Research project

The aim of the research project is to retell the history of Europe in the 20^th century from the perspective of its rural southern peripheries. Can Mediterranean Europe be brought into dialogue with debates on the concept of a “Global South”? Should we understand underdevelopment and modernization, including within Europe itself, as influential perceptual patterns that formed the context for integration policy in the Mediterranean region? What influence have scholarly discourses had on the construction of a Mediterranean “backwardness”? And which processes of learning and dialogue have been initiated by networks of agricultural science? Such questions will be examined as they relate to the Southern European periphery with the help of a combined approach that draws from both the history of knowledge and economic history as well as entangled and comparative perspectives. By examining the circulation of knowledge on questions of rural development policy between Western Europe and the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean regions, it becomes clear how not only new practices of integration in the Mediterranean were established but also how neo-colonial mise en valeur projects were imposed by supranational authorities even as long-standing social and economic entanglements endured.

The project, which is underpinned by a clear thematic and analytic focus, examines the 20th century from its beginnings until the height of Western European integration policy in the 1970s. It is empirically supported by two case studies, through the prism of which the history of European intervention policy in the Mediterranean region will be described. In the first project, the history of rural sociology and its engagement with the Mediterranean region will be examined in light of its role as a crystallization point for a new concept of modernization. The second project is concerned with the history of rural agricultural education and training in different parts of the Mediterranean.