Even though commercial agriculture is not important in terms of the country’s GDP or foreign exchange earnings, and has little direct political power, the petro-nature of the state impedes transformation of agrarian relations. What emerges then, is a contradictory process that seeks to consolidate a mixed economy, where an agrarian reform sector coexists alongside a commercial one, while being limited by the dynamics of oil rent redistribution in the agro-food system. This reading of agrarian dynamics challenges readings such as Harnecker’s that the Venezuelan state’s primary tumbling block to structural reform is the persistent top-down ‘bureaucraticism’ left over from the previous political era that smothers Venezuela’s new forms of production and community-based decision making. While it could be argued that a mixed economy is a necessary challenge to overcome on a road towards eventually more socialist socio-economic forms, it is relevant to consider how the former potentially, and perhaps fatally, diminishes the latter. There is a critical distinction between creating a mixed economy and breaking landlord power and the contradictions in Venezuela’s process speak to constraints on policy formation and implementation that promotes peasant agriculture as the basis for some sort of socialist agrarian development. At the southern tip of the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnese is a coast known as Cape Tenaro. Also called Cape Matapan, it is the southernmost point of the Balkan peninsula.

Like much of the rest of the Mani, Tenaro is rough and rocky terrain with a relatively arid climate. In the nineteenth century, Western European travelers to Greece described Tenaro as they saw it from the sea. Depending on their route, Mani was often their first sight of Greece. They watched from their boats, eager to catch sight of the country they had read so much about and experienced vicariously through Pausanius. What they saw shocked them: “I do not believe that there exists in the world a desert more sterile and desolate than the two southern promontories of Morea,hydroponic bucket which end at capes Malea and Matapan,” wrote the French traveler Edmond About in the 1850s. “This country, called Maina, seems to be deserted by God and man.”1 A quarter century later, another French traveler, Henri Belle, was called to the deck of his ship by a sailor and was welcomed to Greece with the same view. Belle, however, was struck by something different—an aspect of the landscape that had changed since About’s voyage: “Nearby, on the left, I saw a large, somber cape, falling in a sheer drop to the sea and beaten by the swell, which was whipped into a white foam; above, and dominating it, a series of harsh and arid terraces… Such was the appearance under which this land of Greece appeared to me, which I had never seen before except through the conjuring of classical memories.”2 The “series of harsh and arid terraces” that Belle saw survive in the present-day landscape of Tenaro. They stretch on for kilometers— rocky, overgrown, and abandoned. Tenaro is not obviously well suited to agriculture, and the observer is left to wonder what could have motivated their construction .

The terraced cliffs of Tenaro are just one example of many similar riddles in the present day landscape of Greece. Terraces can also be seen carved into the hills of the island of Lesvos, once used to support the island’s olive monoculture.3 Water mills scattered throughout the island of Andros now sit abandoned, no longer in the vicinity of any obvious water source.4 These and many other features of the Greek landscape are remnants of another time—a legacy of the late nineteenth century. This dissertation is about the changes in the relationship between Greeks and their environment in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this time, Greek agricultural products became internationally exchanged commodities, and the ensuing expansion of foreign demand for these products altered Greek agricultural practice. Growing for international markets prompted a normative shift in Greece from traditional, risk-averse Mediterranean agriculture toward risky, specialized, intensive agriculture. This new system was motivated by profit rather than subsistence—a goal which was outwardly manifested in the landscape by the ways Greeks changed their environment to better suit the intensive cultivation of certain profitable crops. Out of diverse, fragmented, and marginal landscapes, the interests of profit-driven agriculture produced homogenous landscapes specializing in intensive agriculture. In 1832, after a decade of war, Greek nationalists’ aspirations for independence from the Ottoman Empire were finally fulfilled. The lands contained within the borders of the newly established Kingdom of Greece, however, were no great loss for the Ottomans, who kept not only the major port cities but also the best agricultural land of Rumelia.

In a speech given to the National Assembly in 1844, Greek statesman and soon-to-be Prime Minister Ioannis Kolettis famously voiced this idea as part of an irredentist vision: “The Greek kingdom is not the whole of Greece, but only a part, the smallest and poorest part.”From 1832 to 1864, the Kingdom of Greece consisted of the Peloponnesian peninsula, Attica, part of Central Greece, and the Cycladic Islands. None of this territory was ideal for intensive, specialized agriculture. The Peloponnese was mountainous, and its low-lying plains were often waterlogged and uncultivated. Attica and the Cyclades were arid and mountainous. Boeotia in Central Greece was a region of extremes—it was wet in winter, but it received almost no rain in the summer. Under these conditions, Greek agricultural practices continued much the same as they had for centuries: small, family farms continued to grow primarily for their own subsistence. In this agricultural system, rural labor was characterized by diversity, resourcefulness, and risk aversion. Farmers owned small plots of land spread across different landscapes, and they grew different crops on each. Their landholdings were fragmented in multiple locations to spread their risk over distinct micro-ecologies with different productive strengths. This was done to take full advantage of the various resources that different landscapes could offer in different seasons of the year. The goal was to diversify production and minimize risk: if one plot of land underperformed one year, hopefully others would not, and all would not be lost. Pastoralists were seasonally transhumant, meaning they grazed their flocks in different landscapes over the course of the year to make full use of the land, to avoid cold winters in the mountains, and to also avoid the wet seasons in lowland plains. Rural populations were also pluriactive, meaning they were not just farmers or shepherds, but performed multiple roles. A rural worker might, for example, work his own land one season, work as a day laborer on neighboring farms in other seasons, and also undertake artisanal work or other forms of petty commodity production when the opportunity arose. They also foraged for resources in marginal landscapes such as wetlands and forests. Any surpluses that were produced were stored to be consumed later or exchanged for other goods. Rural Greek cultivators did also grow cash crops purely for exchange, but this constituted a relatively small part of production on most family farms. This traditional Greek agricultural system had developed in sync with ecological constraints imposed by the landscapes and environments of the Mediterranean basin, where the climate was unpredictable, both within a single year and from one year to the next,stackable planters and ecological and climatic characteristics varied greatly from one location to another. Greece, like the Mediterranean region in general, is best considered as a patchwork of mutually interdependent micro-ecologies. For most of the population, it was not usually possible to impose monoculture on such land, nor was it desirable to concentrate risk in this way. The agricultural system found in Greece was one that had developed to limit the risk of subsistence failure due to market volatility and the capricious Mediterranean climate. Then, around 1860, something began to change. Improvements in transportation technology, particularly with the advent of steam ships, facilitated Greece’s integration into the capitalist economies of Northwestern Europe, and certain Greek agricultural products became highly-demanded in foreign markets. These included olives and olive oil, silk, cotton, and above all the small, black raisins known as currants.

As demand for these products rose, agricultural practice changed in three fundamental aspects. First, Greek agriculture became more commercial—more oriented toward market production than household subsistence. Second, rural populations moved away from diversification, and Greek agriculture became more specialized in the production of commodities meant primarily to be sold and exported. Third, more land, labor, and resources were devoted to producing these commodities than to other activities, and Greek agriculture became more intensive. As agricultural production in Greece was tied ever more closely to the tastes of European consumers, cultivators in the regions that produced goods consumed in Europe abandoned earlier risk-aversion strategies in favor of the intensive cultivation of cash crops for export. In order to accomplish this commercialization, specialization, and intensification of agriculture, great changes needed to be made to the Greek landscape. Land was “reclaimed” for agriculture as wetlands were drained, cleared, and converted into arable land. In the traditional Greek agricultural system, wetlands were valued as a source of fish, fowl, and other resources. In the new system, they were seen as an obstacle to the intensive cultivation of cash crops. Forests were also cleared or depleted. Like wetlands, forests supplied Greek peasant families with resources, such as timber and game, but in the new agricultural system, the demand for timber was beyond what could be grown sustainably in Greece, and the land occupied by forests came to be seen as more useful for the production of cash crops. Some forests were depleted by the heightened domestic demand for timber, and others were intentionally burned down through the practice of “fire farming” to produce fertile soil for farmland. Another change was the wide embrace of large-scale watercourse manipulation projects that were previously unknown in Greece, including the dredging of canals that radically changed the country’s natural fluvial channels. These included canals for navigation, for irrigation, and for river rectification to drain wetlands, as well as the construction of water mills. Terraces were installed in hillsides and mountains to maximize the land area that was available for growing cash crops. Finally, there were new settlement patterns that were adopted. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most permanent settlements were located at higher elevations, and rural populations descended into low-lying plains for a few months out of the year in order to minimize risk and maximize the exploitation of diverse landscapes. By the end of the nineteenth century, new settlement patterns entailed widespread permanent lowland colonization in order to more intensively grow profitable export commodities. These transformations in landscape and land use required a heavy investment of labor and of capital. The Greek state took on large amounts of debt to fund such initiatives as well as to undertake other economic modernization projects that helped move goods from farm to market, and lenders granted these loans based on their belief in the future profitability of export agriculture. Other projects were financed through foreign direct investment, as investors in Paris and London formed joint-stock companies to dredge canals, drain land, and to operate large, commercial farms. Local elites in the Greek countryside took advantage of state land policies to consolidate landholdings and convert mixed-use and unused land into year-round farmland. Motivated by the belief that Greek agricultural exports would continue to be profitable in the long term, all of these actors became deeply invested in Greek farmland. Their investments paid well for several decades. While many Greeks profited from and helped to enable these changes to the land, many others were harmed in the process. As more of the Greek countryside became private property, land that was previously shared in common by cultivators and pastoralists became inaccessible or else required payment to use. Moreover, the growth of market-oriented production meant that resources inherent in the Greek landscape were destroyed, and these resources could serve as a social safety net in difficult times. A large segment of Greek rural society, therefore, saw their livelihoods threatened in the new agricultural economy. The homogenization of the Greek countryside and the trend toward the monocultural production of cash crops for foreign markets meant that the more vulnerable residents of rural Greece were exposed as never before to the risks of market volatility and the variability of the Mediterranean climate.