Rural Europe since 1500: Areas of Retardation and Tradition

• Main Author: Whyte, I D
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 1999
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198741794.003.0011; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/52440237/isbn-9780198741794-book-part-11.pdf

Abstract This chapter considers areas of retardation and tradition in Europe where change occurred belatedly and often incompletely compared with the regions discussed in Chapter 10. Indeed, the belated modernization in many such areas necessitates a different focus from Chapter 10, giving greater consideration to the period after 1914. Although they were disadvantaged in terms of remote locations and harsh, limiting physical environments, defining them is not easy as such criteria were relative rather than absolute (Fig. One dear group of regions were those of northern Europe: Iceland, Finland, and most of Norway and Sweden. Another forms the Atlantic periphery of Europe: the Faeroes, the west Iiighlands and Islands of Scotland, western Ireland, Brittany, and north-western Iberia. Here, climate and topography are often less harsh but maritime conditions generally favour livestock-rearing rather than cereal cultivation. A third category compri5es the mountain environments of continental Europe ranging from the Spanish sierras through the Pyrenees and the Alps to the Apennines and the ranges of eastern Europe. Finally, there are the problem regions of the Mediterranean.