Mats morell, a swedish economic historian whose work on agriculture and rural life since 1750 made essential contributions to our field, died in May 2022, just before the conference of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO) in Uppsala. Historians based in the United States and Canada became acquainted with Mats through his participation in the Agricultural History Society, which began in 2012 when he presented a paper at the conference in Manhattan, Kansas. From then on, he attended our conferences whenever he could, sharing his work-in-progress on a wide range of subjects. His warmth, generosity, and endless curiosity sparked wonderful conversations. At the same time, in 2012–13, Morell cofounded EURHO with his longtime collaborators across the continent. The two organizations soon developed close ties, as Mats invited North Americans to present papers and panels at EURHO conferences, which met every other year, and organized panels of Europeans to share their work at the Agricultural History Society annual meetings. In Uppsala, several panels included participants from both sides of the Atlantic addressing common themes. Mats exemplified the collegiality he facilitated among the rest of us.This international interchange has been transformative for many participants and for journals in the field. Those who study the United States and Canada were encouraged to situate their findings in relation to developments in diverse parts of Europe, illuminating debates about questions such as the position of farmers in the transition to capitalism, which had previously been considered by only a handful of scholars in North America. Those who study Europe were encouraged to comprehend the special dynamics of settler societies and consider the significance of race and gender in relation to property and power. Convergences and divergences in the causes, timing, and consequences of trends toward mechanization, increases in scale and specialization, state promotion of productivist agriculture, and the subsequent and simultaneous yet contradictory turns toward neoliberal policies and sustainable farming practices have been illuminated through international comparisons and transnational studies.Mats Morell's research, as well as his reflections on the development of our field, shed new light on the past fifty years of scholarship in agricultural and rural history. Like many who study rural societies, Mats described himself as a “country boy living in the city.” Growing up and attending school in vanishingly tiny villages and small towns in Västmanland, a rural county west of Stockholm with a mix of large farms on the plains, smallholdings in the woodlands, and scattered industrial plants, informed his understanding of the complexity of rural societies. He came to Uppsala University in 1975 and decided to study economic history. The field was then influenced by young Marxists whose sympathies lay with the Social Democratic Party, which had united the industrial working class, family farmers, and rural laborers since the 1930s. Significantly, Morell's last major research project focused on changes in the productivity of agriculture in relation to enclosures between 1750 and 1920 in both his native province and Uppland, the richer province east of Västmanland whose center is Uppsala.Even as an undergraduate, Mats was interested in social stratification as it occurred over time among the agricultural population. His PhD dissertation, completed in 1989, examined Swedish food consumption from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, linking standards of living to farming over three centuries of change. The creative combination of statistical analyses of historical data with qualitative sources and theoretically informed frameworks that is notable throughout Mats's work was visible from the beginning. Equally significant were his close friendships with a new generation of economic historians, who connected economic history with social history, politics, and policy. Many became his lifelong collaborators, not only on joint research projects but also on textbooks that presented entirely new accounts of Sweden's development from a relatively impoverished, predominantly rural society at the turn of the twentieth century to an affluent, urbanized industrial society with a robust welfare state in the postwar period.As a postdoctoral researcher and faculty member in economic history at Uppsala, Mats embarked on the broad investigation of the history of Swedish agriculture in the early modern and modern periods that informed the rest of his career. Peasant farmers, landholding, mechanization, markets, and the state were at the center of his inquiries. He became a leading member of a generation of economic and social historians who emphasized the rising proportion of propertyless rural workers, the stratification between large-scale farmers and smallholders, and the persistence of family farming within a capitalist system that controlled the purchase of inputs and the processing and sale of products. These historians highlighted the agency of farmers themselves in these developments, as they cleared new land for cultivation, shifted from a one-sided focus on grain or livestock to convertible husbandry, and reaped enough income to adopt technological innovations that increased the productivity of their labor and land. Old models of diffusion from large estates to middling farmers and from commercial centers to peripheries were overturned by empirical studies of the bottom-up processes of change in specific regions.In the mid-1990s, Mats began a long-term collaboration with the newly established program in agrarian history at the Swedish Agricultural University, located on the edge of Uppsala. This lively intellectual milieu, which was marked by international and interdisciplinary perspectives on continuities and changes from the ancient period to the present, generated the five-volume Swedish Agricultural History, which was spearheaded by Janken Myrdal. Mats Morell was a core member of this group from the start, and he wrote volume 4, Agriculture in Industrial Society, 1870–1945, which synthesized a large body of new work. These richly illustrated books, which draw on literature, artifacts, and visual sources as well as graphs, maps, and photographs to tell the stories of farming and rural communities over deep time, have been strikingly popular among ordinary Swedes, many of whom know where their ancestors lived in the countryside. The authors' concern for the rural landscape, environmental issues, and sustainable farming ensured that the series spoke to this moment on the cusp of change.Morell and Myrdal then coedited the one-volume English-language version, The Agrarian History of Sweden, which includes abridged versions of the volume by Carl-Johan Gadd, The Agricultural Revolution, 1700–1870, and the one by Maths Isacson and Iréne A. Flygare, Agriculture in Welfare Society, 1945–2000. The chapters in this eminently readable book will feel simultaneously familiar and strange to historians who have studied these periods in other places. The material culture and technologies of farming were widely shared across Europe and North America, but the ideologies and social dynamics of farmers' movements and their political alliances with liberals and social democrats are sometimes startlingly different. So are the changing contours of settlement: a momentous shift from open-field villages with vast commons and to dispersed farmsteads with contiguous fields and meadows.While the gender division of labor, land ownership, and authority in rural Sweden seems deceptively similar to that found elsewhere, the differences soon leap out. Not only was women's labor essential during haying and harvest, but on smallholdings, where the men were often absent to earn money in lumbering, transport, or construction, women often carried on the farm operations by themselves. On family farms, women took care of the cows, did the milking, and processed butter and cheese, as they did elsewhere, but in Sweden they were employed in and managed centralized butter and cheese dairies well into the interwar period. From 1845 on, daughters and sons were entitled to inherit equal shares of their parents' land, and until the early twentieth century, husbands and wives each held land inherited from their parents as separate property. Women's access to land and the recognized value of their labor made a difference in marital and intergenerational relationships, differing from the female dependence that was the norm in urban bourgeois families and, as Lena Sommestad has suggested, laying the basis for the two-breadwinner model in the Swedish welfare state.Mats not only supervised the PhD research of feminist historians investigating women and gender but also conducted a fascinating study of representations of masculinity and femininity in advertisements for milking machinery in the early twentieth century. In Sweden, men's movement into the cowshed coincided with mechanization, and the ads both assured farmers that milking machines were light enough for women to carry from stall to stall and associated men with milking through their supposed affinity with machinery. But the decisive factor in this shift in the division of labor, Morell concluded, was the marked decline in the relative number of adult women living on farms. He interpreted women's disproportionate exodus from the countryside not simply as a response to the contraction in opportunities to get started in farming but also as a rejection of unmarried women's subordinate position in rural society. While women who became joint owner-operators of family farms organized to improve farm incomes and their own conditions of life and labor, others refused to work as milkmaids and servants and instead sought jobs in towns and cities that offered them a greater degree of personal independence.Although Morell's history of Swedish agriculture places the country's economic and social development in its international context, his perspective was much more deeply informed by international collaborations with other Europeans than is apparent in his English-language publications during the 1990s and 2000s. During the early 1980s, he and a few other Swedes attended European conferences organized by economic historians and sociologists on themes such as living standards and the past and future of rural communities, and during the 1900s they presented and discussed their own and others' work at the international congresses of economic historians. These conversations bore fruit in long-term comparative work.Mats's most important, lifelong collaboration was with Ildikó Asztalos Morell, a sociologist who was studying agricultural cooperatives and family farms through the transition to and from socialism in her native Hungary for a PhD in Canada. They married in 1986, after they met at a UNESCO-sponsored workshop on ethnographic observations and interviews with members of rural cooperatives in western Hungary. “That changed the direction of my research,” Mats reflected. Ildikó and Mats continued to study the reorganization of agriculture in post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe through 1999. Relatedly, in 2004–10 Mats, Ildikó, Iréne Flygare, and other colleagues combined methods from history, sociology, and ethnography to study generational change and the transfer of resources in agriculture since 1870 in Sweden, Estonia, and Hungary.The other major collaborative project in which Morell engaged from 2006 through 2009 was a series of international workshops sponsored by the Program for the Comparative Study of Rural History in Europe (COST Action 35 PROGRESSORE), with researchers from twenty countries. The workshops culminated in a set of edited volumes featuring systematic comparisons of rural development in the Nordic countries and on the Continent. The Rural History of the North Sea Area network produced a series of these volumes, which are published by Brepols. Morell was a major contributor to two: Property Rights, Land Markets, and Economic Growth in the European Countryside and Rural Societies and Environments at Risk: Ecology, Property Rights and Social Organisation in Fragile Areas. At the same time, he published chapters in edited volumes on these themes. Property Rights in Land had a global scope, while Integrated Peasant Economy in a Comparative Perspective examined pluriactivity and the careful use of niche resources in areas whose elevation and northern locations created special conditions for agriculture. In contrast to many economic historians, Morell integrated Sweden's colonization of the north and its repeated encroachments on the land and culture of Sami people into the national story.Growing concern with climate change, food insecurity, and the long-term consequences of productivist agriculture for biodiversity and rural environments inspired Morell's next major collaborative project. This methodologically innovative research analyzed farmers' diaries to see how they coped with extreme weather, such as drought, excess rainfall, and unusual spells of heat and cold, and what enabled them to be resilient through periods of harvest failure. Biological and environmental scientists from the Swedish Agricultural University played a key role in the analysis. The group found that diversified farming and staying out of debt were equally important in enabling farms to survive crises. They also initiated comparative discussions of famines and the socioeconomic relations that resulted in or prevented high rates of death and emigration with scholars elsewhere in Europe. Of special interest to US-based rural historians is Iréne Flygare and Marja Erikson's study of the religious and economic unrest that led a group of utopians to leave Sweden and found Bishop Hill, a cooperative community on the prairie in southern Illinois.Morell's last book, Agricultural Revolution: Agricultural Production in Uppsala and Västmanland Counties, 1750–1920, has implications that extend far beyond Sweden. Methodologically, it demonstrates how the analysis of diverse materials including manuscript maps, land records, tax records, and government statistics of agriculture for judiciously selected regions and localities enables historians to ask and answer fundamental questions regarding the process of long-term change. Substantively, it offers a major reinterpretation of the agricultural revolution. Morell shows that the most significant increases in productivity resulted from practices that were introduced by farmers themselves rather than imposed through state policies or recommended by experts. Moreover, it differentiates between the initial growth that resulted from changes initiated by farmers and the later, less robust increases in productivity that depended on farmers' purchase of chemical fertilizer, concentrated feed, fossil fuels, pesticides, and herbicides from agribusiness corporations, which led to a vicious circle in which costs rose but the prices paid to farmers for their products did not. The adoption of complementary crop rotations and animal husbandry suited to local and regional conditions on diversified farms points to a way forward for the future, as it did in the past.Mats Morell left a legacy and a lesson for all of us. He never lost sight of the big questions we ask about the past: What did the agricultural revolution mean for farmers and rural society? How did the positions of women and men who lived and worked on farms change throughout this transformation? And what can we learn about the dynamics of change in the past that can guide us as we address the challenges facing the food supply and rural environment in a period of neoliberal policy amidst the global climate emergency? The lesson is one that Americans, in particular, need to put into practice as the circumstances of our work in academe become more constrained. In order to summon the wide range of skills and perspectives that enables our research and writing to make a difference, we must expand our collaboration across the obsolete borders of disciplines, nation-states, and continents.