By exploring the fundamental issues of property rights and markets in land, this book will offer important insights into long-term economic change in Europe. The essays gathered here provide a major consideration of the institutional constraints which can be employed by historians and other commentators in order to explain both the slowness or even absence of growth in certain areas of the European economy between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the discrete experiences of countries within Europe in this broad period.

This is an issue of current interest not least because discussion of 'institutional determinism' has become a standard of explanations of historical and economic change; that said, those promoting such approach have sometimes been criticised for generalising from an 'institutional' perspective rather than taking full account of the variety of potential causative explanations within particular historical contexts.

The present collection of essays will therefore explore the conditions which permitted the progress of agriculture in Europe and the emergence of capitalism in the countryside. The research presented in this volume helps to demonstrate that changes in the market (demand, relative prices...) encouraged changes in property rights but certainly did not do so in ways that were consistent or that led inexorably towards individual and exclusive rights of the kind described by the nineteenth-century liberal paradigm.

 

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Annie ANTOINE,  Université de Rennes 2, France 

Gérard BEAUR, CNRS &EHESS, Paris, France

Bruce M. S. CAMPBELL, Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom

Markus CERMAN,  Universität Wien, Austria

Jean-Michel CHEVET, INRA, Bordeaux, France

Rosa CONGOST, Universität de Girona, Spain  

Llorenç FERRER-ALÒS, Universität de Barcelona, Spain

Georg FERTIG, Martin-Lüther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

Piotr GUZOWSKI,  Uniwersytet w Bialymstoku. Bialystok, Poland

Anne-Lise HEAD-KÖNIG, Université de Genève, Suisse

Laurent HERMENT, EHESS, Paris, France

Emmanuel HUERTAS,  Université de Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

Iñaki IRIARTE-GOÑI, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain

Niels GRÜNE, Universität Bielefeld, Germany

Philippe JARNOUX, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France 

José Miguel LANA BERASAIN, Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, Iruñea-Pamplona, Spain

Luigi LORENZETTI, Laboratorio di Storia delle Alpi, Lugano, Suisse

Pablo F. LUNA, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, France

Julie MARFANY, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Alberto MARCOS MARTÍN, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain

Mats MORELL, Stockholms Universitet, Sweden

John Ragnar MYKING, Universitetet i Bergen, Norway

Maria-Teresa Pérez-Picazo†, Universidad de Murcia, Spain

Ricardo ROBLEDO, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain

Rui SANTOS, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

José Vicente SERRÀO, Instituto Superior de Ciënca do Traballio e da Empresa, (ICSTE), Lisboa, Portugal

Paul SERVAIS,  Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgique

Patrick SVENSSON,  Lunds Universìtet, Sweden

Joseba DE LA TORRE, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Spain