As a result of harsher conditions in the lowlands and new crops from the Americas, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, permanent settlement in the Mediterranean region became more concentrated in the hills and mountains. Populations that could not keep up with the drainage work in low-lying fields were forced to abandon settlements there and relocate to hillsides and mountains, which became more densely populated, and were transformed into the new epicenter of economic life. Without lowland stretches to plant grains, and with the removal of “oriental” crops from the Mediterranean , the region returned to its indigenous crops—olives and vines.The movement of cereals out of the Mediterranean meant that permanent settlement in the region’s low-lying plains was abandoned, and these plains were repurposed for seasonal migration and animal husbandry.Commercial agriculture left the shores of the Mediterranean from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. During this period, rural populations retreated from lowland settlements into the hills, and the agricultural landscape shifted from monocultural grain production in low-lying plains to polyculture,chicken fodder system primarily in the hills in mountains.
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, this upland movement was reversed. Two transformations caused a shift in land use and settlement patterns around the middle of the nineteenth century. First, as discussed above, the Little Ice Age came to an end around the middle of the nineteenth century. This made land reclamation in low-lying plains much easier.Second, market integration caused commercial agriculture to return to the shores of the Mediterranean. After 1750, there was a period of expansion of the world-economy. This was due in part to a demographic boom throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin, which created increased demand for wheat and cotton. Higher demand for both of these crops made cultivation in the low-lying plains where these crops could be grown in large stretches a more attractive prospect. While the Little Ice Age climate was still in effect, lowland plains remained marshy, and lowland colonization was still more difficult and more deadly than it had been during the Medieval Warm Period. The demand for wheat and cotton, however, provided the incentive to overcome additional obstacles and undertake lowland colonization.
To reclaim wetlands under these conditions, it was often necessary to form large plantations worked by coerced labor. In the Ottoman realm, this took the form of çiftliks, which began to abound in lowland fields. Moreover, in the 1850s, quinine became more widely available in Mediterranean Europe, making malaria a less harmful disease.Colonization of low-lying plains continued to intensify throughout the nineteenth century, propelled by deeper market integration and greater global demand during the mid-Victorian boom and aided by the palliative effects of quinine. Nevertheless, most of the lowlands remained neglected through the middle of the nineteenth century.As a result of these two processes—market integration and the end of the Little Ice Age—by the middle of the nineteenth century, the low-lying plains of the Mediterranean were once again opened for settlement and tillage, beginning a process of downhill migration.As Tabak argues: “the relocation of oriental cash crops and commercial bread crops, the widening stretch of dispersal of manufacturing, and the growing weight of terrestrial trade led, in unison, to the long-term retreat of commercial agriculture in the region.”As a result of the disappearance of these major commercial crops, the Mediterranean basin became more self sufficient.From the eleventh century to the mid-sixteenth century, lowland plains had been claimed and tilled. Then, from the mid-sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, the lowlands were abandoned.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the plains began to be settled again, with lowland reclamation picking up pace in the middle of the nineteenth century. Grains did not reappear in Mediterranean plains until the mid-eighteenth century and not in a considerable amount until the mid-nineteenth century.When cotton returned to the Mediterranean, it was not grown as a plantation crop, but as a niche crop—“another addition to the petty producers’ reserve, cultivated in smaller fields and mostly for local and regional markets.” In contrast, sugar disappeared completely from the Mediterranean, except for Egypt, where it continued to be grown but on a much smaller scale.In the period under review in this dissertation, the norm of risk-averse subsistence agriculture was challenged, and—in places, for a time—it was replaced by profit-driven capitalist agriculture. With the onset of the Little Ice Age and the relocation of plantation crops from the Mediterranean basin to the Americas, normative Mediterranean agricultural practice became like the “traditional” model described by the older historiographical tradition. In the second half of the nineteenth century, climate change, market integration, and technological innovations caused such changes in land use that this model began to break down. In the period under review in this dissertation, the so-called traditional model co-existed with and was being supplanted by a very different model of land use. In sum, the starting point of this dissertation envisions Greece at the beginning of the nineteenth century as an area composed of shifting, inter-dependent micro-ecologies in which populations strove to meet the needs of their own subsistence through diverse strategies in which exchange played a crucial role. This is the baseline which was altered in the late nineteenth century by the rise of specialized, intensive, commercial agriculture. As a result of growing foreign demand in the second half of the nineteenth century, Mediterranean agriculture became more specialized and more intensive.
The external forces acting on the ecological and agricultural systems of the Mediterranean began to change and, as a result, the character of agriculture in Greece and Mediterranean Europe began to change as well. There was a shift from the old Mediterranean norm of diversified subsistence agriculture, fragmented landscapes, and transhumant pastoralism to the new norm of commercial agriculture. This dissertation rests on the argument that, in the nineteenth century, the nature of Greek agriculture changed from a system oriented toward subsistence into a system oriented toward commerce. In the most basic sense, commercial agriculture was not new in Greece in the nineteenth century—far from it. The exchange of agricultural products existed as a feature of ancient and medieval Mediterranean economies, and, as mentioned above, exchange was built into the old agricultural system. The cultivation of cash crops intended for sale was just one among several strategies for meeting needs.Furthermore, beyond the cultivation of cash crops, any surplus not stored for later use could be sold or exchanged. Agricultural products had been exported from Greece and consumed abroad for centuries. One of the major forces that moved Greek agricultural production across long distances was a phenomenon known as tramping or cabotage, whereby small boats with small cargoes hugged the Mediterranean coastline, stopping in ports along the way to buy and sell. Through this process,fodder systems for cattle goods were relayed around the Mediterranean basin.The exchange of agricultural production in Greece has a very long history, as does the long-distance trade of Greek agricultural production. The term “commercial agriculture,” then, is not meant to refer to either of these phenomena, nor is the term meant to refer simply to the presence of specialized, intensive production of cash crops or other agricultural products for exchange or export. Large farms that specialized in the production of agricultural products to be sold or exchanged existed at least since the Ottoman period. The change that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century was not, therefore, the appearance of a new phenomenon, but a dramatic growth in the scale of an existing phenomenon. From 1860 to 1893, Greek agriculture became more commercial, more specialized, and more intensive. First, agricultural practice in Greece became more commercial, meaning there was a greater participation in markets by agricultural producers. Small-scale producers became more involved in markets, and they moved from production for family subsistence to growing crops for exchange.
There was also a greater level of participation with markets that were farther away, particularly in Western Europe. Market integration with Western Europe was made possible by advances in transportation, particularly the invention of faster steam ships.Second, Greek agricultural production became more specialized, meaning there was an increasing move away from diversified agriculture and toward monoculture. At the small scale, cultivators moved away from diversification practices such as land fragmentation and poly cropping. Instead, to take advantage of economies of scale, certain elite cultivators consolidated large, contiguous land holdings growing the same crop. At the macro scale, different regions of Greece became associated with different monocultures. Finally, Greek agricultural production became more intensive, meaning that more land and labor were devoted to agricultural production. In sum, instead of diversification, there was a trend toward specialization and intensification; instead of family-level subsistence, there was commercialization. Landscapes became more homogenous and monocultural. There was also a trend away from transhumance toward settled agriculture. In the larger Greek world, several crops were important. Largely to satisfy foreign demand, different parts of Greece grew to specialize in the intensive production of different agricultural commodities including olives and olive oil, silk, and cotton. As a percentage of export revenue, currants were the most important crop in the Kingdom of Greece in the second half of the nineteenth century.As such, Greek historians have been interested in this period of currant monoculture, and there have been many studies of the currant question in the nineteenth century.In their studies on Patras, the “capital” of the currant trade in the nineteenth century, Bakounakis and Frangakis-Syrett have demonstrated that currants strengthened Greece’s trading connection to Western Europe and facilitated foreign access to Greek markets.From Pizanias, we get the history of the prices of currants—in Greece, France, and the UK—and a broader commercial history of the European demand for currants and its effect on Greek output. Petmezas writes about the role of currants and of agriculture in the larger Greek economy, and Nikos Bakounakis has studied the financial history of currant cultivation in Achaea.Other studies have addressed the effects of intensive currant production on peasant society and on land tenure practices. Franghiadis has shown how rural populations felt the pull of foreign demand for currants, and they undertook land improvement projects to extend currant cultivation. Bakounakis has elucidated how currant cultivators often went deeply into debt to finance the planting of their land with currant vineyards, borrowing from currant merchants at usurious rates.76In the nineteenth century, Europeans began changing their environments in more ambitious and more impactful ways than ever before, especially through the manipulation of water resources. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Europeans began digging bigger canals and building bigger dams than ever before. They changed rivers, lakes, and wetlands, and they dredged navigation canals that connected seas and oceans—in short, they permanently changed the hydrosphere. During this time, a number of factors came together that led people to undertake these ambitious projects to “tame” the hydrosphere. First, there were new needs during this time that motivated these projects. Some of these new needs were the result of population growth—the population of Europe more than doubled over the course of the nineteenth century.This unprecedented demographic expansion created a need for more food and clean water than ever before, placing new demands on land all over the continent. New needs also sprung from economic growth. This created a need for faster and cheaper transportation—to sustain this economic growth, it became necessary to remove barriers to the movement of people and goods. Draining lakes and reclaiming wetlands provided new agricultural land, which was needed to feed a growing European population and to support growing agricultural economies. At the same time, rectifying inland rivers facilitated the movement of raw materials like coal and iron as well as finished products, supporting growing industrial economies. Taken together, these two process aided in connecting regions by increasing the speed and decreasing the cost of transportation. Efforts to tame the hydrosphere were not new, but in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was a sudden increase in the scale and the intensity of water management projects. Engineers in Europe and North America straightened rivers, dredged canals, drained wetlands, and constructed dams and reservoirs like never before. In addition to the new needs created by demographic and economic growth, three changes also made this change in scale possible. The first was new technology and new sources of energy.