Page 57 - Changing Living Spaces

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Peasants, Land, and Work:
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Structures of Peasant Economy in Slovenia

in the Interwar Period

Žarko Lazarević
Institute of Contemporary History, Slovenia

© 2024 Žarko Lazarević
https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-399-9.55-75

Structures
In the interwar period, Slovenia was a predominantly agrarian socie-
ty, with agriculture still contributing half of the national income. About
60 percent of the population depended on agricultural income (Erjavec
1928, 12). As an economic and social group, peasants were crucial to so-
cial stability. Agriculture itself struggled with numerous difficulties re-
lated to the intensification of production. Although the obstacles were
many, contemporaries focused on the fragmentation of land ownership
and the geographic characteristics of the environment, as well as agrari-
an overpopulation as a ratio between population size and disposable in-
come. The above factors determined the economic and social conditions
in the countryside.
In 1931, Alojzij Jamnik published a book entitled The Causes of Our
Poverty (Vzroki našega siromaštva), in which he tried to answer the essen-
tial question of the reasons for the crisis in the countryside. The Great
Depression, which affected almost everyone in Slovenia at that time, was
not the reason for his reflections. He had already started writing the book
before the outbreak of the Great Depression, and its publication mere-
ly coincided with it. Jamnik analysed the problems over a longer period
and identified the structural weaknesses of Slovenian agriculture as the
main cause of rural poverty. In his opinion, these weaknesses included
the fragmentation of farms, low productivity, and, consequently, low re-
Murayama, S., Ž. Lazarević, and A. Panjek, eds. 2024. Changing Living
Spaces: Subsistence and Sustenance in Eurasian Economies from Early Modern
Times to the Present. Koper: University of Primorska Press.

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