Agricultural Elite Research Articles

The royal Welsh agricultural society: Patronage and the reproduction of elites in rural Wales

This paper is concerned with the reproduction of rural elites and the role of volunteering and participation in rural civil society institutions. Set in the context of popular discourses of the gentleman farmer and the agricultural elite as historic (as opposed to contemporary) leaders in the countryside, this research extends longstanding debates on rural class politics and gentrification, and resonates with a renewed sociological interest in the elites in society. Focusing on senior volunteer roles in the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society (RWAS), we explore the connections between social and cultural capital, the maintenance of moral boundaries, and the relationship of these processes with recruitment at the committee level. Our findings indicate that systems of patronage remain significant in rural contexts, and that these systems interrelate with professional and business fields, and with embedded social and intergenerational networks. Data depicts an organisation that is looking to balance the sustained benefits to organisational capacity brought through longstanding obligations of public service, duty, and family ties, with an acknowledged need to recognize diversity and foster inclusivity. This requirement, however, is largely articulated and confined to considerations of gender, age and to a lesser extent, multiculturalism.

Agri-bolsonarism: a movement led by agricultural elites and far-right politicians in Brazil

ABSTRACT As the balance of forces in Brazil shifted toward conservatism in the 2010s, regional agricultural elites and Jair Bolsonaro formed a political-economic movement. This article analyses the constitution and consolidation of this movement, here called agri-bolsonarism, considering its connections with national agricultural associations and transnational agribusiness corporations and its relations with agrarian and climate politics. The research is based on participant observation in business associations, corporate and state archives and interviews with private and political leaders.

TVA and the Grass Roots at 75: The Legacy of a Planning Classic

Planning struggles with the tension between professional expertise and public voice. The approaching 75th anniversary of Philip Selznick's classic, TVA and the Grass Roots, is an apt time to revisit that tension. In Selznick's analysis, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was a modernist institution aligning with local agricultural elites at the expense of vulnerable Black and poor farmers. He coined the term ‘informal co-optation’ to characterize TVA's affiliation with the powerful. We bring renewed attention to informal co-optation and the institutional aspects of engagement by examining how Selznick's analysis was received contemporaneously, and then considering recent scholarship and the current implications of Selznick's work.

'Getting to Denmark': the role of agricultural elites for development.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10887-023-09226-8.

Democracy, rural inequality, and education spending

Much research suggests democracies invest more in human capital formation than dictatorships. In particular, scholars have suggested that democracies outspend autocracies on education, due to electoral and interest group pressures. However, some democracies spend no more on education - and some spend much less - than autocracies. What explains this variation within democracies? The answer is the influence of landed agricultural elites. Urban industrial elites support human capital investment because it leads to higher rates of return even if wages increase. Yet greater education spending encourages out-migration from the countryside, reducing the supply and increasing the price of agricultural labor. Given the differential impact of education spending across economic sectors, the effect of democracy on education spending may be conditional on the power of landed elites. We test this argument in two ways. First, we run a series of time series cross-sectional regressions on data from 107 countries for the period 1970 to 2000. Second, we conduct a difference-in-difference analysis, comparing countries that democratize at high versus low levels of land inequality, for 73 countries for the same time period. Results confirm a negative relationship between the power of landed elites and investment in public education under democracy, adding important and novel insight into the sources of differences in public-goods spending and human capital investment both within across political regimes.

Fiscal innovation in nondemocratic regimes: Elites and the adoption of the prussian income taxes of the 1890s

The income tax is a central pillar of the modern fiscal state because of its revenue-raising capacity and administrative sophistication. Existing accounts point to interstate war and class conflict as key drivers of modern fiscal breakthroughs. In this article, we evaluate a third explanation for the origins of fiscal capacity that highlights the importance of intraelite competition for political and economic power in times of rapid industrialization. Modern forms of taxation generated a conflict between industry and agriculture over the distribution of the tax burden across sectors. The presence of electoral institutions that connected tax payments to voting rights created opportunities to overcome this sectoral divide and facilitated the formation of a political consensus for fiscal innovation. The political coalition supporting income tax adoption included higher-income industrial and agricultural elites who anticipated fiscal and electoral gains associated with the adoption of the new tax. Drawing on parliamentary debates in Prussia and additional district-level data, we document both the origins and electoral and economic consequences of the new income tax. We show that the adoption of a highly sophisticated income tax in 1891 shifted the tax burden from land to industry and diluted the political influence of the middle class. The findings clarify the coalitional dynamics leading to fiscal tax adoption in nondemocratic contexts.

The pursuit of new citizenship by peri-urban residents in China: Status, rights, and individual choice

Although China did not announce any official urbanization policy until 2014, since the 1980s urbanization has been the core goal of China’s unceasing push for modernization and national rejuvenation. Tens of millions of inhabitants living on the fringes of China’s cities merely hold temporary permits with virtually no political and social rights and only a modicum of public policy benefit in the cities where they work. The rights and social entitlements of these people are changing once again, because cities in China are now required by the central government to include the majority of them as normal citizens with equal rights. From the perspectives of three groups of peri-urban residents – relocated agricultural elites, in situ urbanites, and migrant workers – in Luoyang, Shanghai, and Hohhot, this article traces the dynamic dimensions of this ongoing, highly complex urbanization process. We argue that the decision to become a participant, negotiator, deal-maker, or deal-breaker in the migration, displacement, and/or resettlement process involves proactive agency and rational choices in a fast-moving environment, and that cities in China must make concessions to convince peri-urbanites to give up their official rural links.

Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago

Reviewed by: Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy by Enrico Dal Lago J. William Harris Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy. By Enrico Dal Lago. Cambridge Studies on the American South. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 465. $59.99, ISBN 978-1-107-03842-4.) Enrico Dal Lago is the author of a number of comparative studies focused on Italy and the United States, including Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (Baton Rouge, 2005). Civil War and Agrarian Unrest: The Confederate South and Southern Italy is in some ways a sequel to that earlier study, but with a focus on peasants, small farmers, and enslaved people rather than on ruling elites. It is an original and significant contribution to the ongoing globalization of American historical scholarship. In the mid-nineteenth century, southern Italy (the Mezzogiorno) was ruled from Naples by the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, a Bourbon dynasty. In 1861, that kingdom was conquered and incorporated into the newly consolidated Kingdom of Italy; Francis II, the Bourbon ruler in Naples, went into exile in Rome. More than four years of conflict known as the Great Brigandage ensued in the Mezzogiorno. For two years, resistance to the new regime focused on the restoration of Francis II as the legitimate ruler; afterward, guerrilla bands of poor peasants invaded and destroyed the properties of big landowners, many of whom had prospered by seizing common lands. Only a concerted effort by the Italian army and National Guard, which operated under draconian emergency laws, was able to suppress this “‘inner civil war’” at the cost of more than five thousand lives (p. 4). Dal Lago offers an analytical comparison of the Great Brigandage with simultaneous conflicts in the Confederate States of America. His “central question,” he writes, is “[h]ow did nineteenth-century newly formed nations cope with internal dissent, and how crucial was the role played by the latter in threatening the survival of those new nations?” (p. 7). In Part 1, he compares the pro-Bourbon legitimist movement of 1860–1863 in northern Terra di Lavoro with resistance to the Confederate government by southern whites in East Tennessee. In Part 2, he moves to a comparison of “The Revolts of the Lower Strata” from 1862 to 1865: slaves’ resistance to the Confederacy (and, later, to Union army attempts to keep them working on plantations), with a focus on the Lower Mississippi Valley, and peasant guerrilla war against Italian landowners, especially in Upper Basilicata (p. 227). [End Page 916] In broad terms, Dal Lago argues that this comparison of “parallel processes” in a “contrast of contexts” (the latter phrase he takes from an essay by Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers) shows that both “‘inner civil wars’” should be understood as products of two overarching developments: on the one hand, the formation of new nation-states, some by consolidation and others by separation from larger states; and on the other hand, conflicts between agrarian masses—slaves, serfs, and free peasants—and the agricultural elites who profited from their labor during the nineteenth-century expansion of international commodity markets (p. 9). Dal Lago’s study is based on a mastery of two different national historiographies as well as a deep familiarity with the methodologies of comparative history. It is also informed by his research in primary sources, both published and archival, in both countries. In a short review, it is impossible to do more than suggest some of the implications of his interpretations. His theme of “agrarian unrest” offers, from an innovative angle, support for scholars such as Steven Hahn, David Williams, and Stephanie McCurry, who have emphasized internal social conflict as an explanation for the end of slavery and the fall of the Confederacy (p. 19). At the same time, this approach largely ignores the questions that arise when we focus on the relationship, not of agrarian masses to agrarian elites, but of individuals to the state. For example, in the Confederacy, unlike in the Mezzogiorno, there was remarkably little overt violence by slaves against slaveholders and their families. Instead, former slaves killed white Confederates while serving...

Intra-Elite Competition and Long-Run Fiscal Development

We offer a new rationale to help explain cross-national differences in long-run fiscal development. Higher public goods provision can translate into productivity gains in an industrializing society. Thus, capitalist elites -- unlike agricultural elites, who rely on traditional production methods -- may prefer to invest in greater fiscal capacity. Furthermore, to pay for this investment, capitalist elites may prefer to shoulder a higher tax burden through progressive direct taxation, which they may view as the least-worst economic option. To test the predictions of our argument, we exploit an original fiscal database that spans 30-plus developed and developing nations over 1870-2010. We find a positive, significant, and robust relationship between intra-elite competition among agricultural and capitalist elites and the size and structure of fiscal states. Our results show that fiscal development may take place even in the absence of interstate military competition and warfare.

Transnational class formation and spatialities of power: the case of elite competition in Bolivia

AbstractIn this article, I argue that the neoliberal and counter‐neoliberal transitions in Bolivia secured the power of transnational capital within the country. In the 1980s and 1990s, Bolivia's mining elite used neoliberal strategies to undermine the interests of the country's agricultural elite and pursued a marriage of convenience with transnational capital that allowed both to enter state‐monopolized spaces of investment in mutually beneficial ways. In Bolivia's counter‐neoliberal turn, leftist social movements and political parties removed the elite from power but were dependent on transnational firms to help them use the country's natural resource wealth to fund programmes of socioeconomic change. Engaging theories of the transnational class formation, I assert that scholars need to acknowledge how different capitalist class fractions have distinct spatialities of power. In particular, it is necessary to distinguish between global elites that participate in local circuits of accumulation and local elites that participate in global circuits of accumulation.

Land and Credit: A Study of the Political Economy of Banking in the United States in the Early 20th Century

ABSTRACTWe find that, in the early 20th century, counties in the United States where the agricultural elite had disproportionately large land holdings had significantly fewer banks per capita, even correcting for state‐level effects. Moreover, credit appears to have been costlier, and access to it more limited, in these counties. The evidence suggests that elites may restrict financial development in order to limit access to finance, and they may be able to do so even in countries with well‐developed political institutions.

Imagining nation, envisioning progress: emperor, agricultural elites, and imperial ministers in search of engineers in 19th century Brazil

This study shows how the development of engineering schools in 19th century Brazil is intimately linked with images of nation and visions of progress held by social actors who materialized these into engineering schools, curricula, and graduates. The study proposes that theories of nation present interesting conceptual and empirical challenges for engineering studies scholars by inviting us to explain the emergence and preeminence of engineering education in relationship to the emergence of nation. The article shows that in 19th century Brazil there were a number of competing images and corresponding visions of progress that significantly shaped the development of Brazil's engineering education institutions. One such image was championed by the Emperor Pedro II who wanted to reaffirm Brazil as a civilized empire on par with France and the US. Another was defended by regional elites and defined in terms of agricultural development of their local regions. A third one was endorsed by an alliance of imperial ministers and business entrepreneurs who viewed Brazil as a future industrial nation. During Brazil's Second Empire (1840–1889), no image became dominant. Yet each one materialized in a different kind of engineering education, including curricula, institutions, and graduates and set trajectories for Brazilian engineering education from late 19th century well into the 20th. Finally, this study invites engineering education reformers and policymakers to consider the importance of images of nation and visions of progress for engineering education in order to effectively strategize in their reform and policy initiatives.

The Social and Material Lives of the Agricultural Elite: The 18th-Century Tyngs of Dunstable, Massachusetts

The Tyngs were a wealthy family in Dunstable (now Tyngsborough), Massachusetts in the late- 17th and 18th centuries. They were descended from a Boston merchant, and maintained many commercial connections. Some members of the family became rural storekeepers in Dunstable. Historical research and archaeological data from Eleazer Tyng's house site show the different ways in which the Tyngs related themselves to the urban coastal elite, and participated in the culture of gentility and refinement. Through architecture, social connections, and material goods such as tea wares, they lived as rural elites with connections to the coast. Rather than directly mimicking the life of Boston elites, the Tyngs adapted gentility to their rural life and agrarian base.

Economic Democracy in Post-World War II Germany: Corporatist Crisis Response, 1945-1948

In recent years much light has been shed on a period in the history of Germany that had long remained curiously dark: the brief but dynamic years from 1945 to 1948-49, between the collapse of Hitler's regime and the rise of the new, successful, second German Republic of Bonn.l It was a unique period in German history. It was not just a time of deep economic and political-moral crisis. Many of the typical' ingredients of historical Germany were missing. There was no central state. The powerful traditional agricultural elite had been destroyed. In the west, the industrial elite was eclipsed. Foreign occupation governments deeply critical of many of Germany's political, economic, educational, and general institutional traditions ruled the country. Not surprisingly, expectations of and desire for a fundamental renewal of the German political and social-economic order were in the air everywhere.: Slogans such as Stunde Null (zero hour) and Zeitwende (dawn of a new age), calling for a new beginning or even revolution, abounded. Por many years, the immediate postwar phase of German history was wholly overshadowed by the so-called economic miracle, which, as the allegedly purest model of American-style free enterprise in all of Europe, raised Germany from the depths of economic destruction and despair within a few years and initiated an extraordinarily long period of sustained

Mexico: the Limits of State Autonomy

The predominant role of the state in advanced capitalist societies as well as so-called third world countries has been evident in recent contemporary Marxist literature (Miliband, 1969; Murray, 1971; O'Connor, 1973; Warren, 1972; Quijano, 1972; Ianni, 1974; Pompermayer and Smith, 1973; also the journal Kapitalistate, and the Winter 1974 issue of Politics and Society). There is considerable disagreement among these studies with respect to such questions as the social basis of the state, the distinction between class power and state power, the mechanisms of class-state interaction, and the relative autonomy of the state (particularly in post-colonial societies) and its consequent role in shaping the social formation which emerges. Rather than discussing these differences, which have been analyzed and debated elsewhere (for example, Miliband, 1969; Poulantzas, 1969, and Miliband, 1973; Wolfe,1974; Sardei-Biermann et. al., 1973; Alavi, 1972 and Girling, 1973), the following article proposes to draw upon them in an attempt to construct a generalized model of the state in advanced capitalist and dependent societies. This model will in turn serve as a basis for examining the interpretations of the state which emerged from the Mexican revolution of 1910-1917 and particularly the conceptualization of the autonomous state which appeared to guide the program of the Cardenas government (1934-1940). An examination of the state in Mexico must take into account the apparent paradox of the Mexican revolution and of Mexico's subsequent development. As stated by Roger Hanson: in no major Latin American country has the government done more for the new industrial, commercial, and agricultural elite, nor less for the lowest 25 percent of society -despite Mexico's being the only Latin American country to undergo a profound social revolution during the first half of this century (1971: 87-88). An important element of this revolution was a conceptualization of the state as an autonomous entity which would utilize its power on behalf of the downtrodden groups and classes of Mexico a conceptualization which was to some extent realized in the administration of Lazaro Cardenas during the 1930s. It is a tentative proposition of this study that the contradictions inherent in this conceptualization of the state, and in its attempted realization within the context of a dependent, incipiently capitalist system, explain at least in part the divergence of the present system from that contemplated in the ideology of the revolution and the program of the Cardenas administration.