Agriculture in the Age of Fascism: Authoritarian Technocracy and Rural Modernization, 1922-1945

The agrarian policies of fascism have never before been studied from a comparative perspective. This volume offers an up-to-date overview, as well as new insights drawn from eight case-studies on Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Spain, Japan and Vichy France. The consensus that emerges from them is that the agricultural and rural policies of fascist regimes tended towards modernization and that many of them resembled initiatives pursued in the post-war decades and the Green Revolution, When viewed in this perspective, the fascist era appears less as an aberration and more as an integral part in the global process of agrarian modernization, a process whose merits are now being called into question.