Abstract
The second conference will address the relationship between agrarian transformation and the rise of capitalist enterprises associated with the first, second and third industrial revolutions. For most of their seven thousand year history, European peasants worked with tools made by themselves or by village craftsmen. It was not until the XIXthcentury that the industrial sector began to produce machinery and other supplies for agriculture, and to process its products. Even so, in 1940, in most of Europe's industrialized countries, the agricultural sector was still dominated by peasants.
But after the Second World War, industrial, commercial and banking companies invested massively in the upstream sector (supply of tractors and other machinery, mineral fertilizers, pesticides, seeds, credit) and the downstream sector (processing of agricultural products into food or other goods, sales to consumers) of agricultural production. Most countries have implemented very proactive policies of " agricultural modernization ". This involved mobilizing scientific and technical knowledge to significantly increase production quantities, while lowering production costs. It was based on the increasingly massive use of fossil fuels. During this period, most of the farms that existed in 1940 disappeared. On those that remained, fewer and larger, the farmers' successors implemented processes of " rationalization " and became farm managers. The ecology of agricultural and non-agricultural spaces has been turned upside down. Although the vast majority of farms remained family-owned, their operating capital became considerable, often at the cost of heavy debt.
