Contexts of Property in Europe The Social Embeddedness of Property Rights in Land in Historical Perspective edited by Rosa Congost & Rui Santos BREPOLS“The essays in this book tap the potential of the historical analysis of social contexts in which property rights are embedded — social relations, power and agency, political institutions, culeure ~ to understand how landed resources are actually appropriaved. This exploratory approach seeks both to take advantage of the existing theory of property rights, as itis applied by the institutionalist outlook on economic history, and co go beyond it by explicitly incorporating social processes and factors in the analysis of property institutions. With this common aim in mind, the book covers a wide variety of historical cases throughout space and time, from the lace Middle Ages in the Czech Lands and in Tuscany to the very recent decollectivization of the countryside in former Socialist countries. We believe theve essays contribute rich and grounded insights to the discussion of the topic and of its implications. is senior researcher at the Centre de Recerca d’Historia Rural and teaches at Facultar de Lletres in Universitat de Girona. Her research interests cover the history of landed property and agrarian social relations. ig senior researcher at CESNOVA and teaches at Faculdade de Ciéncias Sociais e Humanas in Universidade Nova de Lisboa. His research interests cover historical and economic sociology and rural studies. oan esa) eae ISBN: 978.2-508-59227-1 | Mh 32271EDITORIAL BOARD Gérard Béaur, director Rosa Congost Anne Lise Head-K6nig Socrates Petmezas Vicente Pinilla Jiirgen Schlumbohm Bas van Bavel This publication is supported by COST. It is the result of the work launched in the working group | ‘Landed Property’ of the COST Action A35. It came into existence thanks to the funding of the ESF (COST), with the support of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the base funding of CESNOVA-FCSH-UNL and project POCTI/ HAR/56210/2004, and the Spanish Ministry of Sctence and Innovation through project HAR2008-02960/ HIST. We are grateful to Anne Varet-Vitu (UMR 8558, EHESS-CNRS) who created the final layout of the book. Cover: Carta Agricola de Portugal [Agricultural Map of Portugal] 1:50,000, by Gérad Péry, Direccao Geral de Agricultura, 1891. We thank Maria José Roxo and E-GEO-FCSH-UNL for kindly providing the picture out of their map library. Printed in the E.U. on acid free paper. © 2010 Brepols Publisher n.v., Turnhout, Belgium and COST All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.1. From formal institutions to the social contexts of property’ Rosa Concost, Rui SANTOS This book reflects two interrelated concerns. The first is with the a-historical, taken- for-granted notion of absolute, perfect, unitary and exclusive property that permeates historical discourse — the Property as one might have it, as defined in nineteenth- century European law and economic thought. Property arrangements in past societies have tended either to be translated into this paradigm — with variations according to national juridical traditions, namely between those of Common Law and Roman Law — or treated as oddities standing in its way, which reason and economic efficiency have wiped out of developed economies and will do so in developing ones. This outlook often translates as a reification of the physical reality of land as the Property, from which more or less explicitly follows, for instance, that the only conceivable way to divide or to consolidate property in land is to physically divide or consolidate the land plots themselves. We argue that such notions have, mostly implicitly and for lack of critical awareness, undermined our ability to understand the social workings of property and their historical changes. The second concern was that even though it is arguably one promising way out of the former problems and certainly one that flourished in economic history, the conceptualization of property rights by new institutional economics largely remains teleological and too centred on legal and state-enforced institutions to grasp the historical, social and cultural contexts and dynamics of property in its concrete appropriations. Put simply, we intended to push the debate on property rights in land further towards the arena of social history, sociology and anthropology. In order to provide a framework for this attempt, we have turned to a broad notion of ‘the social embeddedness’ of the economy and used it to extend the basic definitions within economics literature concerning property rights, so that they generate meaningful problems for historical and social research. We will then move on to explore how certain relevant issues concerning past and recent European history may be seen in this light, as exemplified by the essays in this book. ' We thank Bas J. P. van Bavel for his most useful criticism and suggestions. All the remaining faults and mistakes are our own. 15Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property I. Social embeddedness The notion of social embeddedness of the economy basically represents an attempt to ‘bring society back into’ the study of economies. As initially formulated by Polanyi, it stood for a ‘[...] correct procedure for studying economic life [which] involved examining the concrete institutions that structure empirical economies’ (Krippner, 2001: 779). Polanyi’s grand narrative of modernization depicted a ‘great transformation’ in which the prevalence of self-regulated market exchange had disembedded the economic sphere of human activity from social institutions. The whole of human life and society thus had become progressively regulated by market forces and by the acquisitive rationality of ‘our obsolete market mentality’ (Polanyi, [1944] 2002, [1947] 1996). Contrary to its ideological justifications, with political economy at the forefront, this was not a natural process but rather one imposed by violence and coercion and driven by organized social interests, ideology, and the state — so that, in a somewhat ironical way, the disembedding of the economy was itself socially embedded (Krippner, 2001: 782). Even though the tradition of economic and social history is rife with references to social contexts of property, these were mainly case-specitic approaches with little effort at theorization. Mare Bloch’s was perhaps the first fully systematic attempt to analyse historical property forms within the complexity of their concrete social contexts. His comparative perspective, grounded in his own work on French rural history in the medieval and early-modern periods and on the advancement of agrarian individualism, led him to conceive modern property as a ‘great achievement’ largely constructed through social relations (Bloch, [1930] 1997, [1931] 1987). Yet it may be argued that Bloch’s complex account of property relations was passed on to later economic and social history in a way that somehow reinforced the modern liberal model, emulating Polanyi’s views on the disembeddedness of modern economies in contrast to pre-modern ones. Much of the economic and social history which looked into feudalism, capitalism and the transition between them saw the latter as a shift from ‘relative’ and ‘imperfect’ to ‘absolute’ and ‘perfect’ property, a stereotype that Brenner’s influential essays and the ensuing debate did not manage to avoid (Brenner, 1976). Pierre Vilar’s call for theorising across case studies and to pluralize the ‘principle of property’ and its socioeconomic outcomes was rather an exception in his day (Vilar, [1973] 1982), matched by E. P. Thompson’s explorations in law and common right usages, their relationships and conflicts (Thompson, 1977, 1991). In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Mark Granovetter reutilized the notion of ‘embeddedness’ to revive the theoretical agenda of economic sociology. For this purpose, he departed from Polanyi’s dichotomy and generalized the notion to include 16Rosa Congost, Rui Santos markets in advanced capitalist societies. According to him, all markets and economic institutions are socially constructed, resulting from the social networks in which economic actors and transactions are embedded. The variations in the structure of networks and in the positions of particular individuals within that structure ultimately explain the markets’ workings, as well as the economic behaviour of the actors within them (Granovetter, 1985). This view soon came under criticism by other sociologists. Its emphasis on social networks was deemed too narrow an account of the economy’s interweaving with society, bypassing institutions in Polanyis’s holistic sense (Krippner, 2001: 799; Nee and Ingram, 1998: 22). The immersion of the economy in social life entails its consideration as a ‘total social fact’; even if one must use abstract models to analyse it, they must be Historical models (Bourdieu, 2000: 13). Wider forms of embeddedness should thus be considered besides (albeit related to) social networks, namely: political, pertaining to the power relations which set and enforce social rules and differentially empower and constrain actors; cultural, pertaining to values, beliefs, norms and models; and cognitive, pertaining to the conceptual frameworks and knowledge that mould experience, economic action and organizations (see Smelser and Swedberg, 2005: 15-16, for a synthesis and references). New economic sociologists, however, were hardly concerned with property from the start, mainly focusing on markets and organizations. As the first systematic synthesis on the subject by economic sociologists acknowledges, ‘[...] contemporary sociology has said much less about property than its centrality warrants, largely ceding the topic to economics and law’ (Carruthers and Ariovitch, 2004: 23) — to which we should add anthropology. In fact, the anthropological approach to the ‘embeddedness of property’ proposed by Hann (1998b) converges with sociological perspectives on the economy in its mix of power, culture, cognition and social relations, adding its own emphasis on property grounded in specific social and cultural contexts. II. Property rights: basic definitions from neo-institutional economics Even though the socially and historically contingent character of property was a premise of the institutionalist tradition in economics, and it was expressly acknowledged by Knight in his classical writing on risk and uncertainty (Knight, [1921] 2005: 353-354, 359-360), the systematic theorization of property in the new institutional economics stemmed from the seminal propositions by Coase ({1960] 1990: 155-156), who introduced economic theory to insights from earlier work on the philosophy and the historical ethnography of law (e.g. Cohen, 1927; Maine, [1861] 17Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property 1917: 105). This comparatively recent tradition in economics, as well as its approach to economic history, was a major step in connecting the economic notion of property to the theoretical outlooks and debates in other social sciences and in history. At least potentially, it challenged the liberal property paradigm with a far more flexible concept that made issues like power, institutions, culture and agency endogenous to the theory of property, along with historical change and path-dependence. Let us dwell for a moment on a few basic definitions. According to Coase, standard economic theory was hampered by ‘T...] a faulty concept of a factor of production. This is usually thought of as a physical entity [...] instead of as a right to perform certain (physical) actions. We may speak of a person owning land and using it as a factor of production, but what the land-owner in fact possesses is the right to carry out a circumscribed list of actions’. (Coase, [1960] 1990: 155) Accordingly, property came to be defined as the social legitimacy of specified kinds of actions with respect to assets: ‘An owner of property rights possesses the consent of fellowmen to allow him to act in particular ways’ (Demsetz, 1967: 347), so that ‘{w]hat are owned are socially recognized rights of action’. Thus the commonsense notion of ownership of things in fact ‘[...] masks the variety and complexity of the ownership relationship’ (Alchian and Demsetz, 1973: 17). Two major theoretical developments stemming from these assumptions concern us here. The first is that once it has been defined as above, the unitary and absolute notion of property is exploded. Property rights are defined as discrete sets of possible actions and thus they may be restricted (i.e., some actions may be forbidden), partitioned, distributed and transacted as separate bundles: ‘It is not the resource itself that is owned; it is a bundle, or a portion of rights to use the resource that is owned’ (Alchian and Demsetz, 1973: 17, emphases in the original). One major property right (which may be conceded in different degrees, or not at all) is precisely ‘|...] to transfer all rights in the asset through, e.g., sale, or some rights through, e.g., rental’ (Furubotn and Pejovitch, 1972: 1140, emphases in the original). Therefore, property rights in an asset, such as land, may be distributed among several parties through customs and contracts, without the physical asset itself being partitioned (Alchian and Demsetz, 1973: 17). The second development is that the analysis of property as a set of social relations becomes theoretically inescapable: ‘T...] property rights do not refer to relations between men and things but rather, to the sanctioned behavioral relations among men that arise from the existence of things and pertain to their use. [...] The prevailing system of property rights in the community can be described, then, as the set of economic and social relations defining the position of each 18Rosa Congost, Rui Santos individual with respect to the utilization of scarce resources’. (Furubotn and Pejovitch, 1972: 1139, emphasis in the original) Their inherently social-relational character and the fact that they depend on acknowledgement, consent and enforcement means that ‘[...] property rights are not absolute and can be changed by individuals’ actions [...]. The past failure of economists to exploit the property rights notion in the analysis of behaviour stems from a tendency to consider rights as absolute’. (Barzel, 1997: 4) This makes property rights contingent on action and social relations, and also renders them necessarily historical in the deeper sense of the word, that is, subject to change brought about by wider processes in the societies within which they are embedded. However promising such definitions may appear for a coalescence of research programmes between economics, social history and other social and behavioural sciences, their use in economic history has fallen rather short of their promise. On the one hand, despite the fact that the theory differentiates in principle between economic property rights as the ‘ability to enjoy a piece of property’ in a factual sense, and legal property rights as ‘essentially what the state assigns to a person’ by formal rulings (Barzel 1997: 4), and that it includes informal constraints within the definition of institutions (North, 1990: 4, 36-45), historical work by new institutional economists has tended to concentrate on formal institutions and on ruling and enforcement by the state and the legal system. That ‘property rights are specified, enforced and altered by the state’ was one of the main tenets of North’s early research programme for economic history, and the study and theorizing of the state and political systems in this respect was its major assigned task (North, 1978: 975; cf. criticism in Greif, 2005: 7; Hopcroft 1998: 227). Even if ‘legal rights play a primarily supporting role’ in relation to economic rights, this role is considered ‘a very prominent one, however, because they are easier to observe than economic rights’ (Barzel, 1997: 4). Dwelling primarily on the state and equating visibility with theoretical prominence has led to neglect of local and context-specific institutional variance (Hopcroft, 1998) as well as the interplay between formal and informal rules, beliefs, modes of enforcement, and resistance (Nee, 2005: 65). On the other hand, the theoretical assumption that disputes over rights are settled and new rights are delineated by rational parties at the lower settlement cost (Barzel, 1997: 96-99) masks the uneven distribution of power both to influence institutions and to delineate, appropriate and enforce actual rights through effective everyday behaviour and social relations (Ellickson, 1998: 59 ff.). Recent historical reviews counter both the lberal view of private property as natural social order and the institutionalist perspective that sets the state and formal ruling techniques apart from 19Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property society, arguing for an emphasis instead on the ‘politics of property’ comprising the ‘T...] struggles and confrontations among different actors, including administrative ones, for control over the use as well as the revenue of land’ (Islamoglu, 2004b: 9). Once these aspects are brought to the fore, it becomes clear that the actual historical configurations of property rights vary well beyond their legal specifications (Congost, 2003: 74; Hopcroft, 1998: 282, 297-298; Santos and Serrao, forthcoming). New institutional economics and the related economic history literature is a deliberately partial, highly abstract approach that obscures or oversimplifies social, cultural and political aspects which, though they may be deemed irrelevant to the core problems of economic theory, are most relevant to social-historical analysis. The overall assumption that institutions evolve as rational responses to high transaction costs was charged with failing to analyse the historical social structures and processes by which they were constructed (Granovetter, 1985: 488, 505), ultimately taking on a ‘Candidian appearance’ that obscures power and coercion and in which ‘[...] all politics becomes a mutually beneficial, volunteeristic negotiation between individuals’ (Wellhofer, 1990: 357-358). The corollary that perfect, individual and exclusive property rights are a precondition for economic efficiency is far too linear and teleological, and in the end reintroduces the Property if not as the sole paradigm, at least as the yardstick against which all other, ‘imperfect’ forms of property should be assessed — thus finally precluding the analysis of the plurality of rights and of their social distribution in their own terms and contexts (Congost, 2003: 76). Ill. Socializing and historicizing property rights It is only fair to acknowledge that new institutional economic and historical literature has come a long way to enrich the social dimension of its models, particularly by more explicitly addressing informal rules, beliefs, coercion, bargaining power and the ability to mobilize social support as drivers of institutional change or stagnation (North, 1990, 2005, passim; cf. Wellhofer 1990: 358). Most remarkably as far as property rights are concerned, major developments in the theory of institutions and governance allowed Ostrom to address institutional diversity and to reframe the debate on common-pool resources, well beyond the simplistic liberal argument for exclusive individual property based on ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Ostrom, 1990, 2005; Ostrom, Gardner and Walker, 1994). In economic history, Kantor’s history of livestock enclosure in the postbellum South of the United States introduced social and political agency into the core of the argument, to conclude that ‘T...] broad predictions about the direction of institutional change become much more complicated when the competing interests must resolve their differences in the political arena’. (Kantor, 1998: 86) 20Rosa Congost, Rui Santos Another example is Buoye’s narrative of the privatization of land in eighteenth- century China, which evolves within a neo-institutional framework that draws explicitly on North but builds into it an analysis based on Thompson’s concept of moral economy to account for social struggle and violent resistance (Buoye, 2000). We believe that fully taking advantage of neo-institutional insights for social historical analysis will require a shift in emphasis from overarching macro-level institutions, and particularly property rights as stipulated by the state, to their interplay with lower level institutions and with culture, action and social relations in specified historical contexts. This should make us delve deeper into how property rights are diversely acknowledged, appropriated, enacted and reshaped by different actors and social groups. It would also require a shift from grand theory to middle- range comparative research, enabling the understanding and conceptualization of concrete historical modes of economic relations and how they change over time — as Pierre Vilar strove for in his empirical research and theoretical essays alike: ‘Only the comparison of enough historical “cases” will demonstrate the validity, suggest the variants, and situate in time the caducity of the economic “models” themselves’ (Vilar, [1960] 1982: 30). This is indeed a much needed task, if one is to take seriously North’s recent caveat that ‘[u]nderstanding is a necessary prerequisite missing in the economist’s rush to model economic growth and change’ (North, 2005: 1x). The contribution of social history to such a research framework can be grounded, though by no means exclusively, in Bloch’s tradition of rural history, striving for a balance between large scale problematic syntheses and problem-oriented detailed regional studies, as well as in Vilar’s social approach to property relations in his theoretical writings and his studies in early modern Catalonia (Vilar, [1962] 1977) and in the ‘customs in common’ and the ‘moral economy’ lines of research in British social history (Thompson, 1977, 1991: 97-351). More recent attempts to reset the historical debate on property in a social, political and cultural framework are well exemplified in the collective volume edited by Islamoglu (2004a). Examples of anthropological contributions may be found among others in the cited collective volume edited by Hann (1998a) and in Verdery’s ethnography of power and disputed legitimacy in privatization processes (Verdery, 2003, esp. chs. 3, 4). From the standpoint of sociological theory, Carruthers and Ariovitch suggested five topics for an account of property rights: which objects are appropriated, who are the subjects who may hold property, how the use of property is articulated, how property rights are transferred, and how they are enforced (Carruthers and Ariovitch 2004: 26-31). The following reflections will attempt to merge these varied suggestions into a few problematic guidelines which cut across the essays in the ensuing chapters. 21Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property Once property is conceived as the socially acknowledged and sanctioned rights of social entities to perform actions with assets, fundamental questions arise regarding each given context. Who are those entities and how are assets defined so that they may respectively become the subjects and the objects of meaningful proprictary claims? How are social identities articulated in those rights or exclusion from them? Conversely, how are existing definitions of rights manipulated in reference to existing social identities? For instance, what is defined as a “grazing field’ — which combinations of land, plants, and water, within which space and time boundaries, 1n what sequence relative to other plots in a rotation system? Which rights are specified in it? Which individual or collective entities — landowner, tenant farmer, family, ethnic group, village community, cooperative, corporation — hold which rights, how far do they overlap or exclude others? Conversely, which entities are excluded from such rights? The concept that the overall bundle of rights in a certain object (e.g. a given plot of land) may be split into subsets owned by different entities expands the perception of how property rights, rather than land itself, may be divided across society, and of the institutional devices (trade and contracts, inheritance, donation, political redistribution...) through which they may be transferred and allocated. This overcomes the dichotomy of societies ‘with’ and ‘without’ the idea of property, allowing us to look through a common framework without disregarding their different ideologies of ownership and property systems (Béaur, 1998: 24-25; van Bavel and Hoppenbrowers, 2004: 15). It also makes it possible to articulate the concept of a plurality of markets in land, distinguished by the different specifications of the bundles of rights transacted in each, as well as the historical variability of contractual forms, of transactions and of their social appropriations (van Bavel and Hoppenbrouwers, 2004: 17-20; Thoen, 2004: 49; Santos and Serrao, forthcoming). Defining property as not simply a bilateral relationship between social entities and things, but rather as a multilateral relationship among social entities concerning things, means that an appropriated land can be understood as a ‘map of social relations’ (Carrier, 1998: 92) linking contractual parties, family members, current and past generations, and so on by claims, entitlements, obligations and transactions. This definition of property rights questions the cultural and political definitions of which actions are conceived as appropriable and enforceable rights (ploughing, grazing, building, hunting, gleaning, passing through, excluding, trading, inheriting, collecting rent, and so forth), and which are not. This relational and action-oriented perspective implies that we should see property as the outcome not Just of consensus, culture and institutional constraints, but also of power relationships, agency within constraints, and dispute about the social legitimacy of claims. Questions arise in this light as to 22Rosa Congost, Rui Santos who acknowledges a given set of property rights, who contests them, and according to which institutions, that is, sets of formal or informal, possibly competing ‘rules of the game’. How and how far are property rights disputed and resisted against, enforced and transformed by human agency? According to which distribution of bargaining power and coercive capacity? Which contending sets of values and rules strive to legitimize claims, and how are they argued by contenders as they attempt to gather social worth, de-legitimize opponents and achieve favourable conventions? (In the sense of “convention economics’ and the “economies of worth’ proposed by Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006.) IV. The volume: embedding property rights The stereotyped a-historical concept of property resulted from a specific historical context, which roughly spanned the second half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century across several areas of western Europe, mostly irradiating from France (with the discourse of the Physiocrats) and the United Kingdom (with that of the Scottish liberals). From then on this ideal concept of absolute property, with its emphasis on individuality and exclusiveness, has left a deep imprint on legal frameworks, becoming one of the hallmarks of political modernity. This trend is itself a part of the historical reality of the modern world. But as we have said, it has also tended to naturalize the liberal notion of property in the discourse of the social sciences concerning past, present and foreseeable future societies, as was the case during the first liberal age in Europe and is currently so in western societies — in which, however, zoning laws, eminent domain and production quotas display a situation quite removed from absolute property — and in transitional societies in post- Communist and in developing countries. We believe that the essays collected in this book are valuable exploratory incursions that counteract that tendency by retrieving the embeddedness of property rights in land in specific historical-social contexts, viewed from a variety of vantage points and grounded in very diverse empirical cases and methodological approaches. Even though the contributors were only asked to address a broad set of questions related to the above considerations, not to follow a specific theoretical framework, the previous conceptual strands run throughout the chapters in this book and relate them through research questions, 1f not full theoretical coherence. In this final section, we will first highlight the chapters’ major relations to the conceptual questions we have posed, and then contextualize their contributions within a few relevant issues and debates about the history of rural societies in which the perspective on property rights in land is of major significance. 23Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property IV.1. Conceptual strands The reader will find throughout this volume several instances of the plasticity with which property rights lend themselves to different social appropriations, according to which social groups and strategies gain control of them. Thus Markus Cerman and Dana Stefanova suggest that in early modern Czech lands the upper peasantry actually used the reinforcement of seigniorial control on property to secure their own rights against competing claims (Chapter 2). The long term study on Tuscany by Giuliana Biagioli shows how a medieval contract such as the emphyteutical /ivello changed its economic and social functions throughout history, as it was appropriated by wealthy social groups to accumulate control over land (Chapter 3). Maria Halasmka draws attention to ‘the social aspects of appropriation’ and their impact on the effective property outcomes in her essay on post-Socialist privatization processes in Europe (Chapter 11), and such social aspects of appropriation are addressed in contextual detail in the chapters on East Germany by Jeong Nam Choi, Axel Wolz and Michael Kopsidis, and on Hungary by Zsuzsanna Varga (Chapters 12 and 13), which demonstrate that the juridical change of the property regime and the reallocation of former collective property to individual landowners, far from being the ‘end of history’, was but the beginning of a complex and contingent social-historical process of appropriation. Processes of change in the categories of social entities holding property rights in land are also questioned. This was of course the essence of the rise of agrarian individualism in Europe, with the suppression of formerly acknowledged rights of communities in favour of those of individuals, of which late eighteenth-century Tuscany provides a clear example (Biagioli, Chapter 3). José Miguel Lana and Ifaki Iriarte also address a classic case of law-induced change from communities to individuals holding entitlements to land in Navarra (Chapter 4), while all aforementioned chapters on post-Socialist transitions also speak of changes in the social entities with legitimate rights in land, from collective production units and labourer’s cooperatives to individuals, farming corporations and cooperatives of landowners (Chapters 11 to 13). The relationship between property rights and identities is questioned as weil. Fabrice Boudjaaba’s essay challenges current views concerning a strong link between land and peasant family identity, in his case study in late Ancien Régime and post- Revolutionary Normandy. He finds that in this context of egalitarian inheritance custom, thin relationships between land and family identity allowed the former to be treated as a commodity, relatively unconstrained by provisions for the continuity of family property (Chapter 5). R. W. Hoyle’s essay on the dispute over the right to roam on the uplands in twentieth-century northern England shows how class and political identities were articulated through competing claims to the use of land, involving 24Rosa Congost, Rui Santos gentry and patrician families, citizens’ associations, public utility corporations, and government agencies (Chapter 9). Dietmar Miiller writes about the definition of ethnically based entitlements to land as a tool for ethno-national state-building and governance in Romania and Yugoslavia (Chapter 10), in which he concurs with Paul Brassley’s pointing out of a crucial lmk between nationalism and land reform in twentieth-century interwar Europe (Chapter 7). A more recent example of the delimitation of ownership rights based on national identity is found in the constraints on who can buy Hungarian land during the transitional period of accession to the European Union (Varga, Chapter 13). Social identities are seen to be attached to land itself as well, which condition the social relationships and the admissible forms of its appropriation. Thus in early modern Tuscany, as elsewhere throughout Europe, Church and aristocratic land took on institutional identities that put related property rights under specific constraints, as mortmain and entails, respectively (Biagioli, Chapter 3). The political identification of land as primordially the gentry’s private property, the citizens’ landscape heritage or the cities’ water catchments eventually delimited the rights that might legitimately be claimed in it (Hoyle, Chapter 9). The ethnic identification of a particular class of land, the ‘hereditary farms’ attached to idealized German peasant lineages and ruled to be inalienable, was part of the Nazi regime’s attempt to decommodify German land, to freeze peasant mobility and to attach ‘the soil’ to ‘the blood’, of which Ernst Langthaler writes in Chapter 8. Most chapters address property as a bundle of rights. Brassley explicitly uses this approach to frame his account of the multifarious processes of land reform which swept across Europe after the First Word War (Chapter 7), and so does Langthaler to deal with farm property law in Nazi Germany (Chapter 8). Biagioli shows that the splitting of landed property into discrete bundles, tradable in different agrarian contracts, underpinned the construction of the ‘sharecropping landscape’ in medieval and early modern Tuscany (Chapter 3). It also accounted for the nineteenth-century privatization of the rights of use in common lands, in the areas of Navarra where it took place under usufruct contracts rather than full ownership (Lana and Berasain, Chapter 4), as well as for the nationalization of specific rights in land in postwar Britain (Hoyle, Chapter 9), and for the rearrangement of scattered property rights into agricultural firms and cooperatives by entrepreneurs in post-Socialist privatization processes (Halamska, Chapter 11; Choi, Kopsidis and Wolz, Chapter 12; Varga, Chapter 13). The definition of the kinds of actions admitted or restricted as discrete strands in the bundle of property rights is dominant in Hoyle’s essay about the dispute between the right to roam and the right to exclude roamers (Chapter 9), and it is also a key 25Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property concern in Cerman and Stefanova’s argument that Czech peasants in fact retained the right to trade land throughout the early modern period (Chapter 2), as well as in Boudjaaba’s cited findings on how little the right to trade land was hampered by family strategies (Chapter 5) and in Langthaler’s account of the suppression of the rights to trade and to testate land in Nazi Germany (Chapter 8). The link between land and social networks is nowhere clearer than in land de- collectivization in former Socialist countries as it disseminated entitlements through kinship networks to hosts of untimely heirs, after descent lines had been broken for two generations. The three chapters on the processes and outcomes of privatization also show how the distribution of bargaining power favoured specific segments of the ‘maps of social relationships’ interwoven in land, as many new landowners used their own social networks to coordinate their property rights in joint agricultural enterprises, or delegated most of those rights to managers who held important social relations with direct producers and with state and market organizations — indeed Halamska suggests in chapter 11 a new post-collective type of ownership based on network property control. This often contributed to re-creating an agricultural landscape dominated by medium and large scale agriculture in the new market environment (Halamska, Chapter 11; Choi, Wolz and Kopsidis, Chapter 12; Varga, Chapter 13). Discourses of justification to legitimize action and the distribution of entitlements are shown to operate in controversies about landed property across a variety of contexts. As Brassley puts it, land reform in interwar Europe took place ‘[...] as a response to changing perceptions of what constituted social justice and which historical actors possessed the political, economic or social power to decide where social justice lay’ (Chapter 7), a perception that is also highlighted in Miiller’s account of interwar land reform in Romania and Yugoslavia in Chapter [0. The same may be said of the argument between diverging paths to land reform in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Denmark and the adjoining Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, about which Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen writes in Chapter 6. Further examples are those of the competing and evolving arguments for the definition of public good which structure Hoyle’s narrative of the controversy about access rights (Chapter 9), and the political arguments about just compensation rules for redressing past injustice in post-Socialist transitions (Halamska, Chapter 11; Varga, Chapter 13). IV.2. Historical issues and debates We will briefly present the empirical cases included in this volume in relation to four historical issues in which property in land plays a significant role: the degree of peasantries’ hold on property rights and the decline or strengthening of seigniorial order in early modern Europe; the effects of liberal property laws in nineteenth-century 26Rosa Congost, Rui Santos continental Europe; twentieth-century reforms, restrictions and challenges to the liberal property model; and finally the revival of the liberal model in the post-Socialist privatization processes in central and eastern Europe. We believe these approaches will highlight the potential of the soctal-historical approach we have introduced in the previous sections to reposition broader historical problems, besides each chapter's specific merits and valuable added knowledge regarding their own subjects. [V.2.a. Feudalism and beyond: property and the socio-political order in early modern Europe The first two chapters cast a long term view on two European societies im very different geographical contexts: the ‘historical Czech lands’ and Tuscany in central Italy. It is interesting to take both cases together to question the dominant view in the literature on the social and economic history of preindustrial Europe, which tends to hold that a clear dichotomy developed from the late middle ages onwards between western and central-eastern Europe. This view takes it for granted that out of an earlier rather homogeneous situation, the power correlation between lords and peasants led to a progressive breakdown of ‘feudalism’ in western Europe and to ‘second serfdom’, the hardening of servile conditions to the east of the river Elba. This clear-cut dichotomy, which partly hinges on the literal interpretation of the control of property rights as stipulated by law, is present in most historical syntheses and it has influenced the outlook and the design of most case studies as well, and is one we believe that the approach undertaken in this volume should contribute to relativize. Markus Cerman and Dana Stefanova in Chapter 2 challenge that dominant view about the peasants’ loss of property rights in central-eastern Europe since the crisis of the late middle ages. The chapter brings forth quantitative and qualitative data about the workings of the peasant land market in the Czech lands, focusing on the kinds of transactions and the interplay between the involved parties, village communities and seigniorial institutions. On the one hand, it rebuts the traditional view of hardened seigniorial control over peasant life, highlighting the relative autonomy of local organizations and of peasants in relation to seigniorial intervention concerning the disposition of landed property. On the other hand, it shows evidence of continuity in the peasants’ hold on property rights in land and the hereditary character of peasant tenure. While acknowledging social and agrarian changes in the Czech countryside, the authors do not see them as resulting in a wholesale dispossession and disempowerment of peasants. The formal control by seigniorial powers, they argue, was often brought about by peasants’ strategies for securing and enforcing property rights in actual or anticipated disputes, rather than imposed on them by the landlords’ power. 27Working out the frame: from formal institutions to the social contexts of property Giuliana Biagioli’s essay in Chapter 3 provides a synthesis about agrarian contracts and the hold on property rights in Tuscany from the late middles ages to the Napoleonic period. ‘Tuscany was one of the earliest regions in Europe to have witnessed the decline of feudal rule, much by way of the growing urban hold on the cities’ rural hinterlands, which from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries progressively freed peasants from feudal ties and from personal attachment to the land. However, such a precocious development did not entail a triumph of absolute peasant property with the end of feudal dues. The chapter clearly shows how emerging social groups appropriated centuries old formal contracts that allocated rights to land and put them to use in new social relations, in which new ties of peasant dependence were weaved. Both the change in the Tuscan agrarian landscape and production relations and the rise of agrarian individualism, which late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century reforms came to enshrine, were in fact a long process that largely emerged from the strategic use of old formal contracts regulating the transfer of property nghts by new urban-based landowning elites. The simple polarization of power relations between landlords and peasants in respect to property, on which most studies of preindustrial European societies leaned, falls short of a satisfactory interpretation of both processes. In Tuscany, after feudalism was precociously abolished urban traders and bourgeois families — some of which of peasant descent — gained control of property rights through the strategic management of contracts and blocked the emergence of a significant peasant landowning class. Conversely, in the Czech lands and in spite of the formal growth of seigniorial control, the evidence suggests a process of peasant differentiation rather than of overall dispossession, which the emphasis on seigniorial power has rather tended to disregard. IV.2.b. The liberal paradigm in its heyday: absolute property, relative outcomes The principle of absolute and exclusive individual property was imposed on continental western Europe during the course of the nineteenth century by laws and codes that enshrined the liberal paradigm. The English case was then seen as the epitome of both agrarian growth and the liberal property paradigm, which had served innovation and profitability in agriculture with individual and exclusive property rights, enclosure, and the prevalence of large scale capitalist tenant farming. Even though there has been much discussion about the true distinctiveness of such features of English agrarian structure (Broad, 2009) and their effective link to agricultural growth (Allen, 1992, 1999; Clark, 1998), the exemplary nature of the English property and farming regime as idealized in the popular writings of Arthur Young, the Physiocrats and other continental reformists remains alive. 28