This is an impressive and sizeable work: 754 pages of text, 70 pages of footnotes, 285 statistical tables and plates, and a huge 42-page bibliography. The Austrian agrarian historian Ernst Langthaler has been active for almost twenty years, with an impressive array of publications, essays, and book chapters (many published in English) under his belt. Though the focus of his attention has been on Austrian agrarian history in the twentieth century, his prolific and intelligent work has sought to restore some life to agrarian history—a discipline of historical studies that, until the 1970s and 1980s, occupied an important place in the scholarship of countries such as Germany, England, and France, as well as Italy and Spain. It has entered a phase of decline in recent years.

Langthaler's monograph offers a vast and complete overview of his previous empirical research and of the theoretical reflections that underlie it, but his focus here is a detailed empirical study of National Socialist agrarian policy in Austria after its annexation by the German Reich in 1938. The groundwork for his research comes from statistical documents relating to individual farms that were introduced on a small scale by Nazi Germany, and especially documents produced by the Reichsnährstand (RNST), an organization used to control and govern the economic behavior of German farmers and, after March 1938, Austrian ones. Langthaler has examined more than three thousand farmsteads in the Reichsgau Niederdonau, presently part of the Lower and Upper Austrian states. There is copious documentation for many Gaue, but this is the first time that it has been examined in such thorough and painstaking detail for historical analysis.

These documents provide a comprehensive overview of the economic status of each farm, including its size, the amount of machinery at its disposal, the type of crops grown, available wage labor, and many other relevant items, such as information about assets and other financial matters. Spanning a lengthy period of time, the documentation allows Langthaler to study, on the one hand, the effects of the agricultural policy of the National Socialist regime and, on the other (and of greater interest to the author), the behavior of producers and their reactions to the constraints imposed upon them by the regime. Langthaler thus explores the mediation (and frictions) between producers and the state apparatus. The conclusions of his study are indeed extremely interesting (even if the book strays from the main narrative in many places, making it difficult to find a common thread): it shows us a rural society that was far from being blocked and ineffective. Rather, its members tried to find ways to improve productivity and incomes, partly by bypassing the rules imposed by the new regime. The author, who was trained as a mathematician, indulges at many points in theoretical musings, makes everything abstract, and uses numerous tables and graphics to that end.

The book nevertheless allows one to grasp the complexity and variety of responses by producers to the agrarian policy of the National Socialist regime, which—according to Langthaler—cannot be classified merely as reflective of “blood-and-soil” ideologies. In fact, he repeatedly emphasizes the regime's intent to achieve partial modernization. Nor can one generalize about a shrinking Austrian farm community caught between the prevailing priorities of rearmament and war. He concludes that the so-called Ostmark experienced a “surprising dynamic framework” (742) as a result both of the entrepreneurial spirit of many producers, especially in areas geographically closer to markets (the region Langthaler examines has Vienna at its center), and of the policy choices of the RNST authorities. It is a complex and nuanced argument that, based on a body of indisputable empirical data, confirms previous assessments about the behavior of agricultural producers, who found many different ways to respond to the regime's policies based on their expectations and capabilities, which were by no means uniform across the primary sector.

Not entirely convincing, however, is the characterization of Nazi agrarian policy as one aimed at modernizing agricultural production in Austria and Germany—an aim achieved only in part, as the author himself acknowledges. There is only a brief outline (somewhat paradoxical in such a lengthy book) of the study's important and innovative view of the Nazi period as part of a broader transition of segments of Austrian (and German) agriculture to more efficient activities involving technology and long-term productivity and profitability goals based on capitalist criteria. The same may be said for the scope of international comparison: only in the last pages of the book does Langthaler address the (undefined) category of a völkisch productivism that exhibited common features during the interwar period with other authoritarian, fascist, and semifascist regimes in Europe. This, too, is an important area for new research, but one upon which the author does not adequately elaborate. The book is nevertheless an important study that offers new approaches and lays the groundwork for in-depth discussion of the relationship among dictatorship, agriculture, and modernization in a broader geographical context. It is of such importance that a more condensed version, possibly in English translation, would be welcome—one in which the author gets directly to the crux of his arguments without engaging in digressions in an impossible quest for completeness that only detracts from this otherwise absolutely praiseworthy study.