No Special Case

Development and Potential of Agrarian Historiography in Switzerland in the 20th Century

Abstract

This article gives an overview over agricultural historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Switzerland between the First World War and today. While the interwar period produced only a few but interesting studies, technical aspects and political topics dominated the writing of agricultural history in the first three decades of the post-war period. The 1980s are characterized by a number of substantial works on the nineteenth century focusing on the mutual impacts of the agricultural sector and the process of industrialization. Since the early 1990s a growing interest in and a new interpretation of agriculture and the farming population in modern societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be observed. The third part focuses on the big potential of the agricultural history as a modern Integrationswissenschaft, incorporating environmental, biological, economic, social and cultural aspects for a better understanding of the general historical development of industrialized societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.