. The panel also aims to adress the roles of peasant women in reality: the work they performed on farms or cooperatives, their family roles, education levels, access to cultural goods, and their participation in agricultural management. It aims to raise questions about social stratification and peasant women’s involvement in shaping their rights. Finally, we would like to explore how peasant women perceived their position, whether they demanded recognition and rights, and if they received support from organizations like cooperatives and women’s groups.
We welcome contributions on:
• Peasant women in ideology and policies
• Their self-perception
• Their roles in family, agriculture, and society
• The influence of cooperatives and collectives on their status in socialism
In this panel, “peasant women” includes all women who worked formally or informally in agriculture (whether in the state or private sector) or simply lived on farms (elderly peasant women, disabled peasant women, etc.).

Organizers
Laura Prosperi – University of Milan Bicocca
Andrea Maria Locatelli – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
Paolo Tedeschi – University of Milan Bicocca

With 2024 hindsight and the perspective of the Green Deal, it is now quite easy to blame the CAP for its massive food waste, perpetrated over decades. Indeed, food losses and wastage were a major concern in the critical review of the CAP mechanisms – from the threshold price to the allocation of product quotas – and were among the main reasons for the CAP’s historical reforms.
Inspired by the ambition to provide a meaningful contribution to the current debate on food waste, this panel is part of a research track launched in Romania in September 2023, which meant to further explore food losses and wastage along past food supply chains in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy.
Our joint effort aims at investigating historical food inefficiencies, shedding light on food waste generated by public institutions rather than by households. Our overview will therefore include all European countries since the 1960s, both those ones regulated by the CAP and those ones where food waste was actually generated due to the backlash of the CAP, as well as those ones affected by CAP side effects (i.e. Western European countries kept out of the CAP area, Eastern European countries and non-EU countries).
Besides ridding the concept of waste of its emotional and moral components, we propose to understand food waste on the basis of the socio-economic functions it actually performed. Set against a different background, food waste is first and foremost a dynamic phenomenon. We focus on those norms and public policies that have tolerated – but more often generated – food waste as a reasonable toll paid in the name of a set of shared priorities. These priorities have changed over time, ranging from food security and landscape regeneration to rural employment and eco-system services. On the one hand, the list of these different priorities outlines a working grid that provides us with a new taxonomy of food waste. On the other, it allows us to investigate the phenomenon through a purely economic lens, replacing the concept of waste with that of ‘inefficiency’, corresponding to the loss of edible mass, money and/or natural resources spent to produce it. In both cases, the contributions will shed new light on the current commonplace of food waste, typically read as an irrational public enemy, here seen as part of a broader common profitability, notably due to the priorities set by European legislation and its governance.
All the proposals included in this panel will contribute to a new understanding of food waste through the historical perspective. While not exhaustive, the list of relevant research strands includes:
– Studies on inefficiencies (both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective) in each individual
food supply chain within a given regional or national context, as well as through a comparative
perspective between different contexts.
– Assessment of the policies applied to agri-food products and past trade of any European country
(directly and indirectly affected by the CAP).
– Survey and data series on waste, where historical series are available
– Diachronic analysis of agri-food regulations, notably CAP regulations, related to food waste and
losses.
– Recycling and upcycling strategies adopted over time to overcome food inefficiencies
– Reasons, strategies and early reforms to tackle food wastage
– Development of public and media rhetoric as well as discourse on institutional food waste
While the Italian context will be examined thanks to the three papers presented here, the Belgian, Spanish and French cases will be dealt with thanks to the scholars who have already indicated their willingness to contribute to the panel session.

Organizers
Niccolò Mignemi – CNRS (France)
Luca Andreoni – Università Politecnica delle Marche
Francesco Chiapparino – Università Politecnica delle Marche

Agricultural underemployment was a frequent and widespread, in some respect structural, situation in the 18th-20th centuries. It was linked to the seasonality of the farming systems, and the availability of a reservoir of rural workforce, which was the condition to cope with bottlenecks and peaks in the labour supply,throughout the year. Economic and social historians have paid particular attention the consequences of these dynamics in terms of seasonal mobility, the development of protoindustrial and off-farm activities, or crop specialization (vineyards, olives, fruits but also industrial crops). Observed through the lens of underemployment, work rhythms can indeed provide crucial insights into the evolutions of farm organization and rural rationalities. They are central to understand changes in productivity patterns (land and/or labour), the spread of labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive innovations, the management of local resources, the place of migrations (temporary or permanent), the evolution of the labour contracts, or the multiple strategies combining agricultural and non-agricultural activities etc.
However, despite the importance of the subject, historians have paid little attention to the study of agricultural underemployment per se, its role in technological innovations and the diversification/ specialization of farm activities. There are several reasons for this lack of analysis. Firstly, the everyday forms of labour organization – both family and hired labour – are harder to detect in archives than land or heritage. Secondly, sources concerning the length of the working day or the numbers of days worked per season are scarce, lacking data for comparisons between national aggregates and longitudinal studies on specific territories. Thirdly, the seasonality of labour and the impact of agricultural underemployment are difficult to define and measure at different levels, as well as the mechanisms of its persistence and the consequences on the other economic sectors.
Contributions to this panel may address one or more of the following issues:
– Measurement and estimation of the working hours, according to their seasonal dynamics and distinguishing between specialised and non-specialised tasks: all approaches are welcome, from qualitative case studies to econometric analyses, as well as studies focusing on the production of data and statistics on these phenomena.
– Origins and consequences of seasonality on the organization of the farm, the development of technological innovations, and the dynamics of the farming systems.
– Debates on women’s underemployment and the changing perceptions/recognitions of female labour in agriculture (both within the family, and outside as servants or temporary workers).
– Income integration strategies (at the individual or the family level) in response to underemployment, with particular attention to life-cycle effects and the role of pluriactivity.
– Local and national initiatives promoted by local authorities, governmental and non-governmental organizations to manage seasonal labour and fight against underemployment, through technological change, employment and educational policies.
– Agricultural underemployment in the economic and social debates, in particular during the period of crisis, in the relation to the level of the agricultural wages, and the question of the rural population as a reserve army of unemployed workers.

Organizers
Nathalie Joly – Institute Agro Dijon
Federico D’Onofrio – Institute fro Social and Economic History of the University of Vienna

The first aim of this session is to celebrate the publication of Nathalie Joly and Federico D’Onofrio, Farm Accounts in Rural Europe, c.1700-1914: To better know one’s own? (Boydell, 2025). This places the study of accounts arising from both farms and estates on a new footing. Informed as the volume is by the ‘new accounting history’, it integrates the history of agricultural and estate accounting with insights from the Social Sciences. It shows how accounts could be used to control and avoid fraud by labourers, farm managers and administrators, how they were a force to improve farming, how farmers dragged their feet over the use of double-entry bookkeeping but how simpler forms of bookkeeping were sold to French farmers’ wives. Ultimately many farmers were compelled to keep accounts by the tax and government authorities in the early twentieth century, but a valuable by-product of this was the creation of data which could be analysed by farmers’ and other organizations and used to inform government agricultural policy. After this book, it is impossible to use accounts without asking what choices an individual farmer made in keeping accounts and what purposes they served him. Whilst the session will open with a presentation of the book, followed by a commentary by Nadine Vivier, its second aim is to gather together the next generation of essays on accounting practice in Rural History. Other filing gaps in the literature generally and in Farm Accounts in Rural Europe, c.1700-1914: To better know one’s own? in particular, we will ask two broad questions: what discourses encouraged farmers to keep accounts and what purposes accounts served, whether for the farmers that kept them or the professional or government organisations who extracted data from samples of accounts.

Organizers
Janine Maegraith – Newnham College, Cambridge
Siglinde Clementi – Centre for Regional History, Brixen-Bressanone

In the wake of the 500th anniversary of the German “peasant war”, many conferences and publications address the uprisings of 1525. But they mostly retain a narrative of the events as a ‘male affair’ which covers up the conditions of rural and urban women at the time. Apart from individual attempts to recover female actors in the documents and encourage a gender perspective, hardly any narratives emerge that include the aspect of gender relations and the societal changes that were emerging in this period. We therefore propose to approach the time around 1525 not only from a gender perspective but also from a socio-economic one by addressing aspects of wealth and its legal framework and putting households and household economics centre stage. Specifically, we ask about legal, social and economic status of women in view of access to wealth, wages and usage rights. The aim is to ultimately increase our knowledge about the socio-economic conditions of female and male actors at the time of the uprisings and thus to understand the framework of the peasants’ grievances, possible female involvement or impact on women. The session addresses different social groups in rural and urban contexts in southern Germany and southern Tyrol: women’s economic position and their taxable wealth in urban and rural marital and single households in Freiburg; noble women in Tyrol and their access to fiefs whereby changes in the feudal system, kinship interests and social practice come to the fore; continuities and changes of the legal context of property and gender in rural areas in southern Tyrol taking legal practice into account; and rural or ‘peasant’ women and their involvement in household economics from contributing and administering wealth, their material world, to funding acquisitions and lending activities.

Organizers
Gillian McGillivray – Glendon College, York University, Canada
Marcus Dezemone – Instituto INCT Proprietas; Universidad Estadual do Rio de Janeiro/Rio de Janeiro, and Universidade Federal Fluminense/Niterói, Brazil
Leonardo Soares dos Santos – Universidade Federal Fluminense/Campos dos Goytacazes, Brazil

Reflections on labour relations in the rural world offer a crucial key to understanding the fight for democracy in Latin America, especially in Brazil. The rural world in general—and large properties in particular—have undergone numerous and intense changes at the same time that researchers studying the countryside have developed new methodologies through fruitful and rich international debates. The relationships between these changes – in the rural world and in academic spaces – continue to deserve researchers’ attention.
The concept of a “great transformation” in agriculture has played a central role in shaping our reflections on Latin American rural areas. In this vein, researchers have begun to more accurately understand how the State and its institutions mediate and regulate rural conflicts; how companies developed and changed systems of organization of production and labour, and how capital and land have been (re)distributed and (re)concentrated. More recently, researchers have begun to add nuance to the interpretative perspectives linked to modernization theory by adding cultural, social and environmental variables to economic and political debates. These variables, which include geographic origin, generational differences, professional qualifications, gender diversity, race, and ethnic distinctions, help to explain inequalities regarding access to—and management of—natural resources.
As a result, much progress has been made toward answering questions that deepen our understanding of the relationships between economic development and democracy in the rural world. Processes that have attracted thick historiographies have been made more complex, as researchers introduce new questions and approaches to identify diverse networks of sociability and notions of rights in the rural world. This movement has contributed to a challenging and questioning of traditional historiography.
Our panel speaks to this challenge, and we propose the following questions: what were the impacts of the “great transformation” in relation to everyday life and social mobilization; conflicts; sociability networks; multiple inequalities; diversity; regulatory entities; forms of organization, and leisure spaces? What collective actions, expressed through conflicts (some with greater and others with lesser public visibility) could be developed in such contexts in Latin America and Brazil?
Overall, the panel aims to bring together studies of large estates in Latin America and Brazil characterized by these new approaches, both in terms of economic and political processes on the one hand, and their locally specific cultural, social and environmental aspects, on the other. Our goal is to build notions of rights, citizenship and democracy into our work.
We welcome studies at different geographic scales, especially those that recognize transnational relations or are linked to recent ongoing international debates.

Organizers
João Luís Jesus Fernandes – University of Coimbra, Portugal; Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, CEIS20
Ramon Garcia Marin – University of Murcia, Spain

In different historical and geographical contexts, water is omnipresent in rural spaces. This relevance is due to water as a source of life, to its central role in shaping landscapes, but also, often, to the constraints imposed by the scarcity or lack of access to water resources.
Over time and avoiding anachronistic determinisms, water has interfered in Human Geography and has been a superlative factor in modeling settlement structures. In fact, water is part of the memory of many places, a reality that is confirmed, for example, by the cartography of hydrotoponyms present in rural areas in many European countries, and beyond.
On the other hand, as a disputed vital strategic resource, water interferes with power relations, tensions and conflicts, on different geographic scales, from the micro-territories of small farmers and livestock breeders, to large geopolitical spaces, including the geographies of intensive land exploitation systems.
Also in different spatial and temporal scenarios, water has been imposed on rural spaces through developmental strategies that involve the regularization of rivers or other river courses, as well as the construction of important infrastructures, such as dams and canals. The demand for water, especially in contexts in which there is a spatial and temporal gap between the need and access to this value, has led to disruptive interventions, with very heterogeneous effects in fragile systems, such as most rural areas.
In this sequence, a panel is proposed based on a set of principles: water issues are not confined to the physical dimension of the problem; far beyond the uncertain idea of abundance or scarcity, the issue of water and associated ecological marginalization can have a mainly political origin and result from complex relationships between different actors; this is a topic that will benefit from different disciplinary angles.

Organizers
Claudio Lorenzini – University of Turin 
Katia Occhi – Bruno Kessler Foundation. Italian-German Historical Institute, Trent

At all times, one of the most problematic segments in the timber supply chain is transportation, to the point that the history of forest resources can be read through the gradual improvement of transportation techniques that made it possible to take advantage of forests considered too distant and unusable. One of the favored resources used for logging and transportation has been water. Until recently, floatations have been one of the most suitable solutions for moving a massive and cumbersome matter such as timber. The constraints brought about by this possibility are many, starting with land morphology and stream characteristics and, of course, the distance of forests from streams and rivers.
The objective of the panel is to gather contributions that illustrate the development of timber flows in Europe, with the claim of identifying discontinuities in the cases analyzed, considering the relationship between forests and waters a ‘symbiotic’ aspect of the timber supply chain and as such a structural element of continuity.
There are two approaches with which we would like to analyze timber fluctuations. The first is interconnections with other transportation and distribution systems: ports and roads. Their location, especially along major waterways, often transcends the jurisdictional boundaries of states. This leads to formal systems of organizing river timber transport that result in transactions and affect not only transport workers but the very political choices of those who regulate the trade. This is an extension of the ‘envirotechnical system’, a key approach adopted by the more recent historiographical literature on rivers. The second approach, consequential to the first, is the attention given to the conflicts brought about by the flows, environmental, social and economic in nature, involving village communities and states at different scales.

Organizers
Pierre Cornu – Director of the UMR Territoires, INRAE, France

The modernization of agriculture and cattle-breeding in post-1945 Europe is often narrated as a tale of two contrasting destinies, the one of the winners – grain belts, industrialized dairy production areas… -, and the one of the losers – marginal lands, mountains, Mediterranean hinterlands… – as if economic rationality was writing history by itself. But the risk of an excessive concentration of farming in a few regions and of a desertification of vast areas has led public policies – at regional, national, and European level – to take early action for the preservation of some agricultural activities, mainly pastoral cattle-breeding, in vulnerable areas. This action did not only involve subsidiaries, but also research and shared innovation processes. Unable to join the mainstream of mechanization, specialization, and intensification, pastoral lands have welcomed research teams that proposed interdisciplinary research and complexity approaches, in order to codesign different paths of development at territorial level. For some research institutions, especially in the field of agronomical and zootechnical sciences, this kind of involvement was a way of gaining more agency and creativity in their work, while for farmers and other socioeconomic actors, it was a way of warding off their own disappearance. This alliance, often invisible, but a true cognitive asset for local development, has had very different outcomes, but an undeniable impact on the reinvention of rurality across the continent in the 1970’s-1990’s, especially by the way of enhancing agritourism, signs of quality and origins, and heritage policies – leading to an early positioning on the agenda of agroecological transitions at the turn of the new Millennium.
One particularly interesting point in this history is the early rise of interdisciplinarity in agricultural and rural studies, gathering biotechnical and social sciences – and even including history in some instances. By addressing the history of scientific involvement in the development and sustainability of pastoral lands, we thus gain an opportunity to highlight the rise of post-normal and transformative research. Far from being marginal, rural areas and especially pastoral lands have played a central part in this epistemological turn.
The aim of this panel is thus to highlight, by inviting several case studies, the role of applied research, action-oriented research, or whatever name was given to it, in the enlargement of the scope of development projects all across Europe, and especially in pastoral lands, be they in the Atlantic margins of the continent, its Northern parts, or its Mediterranean hinterlands.
We propose three papers at this stage, but our idea is to offer room for other case studies outside France, in a resolute comparative perspective.

Organizers
Harro Maat – Wageningen University
Joana Sousa – University of Coimbra

Wetlands are currently portrayed as valuable and vulnerable ecosystems that require protection and restoration. Restoration opens up a task for historians, to address questions about how people lived with and in wetlands, across different times and places. This session addresses wetlands as contested spaces, attracting rulers that aimed for colonization and turning wetlands into productive agricultural zones, as well as attracting runaway migrant communities turning wetlands into productive decolonized muddy zones of refuge and self-sufficiency. Although dismissed as insalubrious and sources of disease by certain scientific discourses in the past, powerful actors have tried to control wetlands, not rarely in long-lasting and haphazard trajectories of technological success and failure. Marginalized actors, or those escaping the control of states, have also had mixed experiences, often facing intense, brutal or long-lasting permanence in the swampy soils of wetlands. They often used wetlands as a refuge, finding benefit from the inhospitable combination of shallow waters, muddy fields and impenetrable vegetation as an effective defense against conquerors and raiders. Again other groups were driven into wetlands as part of an enslaved or otherwise coerced labour force, making flooded zones suitable for agricultural purposes. What these groups have in common is a livelihood rooted in wetlands. Productive practices rely on techno-nature arrangements capable of controlling the movements of water and sediment for the purposes of agricultural production. Papers in this session are rooted in new global histories that put agricultural practices at the centre, perceiving these practices as assemblies of vegetation and crops, technology and other non-human actors next to a variety of human individuals and peoples that lay claims over wetlands in different ways. Contestations over wetlands ultimately reflect processes of colonization and decolonization, having roots in European conquest, the Transatlantic trade of enslaved people and plantation agriculture. Wetlands also inhibit contested ideas of food production and therewith provide prominent examples for debates over food security versus food sovereignty. Histories of contested wetlands speak to current restoration policies that emphasize non-human ecologies by prioritizing wetlands for biodiversity conservation and carbon-sink environments. Papers in this session emphasize historical trajectories of contested access and rights, with implications to the commoditization of land, extractivism and dismantling of wetland-based livelihoods.

Organizers
Blancaneaux Romain – INRAe Montpellier, France
Hermesse Julie – UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique
Loodts Nicolas – UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique

In response to the current food system problems, “new”, “revolutionary” ways of growing, distributing, eating, disposing and imagining of food are shifting to resolve broad socio-ecological issues. Yet this also adds up with a decades-long discourse on the need to feed a growing human global population, setting the stage for practices in line as a solution. These rhetoric of novelty are accompanied by promises of more productive and sustainable farming, by adopting practices reducing scarce or harmful inputs while farming becomes more precise. Meanwhile, criticism of productivist agriculture along revolutionary promises has intensified in the academic field, among activists and within institutions, providing various incentives pledging for changing the dominant paradigm in agriculture. How do now and then phenomenons come together with discourses, which harkens back to – or depart from – past narratives and frame rationale? These elements provide a basis for questioning if “alternative” food systems – whether agroe-cologically, “sustainable”, “regenerative”, (etc.) – accompany a “greening” reproduction of phenomena attached to the dominant agricultural paradigm (simplification of processes, farmers’ dependance, etc.). To what extent do “new” narratives (such as those promised by innovations and new agricultural technologies) are likely to modify (or reproduce) dominant practices in food (and other areas) that existed in the past? To what extent, now and then, do they underpin conflicting views and activities? Are current incentives (from public authorities, environmental associations, etc.) more than former ones, likely to change (or reproduce) the dominant paradigm in agriculture, based e.g. on a system of injunctions with little or no consultation of the primary players, the farmers? This panel aims to question the historical (dis)continuities within current imaginaries and promises to change agricultural models. It welcomes multidisciplinary methods to inspire debate on “alternatives” in food systems, as they (are) shape(d by) new imaginaries and narratives, practices and technologies, which might reproduce more than alter existing, dominant logics in agriculture.

Organizers
Jadon Nisly-Goretzki – University of Kassel
Ulrike Heitholt – University of Kassel

For at least two centuries, the concept of distinct animal breeds dominated the exploitation of animal products in agriculture. More recently, the concept of breed is in flux. Hybrids have long been standard in swine and poultry breeding, and selectively cross-breeding with beef breeds is becoming typical in dairying. But even so, and despite the rise of genomics, breeds still play a central role for many farmers. Especially in organic agriculture and direct marketing, so-called ‘local’ or ‘native’ breeds often serve as a marker of sustainability and groundedness. Despite the long-standing primacy of the concept in policymaking and practical breeding, the subject has not often been the focus of recent empirical works of agricultural or rural history. Many of the publications on the history of breeds have remained celebratory internal narratives, often produced by breed associations themselves. These tend to rely heavily on 19th century monographs and follow these in assuming incorrectly that breeds have a deep, even prehistoric past. On the other hand, international histories of breed have tended to focus almost entirely on the British and North American context. This panel looks to showcase a variety of historical perspectives on how ‘breed’ was defined, instrumentalized, or even seen as superfluous. What role did breed play as a boundary marker that could fulfill a range of functions from status symbol to specific forms of concentrated production. This can also include how breeders reacted to ‘race scientists’ and eugenicists, or even actively contributed to such thought. What role did the use of the same term for race and breed in most European languages play? Contributions are welcome that deal with a range of time periods, regions, and species. Topics can include pre-modern concepts of ‘breed’, the impact of local breeding associations and exhibitions on rural sociability, the institutionalization of breed in the 19th century, the role of ‘native’ breeds in fascism, imperialism and colonialism, breeds in relation to reproductive technology like artificial insemination and genomics, and what role breeds still played in hybrid breeding programs.

Organizers
Matteo Di Tullio – University of Pavia
Anna Maria Stagno – University of Genova

The investigations on how and with which results the environmental resources were managed in the past is one of the main topics in rural and environmental history and archaeology. However, an articulated dialogue on this subject is far to be consolidated. The goal of the session is to favor new studies and comparisons between ‘grammars’, concepts and research practices from these different fields, in order to promote an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environment, going beyond the simple collection of different experiences. It is also the occasion to present a book devoted to this topics withthe aim to develop a dialogue between the ‘sister disciplines’ rural history and rural archology, confronting perspectives and methodologies for the analysis of an important issue, which had pivotal consequences in the past as well as today. Moreover, the purpose of the book is to provide a comparison of the different practices of environmental resources management in Europe and Turkey, exploring in particular the actions promoted to cope with the sustainability problems.

Organizers
Radosław Poniat – University in Bialystok, Poland

Although the issue of economic inequality in past societies has been of considerable interest to historians for years, most of the work devoted to it concerns Western Europe. Central and Eastern European societies, often operating under serfdom, which could lead to restricted access to the markets, significant restrictions on mobility experienced by many members of the population and incomplete property rights have been much less frequently the subject of research. Many scholars interested in historical economic inequalities also assumed that its higher levels was primarily observed in precapitalist or capitalist urban communities, and that rural areas were characterized by a markedly lower level of economic differentiation. Such a perspective was in tune with some classical scholars of serfdom, who described serf communities as relatively equal, where both the policies of the lords and the attitudes of the peasants themselves did not encourage individual attempts to acquire wealth.
The aim of the proposed session is to at least partially fill the gaps in our knowledge of the economic inequalities in societies that existed under the serfdom system. The key questions we will seek to answer are the question of the impact of serfdom on the global levels of economic inequality, the role of landlords’ policies in creating or reducing economic differentiation among serfs, the relationship between the level of feudal burdens and inequality, and the social consequences of economic inequalities.

Both researchers working on inequality among peasants and among landlords are invited to participate. In addition to quantitative approaches, which are most often used to study inequalities, we are also interested in studies using other methodologies. In addition to detailed studies, we also welcome approaches of a more synthetic nature and even focusing on a more theoretical and model-based perspective. The spatial and chronological scope of the session covers all societies living under the serfdom system from those experiencing it harshest forms to those where the system was limited or even disappearing.

Organizers
Dietlind Hüchtker – University of Vienna
Friedrich Cain – University of Vienna

The reporting on the latest farmers’ protests in various places in Europe is indicative. Farmers are said to be overwhelmed, insufficiently informed, in short, passive objects of intellectual (i.e. urban) politics. Implicitly, different knowledge bubbles are also constructed – the climate knowledge of an urban elite collides with the economic and business knowledge of rural farms.
The panel aims to take the political constellation of knowledge cultures more seriously. Instead of assuming given collectives with divergent knowledge cultures, the panel will deconstruct the specific connections between political epistemes and knowledge-generating practices and analyse their polarizing consequences. Inspired by Anna Tsing’s following the mushroom and Michel Callon’s sociology of translation, but also by an approach that represents the reciprocity of knowledge cultures, the question is asked as to how the rural appears in scientific research and how the “research object” unfolds its power of influence. How did grain influence research? What say did rural youth have?
On this basis, the panel will discuss the political implications of these encounters. In which social constellations are which knowledge cultures emphasized, which power relations are mobilized? The panel is dedicated to Eastern and Central Europe in a transregional understanding and sees this as an opportunity to rethink the claim to universality of the history of science and at the same time to question the conception of the rural as specific.

Organizers
Dulce Freire – University of Coimbra
Alberto González Remuiñán

Since the 15th century, the global circulation of cultivated seeds has transformed regional agriculture, landscapes and diets around the world. The general trends of these dynamics have been studied, making it possible to identify the regions of origin or the trajectories of plants that have become common in everyday diets on different continents (such as tomatoes, maize, wheat, potatoes, rice, oranges). However, it is still necessary to explain the environmental, genetic and social processes that allowed the local introduction and spread of each new cultivated species. How did these procedures allow, or not, that new seeds brought from other continents to be transformed from exotic to local varieties? This session calls for interdisciplinary approaches to deepen historical knowledge of the local circumstances underlying the so-called global Columbian exchange. Papers should explore local perspectives, practices and knowledge recorded in different historical documents, namely travellers’ descriptions, scientists’ books and reports, administrative records of religious and secular powers, cookery books, memoirs and letters from various plant and food enthusiasts. These diverse and scattered testimonies can mention not only seeds and foods that became famous, but also those that were rejected or forgotten. In order to understand local practices, knowledge and dynamics related to seed cultivation and food consumption, papers focusing on any geography and chronology are welcome.

Organizers
Anna Maria Stagno – University of Genova
Vittorio Tigrino – Università del Piemonte Orientale
Margarita Fernández Mier – University of Oviedo

Starting from the idea that “exchange is what creates value” (A. Appadurai), this session aims at providing an opportunity to discuss issues related to archaeological and historical interpretation, comparing research from different chronological and disciplinary perspectives. The session will move from current research in the framework of two research projects (ANTIGONE and KORE), which address the relationship between changes in practices to manage and activate environmental resources and population dynamics, considering the timespan between 17th and 21st centuries.
This session aims at reflecting on the relationship between resources and conflict, the intention is to analyse practices over environmental resources as catalysts for social relations. A particular focus is on common lands as contested landscapes: seeing social relationships through conflicts.
The adopted perspective is that of conflict understood as an expression of social relations underlying the practices to manage and activate environmental resources. Particular attention will be given to the conflict that arises around common lands and resources, understood as a moment of negotiation through which it is possible to observe the network of social relations concerning a specific territory or locality.

The idea is that common lands are contested landscapes and that social relationships emerge through conflicts. In this way, critical questions can be raised about some of the key concepts revolving around conflicts over common goods, particularly the definition of the spaces of action of social groups and their boundaries. The analysis of conflict thus allows for a deeper scientific discussion around common resources, seeing them not only as mere economic resources but as changing objects around which the identity of specific local institutions (communities, communal entities, kinship groups, associations of lay religious) is constructed. The cessation of conflicts, in many cases, coincides with the progressive dissolution of these local institutions.

In this context the dialogue between archaeology and history (or field and archival documents) is particularly interesting, from one side archaeologists detect what was done, from the other historian how it was described, which helps to understand outright and underlying purposes. These sources do not always coincide, and this is a further element of interest, as it is central to the understanding of how spaces and borders were historically defined and qualified. The final aim of this session is to promote a critical reflection on the use and understanding(s) of ownership and possession, on how archaeology and history analyse and conceptualize them.

Organizers
Piotr Guzowski – University of Bialystok, Poland

The literature describing the daily life of the peasant population in Central and Eastern Europe, both economic and cultural-anthropological, pays attention to the limitations of mobility as an element of the serfdom system, and on the other hand emphasizes low spatial mobility as a result of peasant attachment to the land, conservatism and traditional peasant mentality. At the same time, the examples of mobility present in the literature and sources are not described as something positive, but rather are seen in the context of a reaction to violence and exploitation. In this way, both the lack of mobility and its possible occurrence become evidence of widespread feudal oppression.
The purpose of our session is to point out that territorial mobility was an inevitable phenomenon in the serfdom system and forced by the very nature of historical societies. It was also a self-evident stage in the life cycle of many individuals. We would like to draw attention to the practical dimension of mobility, beyond legal norms and restrictions. We would like to look at mobility through the lens of judicial, demographic and economic sources. We also intend to compare the spatial mobility of social groups that were formally subject to legal restrictions on movement with groups not experiencing such restrictions.

Organizers
Giovanni Agresti – CNRS – Université Bordeaux Montaigne – UPPA
Luis Gomes da Costa – Binaural Nodar and University of Aveiro
Eltjana Shkreli – University of Genoa, CLOE Program

As part of the ecosystem in the mountains and highland areas, water is an essential (key) component in the domestic, industrial, and agriculture/livestock economies. Rural livelihoods are dependent on adequate water supply, therefore in most cases, the upland rural communities are settled among the river valleys and streams/springs due to short water distance – the water has dictated settlements’ location, sustainability, and cultural development shaping the patterns of settlement.
This session connects to the work of the TRAMONTANA network, founded in 2011 and the objective is the documentation, cataloguing, restitution, artistic creation, and dissemination of intangible heritage from rural and mountain communities of Europe.
The session explores the intimate and multifaceted relationship between water and European highland rural communities in the 20th century, focusing on how water has influenced settlement formation, the emergence of water cultures shaped by environmental challenges and societal needs, and the evolution of water cultures and management practices that continue to impact rural landscapes today. Besides, the session will also highlight how water practices have shaped the cultural landscape, particularly in mountainous areas where water sources are both scarce and essential. Settlement patterns in these regions have been intricately linked to the availability of water, resulting in unique cultural landscapes that reflect how humans have shaped and been shaped by their environment.
The session will emphasize an interdisciplinary approach to rural history research, focusing on the main methodology of oral history (microhistory) to recover and preserve water cultures and their management practices. Living witnesses, especially elders within rural communities, offer rich, personal accounts of the relationship between water and settlement in the 20th century, providing valuable first-hand perspectives on traditional practices that may be fading due to the abandonment of Highlands and mountain areas. Oral histories could be compared across regions, offering a cross-cultural approach to understanding how water has been a shared, yet regionally adapted, resource in rural upland settings.
Ultimately, this session would provide a platform for a multidisciplinary discussion of rural upland water cultures and their enduring legacy in the 20th century and beyond. In light of current global challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity, and rural depopulation, this research is more relevant than ever.

Organizers
Jesús Giráldez Rivero – Universidade De Santiago de Compostela
Alvaro Garrido – Universidade de Coimbra, CEIS20
Pedro Varela-Vázquez – University of Santiago de Compostela, GESPIC

Since the 1950s, world fisheries and aquaculture production has experienced significant growth. Production figures increased almost tenfold, from 19 million tonnes to a record of more than 185 million tonnes in 2022. Capture fisheries remained relatively stable since the late 1980s at around 90 million tonnes, while aquaculture experienced spectacular growth. In 2022, aquaculture production (51%) surpassed capture production (49%).
This strong growth allowed the apparent consumption of aquatic food of animal origin to increase at an annual rate higher than that of the world’s population. According to the FAO, the apparent per capita consumption of aquatic food of animal origin increased from 9.1 kg (live weight equivalent) in 1961 to 20.6 kg in 2021. Aquatic foods not only make an important contribution to the diet but are also considered to be among the healthiest. A source of quality protein and various nutrients that are difficult to obtain in other foods, the consumption of which is associated with improving public health.
This session welcomes proposals for papers that address the study of the factors that drove the continued growth of fisheries and aquaculture production and the changes that have taken place. More specifically, the session aims to provide knowledge along the following main lines. On the one hand, factors related to technical changes in catching systems, conservation and distribution technologies, as well as changes in consumer preferences. On the other hand, the work of both international organisations and national governmental interventions in the development of these productions (modernisation of fleets, product processing, logistics, promotion of research, etc.) and in stimulating fish consumption. Finally, the transformations resulting from changes in the international law of the sea, the emergence of Regional Fisheries Organisations or the forms of regulation and management of fisheries. In this sense, we cannot forget those resulting from the emergence of new fishing powers, changes in international trade flows or the restructuring of company behaviour in a globalised environment.

Organizers
Roger Lee de Jesus – Leibniz Universität Hannover
Alina Rodríguez Sánchez – Leibniz Universität Hannover

This panel aims to analyze different cases of formation of land tenure law and land tenure experiences in colonized and occupied spaces in the early modern period.
Recent scholarship has already established the importance of local actors and agencies in understanding the establishment of institutions of land tenure, challenging the narrative of an empire unidirectionally establishing its legal institutions to enact control over its provinces, a model which persists for almost all ‘imperial’ formations, such as the Iberian crowns or Mediterranean empires. The simplistic diffusionist model, once used to explain conquest as the transposition and implementation of legal institutions to recently occupied spaces, is not enough to explain this complex and dynamic process.
In these imperial spaces, the readjustment of land use and ownership became a central element to guarantee the sustenance of both settlers and locals. Therefore, access to land was frequently the reason for conflict and violence, developing a vivid and intricate legal framework. The appropriation and utilization of preexisting structures of land tenure were vital to sustain these processes, with local communities often playing a key role in defining land ownership. Imperial structures relied considerably on these negotiated interactions, creating hybrid institutions that encompassed all the social structure, from enslaved people to colonized and colonizers.
This panel intends to reassess and rethink how land relations were readjusted and negotiated, and to nuance the idea of an ‘imperial’ land tenure law designed from an abstract metropolis. It aims to look at these issues from a global perspective, from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, not only to compare regions, but also to offer different perspectives, from the study of landscapes, to a social approach, and to critical legal history. Each case departs from a local level by looking at the actions of local actors and agents.
The panel’s purpose is to question how land ownership was understood, debated and a central topic in imperial contexts, and to rethink the popular paradigm on how empires expanded by exporting legal institutions. Through different cases, it intends to show the current research about early modern conquest processes and to cross geographies, experiences and legal frameworks.

Organizers
Liliana Pimentel – University of Coimbra
Leonor Fernandes Ferreira – NOVA School of Business and Economics
Andreia Fernandes – University of Coimbra

This session will explore the historical transformation of accounting as a technical practice focused on financial record keeping, and as a socially integrated mechanism in organisational governance and the promotion of corporate responsibility. Focusing on a timeline from the early modern period to the present, we aim to discuss how accounting has evolved to serve as an essential practice in promoting sustainability and building accountability frameworks within organisations. This analysis will allow us to explore how accounting systems have been shaped to respond to social and regulatory pressures, promoting practices that not only meet stakeholder interests, but also contribute to broader goals of sustainable development and organisational ethics.

The main purpose of this session is to discuss new evidence on the historical links, dialogues and knowledge exchanges between organisational members and accounting agents that have influenced these practices over time, in both corporate and institutional contexts (monasteries, universities, landlords, associations, court and state departments, companies, etc.). This exchange will be examined in the light of the dynamic role of accounting, not only as a top-down control practice, but also as a bidirectional channel that promotes collaboration and the creation of shared value between organisations and their stakeholders. This session aims to provide insights into how accounting, as a multidimensional social practice, contributes to building more responsible organisations in line with the expectations of a more conscious and ethical society.

Organizers
Richard W. Hoyle – University of Reading
Clare Griffiths – University of Cardiff

The conclusion of the harvest can be taken as a full stop at the end of the agricultural year. The harvest itself was surely hard when undertaken with manual labour. It might be short, it might be protracted. It might be abundant: it might be disappointing. Anyone who has known a farmer will appreciate that it was – and is – was stressful, with anxieties about rain, having sufficient manpower at the right moment and in our own times not having machine breakdowns.

So the end of harvest, particularly a successful harvest, was a moment of celebration, release and relaxation. How was it celebrated? It is clear from work in progress on the forms of English harvest celebration that there was not a single form that celebrations took. Moreover, the predominant form of celebrations changed over time. And insofar as the celebration often took the form of alcohol-fuelled release, the harvest home could be strongly disapproved of. And perhaps because it involved the consumption of beer and cider, it might also be strongly gendered with the exclusion of female members of the harvest workforce. Hence attempts might be made to tame the harvest home and make it into a disciplined occasion, supervised by landowners and the church.

The harvest might not simply be a rural celebration. Given the importance of a successful harvest for urban society, it might well be celebrated in civic churches, by public rituals, popular songs and rituals. In twentieth-century societies successful harvests might be publicised by the state as evidence of the benefits the regime brought its people.

The panel will consider the forms that celebrations of the harvest took, the way in which harvest customs changed over time and especially under the impact of mechanisation; and the social and political contexts revealed by changing harvest customs. 

Contributions considering popular harvest songs and other cultural aspects of the harvest are welcome. We might add that harvest might be taken broadly to include similar celebrations at the end of the hay harvest, or in some districts, the potato harvest.

Organizers
Fernando Mouta – University of Lisbon
Rui Gomes Coelho – Durham University

Since the Early Modern period, the African littoral has gradually become an integral part of the Atlantic world. A central force in this transformation has been the establishment and organization of Afro-European trade, which not only reshaped economies on both sides, but also set the stage for profound political, cultural, and religious exchanges. These developments continue to shape global dynamics today.

The settlement of the Atlantic islands, the colonization and economic exploitation of the Americas, and the expansive ambitions of European empires intensified these interactions. This period witnessed a complex web of human mobility — both forced and voluntary — as well as significant ecological impacts. The circulation of plants, agricultural techniques, and people between Africa and the colonial Atlantic world remains a fertile area of research, with many aspects still underexplored. This session seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this shared history — one that remains highly relevant in addressing the legacies of modernity but is still too often marginalized in mainstream historiography.

Organizers
Roberto Leggero – Università della Svizzera italiana – LabiSAlp
Eugenio Tamburrino – Fondazione Canova – LabiSAlp
Mirella Montanari

The aim of this session is to discuss the topic of water management between Late Antiquity and Early Modern times in the context of the Alpine region.

Indeed, while there are regions of the Alps that are well studied and highly valued from this point of view, such as Valais (Switzerland) and Valle d’Aosta (Italy), others are less studied.

The particular hydraulic conditions of the Alpine valleys and the exposure of the different slopes to the sun, which determine the conditions of even very strong hypsometric variations, have encouraged the creation of hydraulic canalisation infrastructures dedicated to irrigation since the early Middle Ages. Water also played an important role in the operation of mills, forges and other machinery.

However, at the foot of the Alpine valleys, where they open out onto the plains and where populous settlements and cities were located, the main concern was both to supply drinking water to the population and to protect the urban areas from flooding caused by the torrential and impetuous flow of the watercourses coming down the mountain slopes in spring. 

The regulation of water for different uses and the need to protect the forests that provided the raw material for the canals, machines and bridges forced local communities to manage both water and forests collectively, while in the towns of the Alpine foothills it was necessary to set up both economic and political projects to control supply chains and manage the flow of water in an urban context where, in addition to its practical use, water had a multitude of symbolic meanings.