Dangerous Liaisons: Plant science and the rural world in the Po Valley, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

This article analyses the conflicting relationship between botany and the rural economy in a period of great scientific, technical, and economic change. It takes as an example the Po Valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a laboratory for experiments on acclimatization of new plant species, particularly the potato among other products. Against this backdrop, political authorities and scientific institutions interacted with landowners, farmers, and other representatives of the rural world, sometimes successfully and other times with many difficulties. Source materials include institutional documentation and correspondence, supported by a new interpretation of pertinent scientific and economic texts.