ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Development of Animal Breeding Techniques in Duchy of Carniola

• In Event: Local Practices, Contested Knowledge: Making Animal Sciences in Rural Europe (17th-19th Centuries)

English Abstract

In European historiography, the development of agricultural production in the late 18th and 19th centuries is often portrayed as a linear and progressive improvement of agrarian productive capacities. In the Habsburg Monarchy, this process was driven by physiocratic agricultural societies, established in individual duchies from the mid-18th century onward. Their members - drawn from large landowners, which included enlightened aristocrats, priests, members of the bourgeoisie, and civil servants, to the near-total exclusion of the peasant - played a crucial role in shaping and implementing new agricultural knowledge and practices, overwriting existing peasant knowledge.
This presentation analyzes this process through a case study of animal husbandry. Using sources from the Agricultural Society of Carniola, it examines how new systems of livestock classification and breeding techniques were devised to produce and classify “improved” and “beautiful” specimens. It shows how these state-sanctioned knowledge systems overtook existing peasant practices to shape agricultural production. Ultimately, the presentation argues that these systems became dominant and were historically formed and legitimized by the emerging “agricultural experts” and civil servants according to the demands of the modern political economy.

Author

• Tadej Pavković, University of Ljubljana