Preliminary Programme

This paper aims at a comparative analysis of the creation and development of agrarian organisations by landowners in different European countries between the end of the 19th century and WW2, their lobbying activities and the results of their networking. It does not only want to characterize them, offer a typology and a general framework for their comparison but to draw a global picture of their interconnections and cultural and political transfers at a transnational level. It will be based on personal research concerning the Asociación de Agricultores de España and, partially, on the BdL and the SAF, and on secondary resources concerning other associations. (Show less)

European wine markets experienced an important regulation by the governments since the beginning of the twentieth century. State intervention started early in this agricultural sector as a response to the demands of winegrowers, who had to face a severe overproduction crisis and the competence of industrial alcohols. Winegrowers grouped together in large specialized associations and, in order to defend their producers interests, they lobbied the governments to protect the domestic wine markets from competence. In this paper it will be examined the creation and development of winegrowers' associations in two main producers countries, France and Spain, trying to compare the differences and similarities of their performance, as well as analyzing their interconnections and the results of their collective action. (Show less)

Some rudimentary food regulation existed during the Ancien Regime, but the institutionalized process of inspection at the municipal level that initiated modern food control in Europe had to await the nineteenth century. Before 1908 the detection of food adulteration in a range of products relied on a variety of criteria and methods in Spain. As for the German case, Vera Hierholzer comments: ’Until the end of the 1870s, the legal basis for food monitoring in Germany was a patchwork of state and city borders, by-laws, and administrative and police decrees’ (Hierholzer, 2007: 117). Both the building of a scientific, political and economic consensus relating to the control of foodstuffs and the establishing of appropriate legislation were processes driven by economic interests, scientific theories and social considerations. The aim of this paper is to compare the building of a consensus relating to the control of foodstuffs and the establishing of appropriate legislation in Germany and in Spain from the end of the 1870s until the first third of the 20th century. (Show less)