IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palscp/978-3-031-67281-1_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

When Do Landed Elites Voluntarily Give Up Power? The Europe Experience

In: Family Farmers, Land Reforms and Political Action

Author

Listed:
  • James Simpson

    (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)

Abstract

This chapter looks at the historiography concerning the negative effect of land inequality on economic growth and rural poverty. It shows how growing economic opportunities brought about by trade and industrialization provided incentives for some sections of the landed elite to dismantle Old Regime privileges. In much of North-Western Europe the landed elites from the late nineteenth century, against a background of declining rental incomes, organized with the Church family farmers into competitive mass political parties. The electoral success of these parties attracted other groups, changing the party’s core constituency, and leading to the eventual decline in the political influence of the landed elite. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, rising population densities allowed the landed elites to continue to benefit from low wages and high rents, while restricted suffrage and electoral fraud guaranteed that their political influence remained strong until the land reforms following the Great War. In Southern Europe the landed elites were more successful in maintaining their economic and political power, as tariffs protected their farm incomes and they adapted to political challenges by developing new forms of electoral fraud and patronage.

Suggested Citation

  • James Simpson, 2024. "When Do Landed Elites Voluntarily Give Up Power? The Europe Experience," Palgrave Studies in Economic History, in: Family Farmers, Land Reforms and Political Action, chapter 0, pages 101-122, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-031-67281-1_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-67281-1_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-031-67281-1_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.