Page 10 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Aleksander Panjek

This book’s chapters represent a selection of the papers presented at the
Rural History conference 2023 in Cluj-Napoca, in a panel entitled ‘A Long-
Run Approach to Village Communities: Family, Elite and Social Mobility.’
The panel itself was part of a research project, financed by the Slovenian
Research Agency, entitled ‘Slovenian History on a Small Scale: Continuity
andChangeinaVillage Community inaLong-Term Perspective: Tomaj,
16th–20th Century.’ coordinated by the Faculty of Humanities, University
of Primorska and with the participation of the Slovenian Migration In-
stitute, zrc sazu, and the Institute of Contemporary History. The goal
of the conference panel, and consequently of this book, is to give an in-
ternational dimension to the national research project as well as to collect
methodological and empirical examples from of case studies outside Slove-
nia. The results allow for an enhanced interpretation of the results on the
Slovenian case study (the village of Tomaj), while enabling wider compar-
ative perspectives.
Giulio Ongaro and Edoardo Demo present the dynamism of the econo-
my of Schio, a large village or rural town in the Republic of Venice, from the
first decades of the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.
They show how the long manufacturing tradition was intertwined with a
persistent role of a rather small number of families. These were ‘able to
preserve their political and economic power across the centuries, adapting
their entrepreneurial activities to the evolving economic situation of the
area, diversifying their investments at least until the second half of the
eighteenth century’ by combining their economic activities between the
mining, textile and agricultural sectors, including the grain trade. As rep-
resentatives of the local elite, these ‘rural entrepreneurial families’ devel-
oped their local social networks through ‘strong bonds’ that linked them
to ‘the peasants that worked in their fields.’ On the other hand, alliances
with urban merchant families from the provincial city of Vicenza played
a key role in the provision of capital and in political connections. Ongaro
and Demo underline two interesting points: on the one hand, these rural-
urban family connections played a key role in enabling the rural elites to
maintain their prominent role through the centuries, while on the other
the urban families, with whom they were connected, themselves originat-
ed from rural communities.
Markéta Skořepová’s case study on the Červená Řečice estate in Bohemia
‘roughly corresponds to the development commonly described in Czech
agrarian historiography,’ with an expansive period between the end of the
sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries being followed

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