Property Rights, Land Markets and Economic Growth in the European Countryside (13th-20th Centuries)

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.