The Fruits of Revolution: Property Rights, Litigation and French Agriculture, 1700-1860

Description

In The Fruits of Revolution Jean-Laurent Rosenthal investigates two central issues in French economic history: to what extent did institutions hold back agricultural development under the Old Regime, and did reforms carried out during the French Revolution significantly improve the structure of property rights in agriculture? Both questions have been the subject of much debate. Historians have touched on these issues in a number of local studies, yet they usually have been more concerned with community conflict than with economic development. Economists generally have researched the performance of the French economy without paying much attention to the impact of institutions on specific areas of the economy. This book attempts to utilize the best of both approaches: it focuses on broad questions of economic change, yet it is based on detailed archival investigations into the impact of property rights on water control.

"This book deserves a wide audience among scholars working at the intersection of economic, legal and political history." Reviews of Books "Well documented, and fully informed with state-of-the-art economic analysis, this book provides an example of the very best that modern economic history has to offer." The Annalas of the American Academy "It is Rosenthal's contention that it was the institutional improvements realized by the Revolution that in time permitted full access to technological change. From this point of view the events of 1789 brought France into the modern world. Nineteenth-century scholars will find this volume worthwhile reading for the information it provides about the economic history of the period." Leonore Loft, Nineteenth-Century French Studies