This volume brings together works by eight participants in a seminar for college teachers on the rural history of Europe and the Americas, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and conducted by Richard Herr at the University of California at Berkeley. Herr’s introductory chapter is a historiographical gem that offers readers a vicarious entrée into his seminar. He traces the development of rural history from the classics on Western Europe written early in this century by J. L. and Barbara Hammond, Georges Lefevbre, and Marc Bloch through the impact of the Annales School and the more recent contributions of historians working on Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
Three essays deal with Latin America. D. K. Abbass challenges the presumed and widely touted fecundity of European livestock introduced in the Americas after 1492. Drawing on shipping records compiled by Huguette and Pierre Chaunu and an impressive array of other published sources, Abbass documents the transatlantic transport of livestock from 1493 to 1600. Although chickens, pigs, goats, and other small animals did reproduce at phenomenal rates, ganado mayor (cattle, oxen, and horses) multiplied much more slowly because of their longer reproductive cycles, the hazards of shipping them to the New World, and the shortage of workers able and willing to tend livestock. Abbass concludes that New World settlers deliberately exaggerated the fecundity of their animals in hopes of motivating more Spanish stockmen to emigrate.
Robert H. Claxton uses secondary sources, chronicles, and published documents to compile useful tables listing recurrences of drought for selected locations throughout colonial Latin America. His data confirm the commonly held assumption that the eighteenth century was significantly drier than the previous two centuries. Newcomers to the field will profit from John Frederick Schwaller’s brief overview of the ecological, demographic, and economic factors influencing hacienda formation in the Valley of Mexico in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Specialists familiar with the work of Francois Chevalier, Woodrow Borah, Charles Gibson, James Lockhart, and their numerous scholarly descendants, however, will find little that is new.
The remaining essays offer comparative insights that may interest Latin Americanists. Dennis Kehoe and Anthony Galt examine, respectively, the economic strategies of landowners and tenants in Italy during the early Roman Empire and the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Thomas Fox explores land tenure in the Hesse-Kassel region of Germany in the eighteenth century; Ronald Janke surveys the effects of Indian land policy in the United States, with special emphasis on the Lac du Flambeau Reservation in Wisconsin; and John P. Resch documents the transformation in political culture and land tenure in Peterborough, New Hampshire, from 1750 to 1800.
