Historical Tripos, Part I Paper 17 European History 1715-1890

i. General reading and primary sources
Rudolph, R.L. (ed.), The European Peasant Family and Society: Historical Studies (1995)
Rosener, W., The peasantry of Europe (Blackwell, 1994)
Moulin, Annie, Peasantry and Society in France since 1789 (1991), caps 1-3
Price, Roger, A Social History of Nineteenth Century France (1987), cap. 5
Moeller, R.G., Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany (1986)
Evans, R.J., and Lee, W.R. (eds.), The German Peasantry. Conflict and Community in Rural
Society from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (1986)
Blackbourn, David, ‘Peasants and Politics in Germany, 1871-1914’, European History
Quarterly 14 (1984)
Vucinich, W. ed., The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (1968)
Chaianov, A.V., The Theory of the Peasant Economy (1966)
Schultz, T.W., Transforming Traditional Agriculture (1964)
ii. Land Reform
Simpson, J., Spanish Agriculture: The Long Siesta, 1765-1965 (2003), part II.
Markoff, J., The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords and Legislators in the French
Revolution (1996)
Blum, J., The End of the Old Order in Rural Europe (1978)
Blum, J., ‘The condition of the European Peasantry on the Eve of Emancipation’, Journal of
Modern History, 46 (1974), pp.395-424.
Weber, E., Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France (1977).
The great majority of European inhabitants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were
peasants, and yet the rural world does not often feature in the accounts of political and
cultural transformations that these centuries witnessed. This session will explore living
conditions in the rural world and the rules that governed rural communities. Rural working
patterns and household structures were dictated by land tenure laws, which eventually also
had a broader impact by dictating the pattern of agricultural specialization and growth. It is
therefore not surprising that the abolition of serfdom and the many land reforms passed in
this period had a profound impact on peasant life and work, as well as on the rural economy,
and this is explored in section ii.
23 Nationalism and political culture in southern Europe
Some general reading
J.A. Davis (ed), Italy in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 2000), chs.1-3, 8.
C. Esdaile, Spain in the Liberal Age: From Constitution to Civil War, 1808-1939 (2000).
R. Herr, The Eighteenth-century Revolution in Spain (1958), conclusion.
S. Woolf, A history of Italy 1700-1860: The social constraints of political change (1979),
Pt 4.
Some primary sources:
Denis Mack Smith, The making of Italy, 1796-1866 (1988), chs.1-4.
Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi [The Betrothed] (1827/1842).
José Zorrilla, Don Juan Tenorio (1844).
Italy
A.M. Banti, ‘Public Opinion and Associations in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, in N. Bermeo and
P. Nord (eds), Civil society before democracy: Lessons from Nineteenth-century Europe (2000),
43-60 (see also article by Lyttleton).
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