State control over Greece’s agricultural institutions increased during Metaxas’s authoritarian regime (1936–41). Analysing such state control allows us to address, in the Greek context, two questions with regard to fascist agrarian regimes. First, considering the trajectory of agricultural policy before the emergence of these regimes, how much of what they did was new, and how much was not? Second, how did the cadres of agricultural specialists participate in, or at least accommodate, the new regimes? Our research shows that Metaxas received support from the agronomists who had been active in Greece under previous liberal administrations. Such support did not take the form of laudatory statements or ideology-driven activism. It was rather a discreet acceptance of the new circumstances, combined with defection from one’s previous political camp. Metaxas’s dictatorship inherited most traits that made it a fascist agricultural regime from previous liberal administrations.
History (vol. 64, issue 3), published by Taylor & Francis. This copy is intended for its deposit in a non-commercial institutional repository. For more information about the intellectual property rights related to the article, please contact the publisher.
In this article, I analyze the state-led project of optimizing tobacco production in interwar Greece, as well as its effects on the peasant population. I look at one specific stage within the productive chain, known as primary processing. The history of primary processing allows us to appreciate the interplay of four factors that, I argue, most decisively determined the trajectory of Greece's agricultural policy in the interwar period. Such factors are a) the undercapitalization of the Greek rural economy, b) the ever increasing dependence of the Greek tobacco sector on the German sales market; c) the nonexistence of strong, autonomous agrarian organizations, and d) the pro-merchant stance of successive Greek governments. The scale of analysis proposed in this article can enrich the existing historiography on Greek agriculture by overcoming some of the limitations of the approaches that emphasize quantitative data on productivity, output and land use.
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