Belgian agrarian and rural history, 1800–2000 9 Belgian agrarian and rural history, 1800–2000

I. Belgium: a latecomer to modern agrarian historiography Compared to her neighbours, Belgium embarked quite late on the historiography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century agriculture. For a long time, economic historians were drawn to the ‘successful ’ industrial rather than to the ‘backward ’ agrarian sector. Writing in 1928, for instance, Fernand Baudhuin devoted scarcely one page to agriculture in a substantial chapter on the economic history of Belgium. Moreover, it was only in 1930 that the first history of ‘national ’ agriculture saw the light of day, being published by Julien Vander Vaeren, a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Agriculture, to mark the centenary of the Belgian State, although its focus was very much on institutional developments since 1830. In 1949, further, A. Forget, another official from that ministry, published an article on the economic development of the agrarian sector since 1846, the year in which the first national agricultural census was carried out. The study of rural society seemed to be even less on the agenda of academic historians, as it was only from the 1960s onwards that modern agrarian and rural history became a subject of research. The inter-university Centre belge d’histoire rurale – Belgisch Centrum voor Landelijk