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There is a clear link between the creation of farm accounting offices and the political activism of agriculturalists in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The actual impact of the ‘agricultural crisis’ of the 1870s and 1880s is debated. While some economic historians have questioned the reality and significance of the crisis, other have insisted on a ‘European grain invasion’ that dragged down prices and triggered a long depression.
1 T. W. Fletcher, ‘The Great Depression of English Agriculture, 1873–1896’, Economic History Review 13 (1961), pp. 417–32; K. H. O’Rourke, ‘The European Grain Invasion, 1870–1913’, Journal of Economic History 57 (1997), pp. 775–801. D. Pilat, Dutch Agricultural Export Performance (1846–1926) (1989), p. 29 questions the impact of the crisis on Dutch agriculture. In any case, it is certain that the crisis spurred a lot of discussion about the ‘American threat’ among the European rural elites and stimulated investigations of North American agricultural competition.
2 S. Beckert, ‘American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950’, American Historical Review 122 (2017), pp. 1,137–70. The perceived crisis also led to a renewed political activism, as witnessed by the creation of new farmers’ associations or the reactivation of older ones across Europe, often with the goal of mobilizing farmers around a protectionist agenda. Switzerland and the Netherlands were no exceptions to this trend.
The Swiss Farmers Union was created in 1897 as part of the wave of foundations of new societies, with a clear protectionist programme following the blueprint of the German
Bund der Lanwirte. In the Netherlands, instead, the geography of farmers’ organizations was more complex, divided according to productive specialisms and on religious and ideological lines. Of the two societies discussed in the next section, the Friesland Society of Agriculture had a quasi-monopoly of agricultural representation in the province. Its farming members were mostly butter exporters who rejected protection.
3 Molema, ‘Collective Organisation of Knowledge’, p. 98. In Groningen, farmers’ organizations had a tormented history, witnessed by many name changes, and saw harsh disputes over free trade and protectionism that culminated with the resignation of its influential president Derk Roelf Mansholt in 1884, a supporter of protection.
4 H. M. L. Geurts, Herman Derk Louwes (1893–1960): Burgemeester van de Nederlandse landbouw (2002), p. 56; N. G. Addens and H. D. Louwes, Gedenkboek, 1837–1937 (1937). At the national level, the regional
Landhuishouding Congresses of the 1840s and 1850s, which concentrated on technical improvement and forbade discussion of trade policy, were superseded by the creation of a permanent national
Landbouw-Comité in 1884 to coordinate the action of the government and the provincial agricultural societies.
5 Schuurman, ‘Agricultural Policy and the Dutch Agricultural Institutional Matrix’; idem, ‘Het Nederlands Landhuishoudkundig Congres van 1846–1896: Forum en showroom van de Agrarische Republiek’, in T. Engelen, A. Janssens and O. Boonstra (eds), Levenslopen in transformatie: Liber amicorum bij het afscheid van prof. dr. Paul M. M. Klep (2011), pp. 318–35. Nevertheless, the
Landbouw-Comité encompassed proponents of a protectionist reaction to the crisis as well as free-traders who favoured productive specialization ahead of overseas competition.
Organizations established in this period were divided over the importance to be accorded to tariff protection, but an interest in improved farm management was common ground for agricultural experts. The ideal of a tidy, well-administered farm appealed to both those who supported protectionist measures and those who preferred specialization within the international division of labour. For the free-traders, accounting and other managerial technologies improved efficiency. Its adoption was crucial to enable managers to compete. These kinds of arguments in favour of the spread of book-keeping motivated the free-tradist Landhuishouding Congresses in the Netherlands during the 1850s and 1860s, or the Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft, in Germany, which created its accounting office in the 1890s. On the other hand, protectionists did not disagree with this fundamental function of accounting but added a new layer of importance to it. For them, farm accounting was crucial to understanding which policies, especially concerning tariffs, the farmers most needed in order to maintain a stable rate of profit, and it was a tool in the struggle for government attention. As we will see below, Ernst Laur and the organization he led, the SBV, based their actions on this conviction. To them, accounting was not an internal issue of the farm, but opened the way to a representation of the whole of agriculture in policy making. In these two fundamental goals, we see the origins of the alternative models of accounting office discussed in the following sections.
For both groups, how to convince small and medium farmers to endure the pain of keeping systematic and reliable records of the life of their farms in an accounting framework remained a key issue. Hendrikx and Gelderblom have stressed how farmers had informal systems of accounting – what they call ‘mental accounting’ – while Nathalie Joly has explored, instead, the conscious spread of almanacs, agendas and other kinds of publications that provided material support for the recording of facts concerning the farm as an alternative to formal systems of book-keeping. Experts often displayed a paternalistic attitude towards farmers and denied any validity to these informal records. They claimed that formal accounting was essential to help farmers acquire an economic mentality and turn into entrepreneurs.
6 Hendrikx and Gelderblom, ‘Accounting for Agricultural Development?’; N. Joly, ‘Shaping Records on the Farm: Agricultural Record Keeping in France from the Nineteenth Century to the Liberation’, Agricultural History Review 59 (2011), pp. 61–80.In fact, though, it would be wrong to frame the contrast between experts and farmers in the old schemes of post-modern critique that stressed the struggle between ‘modern’ top down schemes and grass-roots resistance.
7 Y. Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward (1999). It is more interesting, instead, to focus on accounting offices as the site of a broad – although far from universal – coincidence of interests between farmers and experts. In the next two sections, we discuss two examples of the institutional channels through which the co-operation between experts and farmers was achieved in Western Europe, with a particular focus on accounting offices. Whereas the cases of the Netherlands and Switzerland are neither wholly typical nor representative, they show how farm accounting offices could originate from different purposes and be either business- or policy-oriented.