7 - ‘The Eye of the Master’. Livestock Improvement and Knowledge Networks in Belgium, 1990–1940

Summary

In his essay The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947), the German sociologist Max Weber unravelled how modern societies became increasingly organized. Interactions and transactions between individuals and organizations were structured according to well-defined social principles, while bureaucracy grew in order to support and defend public interests. The economy did not escape this need for ordering. Scott Lash and John Urry have explained how, at the end of the nineteenth century, an organized capitalism was constructed. At a time when the invisible hand created social inequality and environmental problems, government departments and civil society organizations such as trade unions and farmers’ associations were established to deal with socioeconomic tensions and challenges and to structure the (inter)national markets. Agriculture was no exception in this regard. After all, the increased globalization of the agricultural and food economy, which was partly the result of a transport and communication revolution, resulted in a deep agricultural depression in Europe that lasted from about 1880 to the mid-1890s.

That crisis led to structural changes in the agricultural sector. Farmers’ organizations looked to government for measures to support national agriculture and to arm it against growing international competition. Among other things, this led to discussions about the degree of free trade and protectionism, to a search for future-oriented activities, and to the widely-supported ambition to modernize agriculture. One way out of the crisis was an increase in productivity, which could be achieved by means of a more scientific approach, through innovation and the development of more profitable sectors and crops, such as horticulture and livestock farming. To make this modernization offensive a success, the state and agricultural organizations in European countries increasingly worked together. They did this in different ways, with varying intensity and sometimes with different objectives. Anton Schuurman has written about the emergence of an ‘institutional matrix’, in which cooperation between state and civil society is the central motor.

In this chapter, we examine how state and civil society worked together in Belgium to organize scientifically-based livestock improvement in the period 1900–1940. Our approach can be explained in terms of four welldefined questions. Firstly, this chapter examines the role of the First World War in the development of scientific cattle breeding. Did wartime devastation indeed accelerate the search for better livestock? Secondly, we concentrate on the appearance of a ‘modern’ cattle breeding network.