1 - Introduction: Knowledge and its Networks in Rural Europe: From the Early Eighteenth to the Late Twentieth Century

Summary

Farming is imperative to feed the world's population. A massive and still expanding historical literature deals with the development of farming and food provisioning throughout the past centuries: on access to farmland, farming methods and technology, farm labour, agricultural production, productivity and trade, food processing and diets. In this vast literature, processes of agricultural stagnation or growth are often linked to forms of knowledge – about reclamation, drainage, crop rotation, the use of fertilizers and tools, the treatment of cattle plagues, etc. – as self-evident explanations. Knowledge is, in that regard, mentioned as a given, as if it were an ‘invisible hand’ that steered and changed farming practices and outputs. This book intends to question the creation and, in particular, the exchange of agronomic knowledge in rural Europe from the onset of the so-called modern era, during the course of the eighteenth century until well into the twentieth century, and to explore the spreading of that knowledge through the lens of ‘knowledge networks’ and related models and analytical concepts.

Where did knowledge come from and how did one learn to run a farm in the European countryside? Was this achieved by imitating one's father or mother, by looking around, over the hedge, by trying things out in the field, by listening and talking to others, and by reading, by means of schooling and by studying, observing, experimenting and trial and error? There is in fact a rich repertoire of verbs in use that refer to the variety of vectors that served, and still serve, for the creation and transmission of knowledge and know-how with regard to farming, ranging from absorbing tacit knowledge to inventing and diffusing new agricultural science. Historians studying agricultural knowledge simultaneously find themselves in a Garden of Eden and in a jungle, because knowledge seems to be omnipresent, in all aspects of daily life and everywhere, in town and in the countryside, but its nature, creation, communication, transformation and appropriation are difficult to grasp.

Knowledge on the move, an epistemological issue

According to the well-known definition by the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, knowledge is ‘everything that passes for “knowledge” in a society’.