HISTORY OF THE ALPS, 1500 - 1900: ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT, AND SOCIETY

3. Agriculture and Alpiculture

47 3 Agriculture and Alpiculture “There are no grounds less susceptible of improvement than mountainous pastures ,” wrote Thomas R. Malthus in 1803. “They must necessarily be left chiefly to nature; and when they have been adequately stocked with cattle, little more can be done.” This assessment of Swiss mountain areas seemed of utmost importance to him, because he believed Alpine pastures to be the centerpoint of Alpine agriculture . He also saw in their limited environmental potential an illustration of his general theory of population. From different perspectives and with different intentions , before and after his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” many voices have pointed out the limited resources of the Alpine space. At least since the beginning of the early modern period, mountain inhabitants have often drawn attention to the infertility of their lands when required to justify themselves publicly (in fiscal matters, for example); and from the nineteenth century onward, when modern agrarian science began to estimate the development prospects of large areas, Alpine regions did not fare favorably.1 Nonetheless, between 1500 and 1900 the total population of the Alpine space probably almost tripled, and there is no doubt that this growth was linked to a notable increase in agrarian production. How was this kind of growth possible? Chapter Three 48 This chapter takes up this question by examining different important aspects of Alpine agriculture. Our point of departure is not a happy one: although the past decades have seen a tendency to study the history of the Alpine arc as a whole, there are few overviews of the agrarian history of this European frontier area. A large portion of the specialized literature is either nationally or regionally oriented, or it is primarily anthropological or geographic in nature. Agrarian histories of single countries analyze Alpine regions therein in quite different ways, partly because of the differing percentages of a state’s total area represented by those regions. For example, while in Austria the Alpine regions play an important role and in Italy they are often taken into consideration, in the French syntheses they are referred to only sporadically.2 The necessity for Alpine historiography to avail itself of discussions with contiguous disciplines is demonstrated by the fact that the most detailed, complete exposition of agriculture in the past comes from human geography. In 1940 and 1941, John Frödin published a two-volume work on Zentraleuropas Alpwirtschaft (The Alpiculture of Central Europe), in which he established the results of many years of research, partly from a historical perspective. We will return to this work.3 The relationship between Alpine environment, population, and agriculture can be examined from a variety of perspectives. In what follows, I begin with the assumptions that a growing population required new and more frugal ways of exploiting the environment, and that these innovations were influenced not only by new consumption needs, but also by labor inputs. In a pre-industrial context, space-saving methods of land exploitation usually required intensive labor inputs, and thus depended on certain population levels. Often, increased output did not match the amount of extra labor required; older, extensive methods of farming thus enjoyed higher labor productivity and remained in place as long as a territory’s resources permitted.4 This development model considers the environmental potential within a total historical context, unlike the perspective of many geographic studies. The latter, because of their disciplinary affiliation, tend to examine nature’s impact on Alpine agrarian structures rather than looking at other correlations. This privileges, a priori, environmental conditions as explanatory factors.5 The notion that agrarian labor could be especially burdensome in mountain regions is often reaffirmed, though usually in general terms. Our investigation would require more precise information, in quantitative form if possible, concerning various forms of agrarian activity in different circumstances. The state of the documentation and of the research leaves much to be desired in this regard. Still, there are both different Agriculture and Alpiculture 49 methods for estimating labor inputs and occasional numerical data. For example, for technological contexts such as those that predominated prior to 1900, it has been estimated that in the French Alps a field of one hectare required 230 man-hours of labor per year to produce hay; for other crops the numbers were as follows: cereals 315, potatoes 2500, and wine 2750. From this one can deduce that, given the same amount of territory, forage production required three...