The Persistence of Open-Field Farming in Nineteenth-Century France

Abstract

The enclosure of the open fields is an example of Europeans' willingness to alter long-standing social and economic institutions in the interest of higher living standards. In Scandinavia, England, and Germany the rise in the value of enclosed relative to unenclosed land induced widespread abandonment of open-field forms of agrarian organization by the middle of the nineteenth century. In France, on the other hand, the traditional patterns of landholding maintained themselves until after the First World War. This paper examines some of the ways French farmers responded to the possibilities of agricultural change within the traditional framework of open-field agriculture.

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