This volume deals with some venerable issues in agrarian history: the relationship between local ecology, systems of agricultural management and the distribution of property rights. Nearly all the copious literature on common lands, for example, has dealt with exactly this triad of issues. Here, however, they are framed as issues of risk and as environmental history, themes that are rightly in vogue, but not themselves very new. The editors are keen to make the point that risk is not a ‘given’ determined by environmental circumstances, to which property systems respond, but is itself produced by the distribution of power and property. The goal of the editors is to escape from environmental determinism, and highlight issues that environmental historians have, allegedly, hitherto ignored. This requires, perhaps, a rather limited reading of some Anglophone environmental history and the manner in which the field was once defined in a largely American context; to take a counter-example one might think of Christian Pfister as a founding father of a self-conscious European ‘environmental history’, whose work has been preoccupied with precisely these questions.

The book is organised into three parts and eleven chapters. The first part handles ‘property rights and sustainable land use in marginal areas'; the second ‘property rights in fragile coastal and riverine areas'; and finally ‘public, private and common property rights, and sustainable land use’. Only the middle of these has any real coherence, as it deals with how risks of flooding were shaped by a complex combination of environmental factors, investment in infrastructural developments and management systems. Nowhere is the idea of ‘fragility’ or ‘marginality’ really discussed or consistently applied. Mats Morrell writes about the whole of Swedish agriculture, while Peder Dam's work encompasses the entire manorial system of Denmark; in what sense are these ‘marginal’ or ‘fragile’? They are, perhaps, lower yielding, on average, than parts of Europe with richer soils. Yet one of those more fertile regions was coastal Flanders, investigated by Tim Soens: a region perhaps literally marginal to both sea and land, but hardly economically. Chapters from Nadine Viver and Angus Winchester reprise their studies of commons in France and England, lands subject to multiple uses and often extensive and variable outputs and that thus exposed individual households and communities to varied sets of risks in the returns to their labour and the influence of choices by other households. Yet what was distinctive about these risks as opposed to those represented by the possibility of sudden floods, to be found on the Hungarian plain studied by András Vári? Or indeed the risks still faced by a farmer of the most mild and high-yielding regions, who still wrestled with unpredictable weather, pests, politics and markets?

The book provides a set of case studies on various scales, perhaps rather arbitrarily selected, that recurrently demonstrate the truth that the links between ecology, agrarian systems and property (or institutions) are complex and historically variable; and that all these factors are important. Yet without any systematic comparison, either geographically or conceptually, it is hard to draw broader conclusions from the book as a collection. The editors' introductory discussion is skewed towards conceiving risks as episodic natural disasters, and addressing the literature accordingly. Yet the nature of such crises was in practice very varied and not easily distinguishable in many landscapes from risks endemic to all agricultural systems. In this sense the editorial line represents a rather old style of environmental or agrarian history, forever on the hunt for crisis and explanations of crisis, and on failing to find environmental determinism, reverts to preferred explanations stressing power and institutions.

Nevertheless, even if the chapters are not really put to work collectively, they remain an excellent set of case studies, representing a range of work that is being undertaken across western Europe. Morell provides a state-of-the-art survey on Swedish agrarian history and the question of late eighteen-century ecological stress, which can still be answered only inconclusively. Sylvain Olivier scans several centuries of agrarian stability and change in the garrigues of Languedoc, noting the tensions between the needs of households and localised risk of over-use in traditional agriculture, but argues that the fundamental change was the end of those ancient practices, rather than alterations to the property regime. Peder Dam's large-scale geographic information system (GIS)-based work on Denmark shows the enduring influence of soil type on landholding structures but also the systemic differences between demesne and tenant farms. Ruí Santos and Maria José Roxo, in their study of a mountainous region of southern Portugal, argue that questions of sustainability should not be framed as common versus private property, pointing out (as many works have now shown) that the ‘tragedy’ of the commons as seen by enclosers was not over-use, but under-utilization, and that investments attendant on privatization brought their own ecological pressures. Iñaki Iriarte-Goñi describes how in Spain, the added ingredient of intensive state forestry produced divergent effects with intensification on public land and a withdrawal and deforestation on private. Tim Soens and Piet van Cruyningen argue effectively in their chapters on the Flanders and North Sea coasts how property rights made a clear difference to strategies of drainage and flood protection, but how the interests of landowners and tenant farmers could strongly diverge over time, raising issues of ‘environmental justice’.

There is thus much to learn here, even if the book does not cohere as a whole, and would have benefited from much more attentive editing.