SIMONDE DE SISMONDI, Jean Charles L.

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Tableau de l'agriculture toscane. First edition of the author's first published work, in which some of the theories on economics he later elaborated are to be found as rough sketches.Forced to leave Geneva because of the French Revolution, the Sismondi family emigrated to Italy, where they bought a small farm in Pescia. His experience working on the farm furnished Sismondi with the material for Tableau, which he published when he returned to Geneva. Alongside observations of a purely agricultural nature Sismondi considers socio-economic questions: the influence of olive tree cultivation on the region's population, the advantages and disadvantages of large farms compared to small, marriage in farming communities... and ponders whether a poor and large population is better than a small and rich population."In this short treatise, Sismondi described the spontaneous and harmonious wisdom that was embodied in Tuscan agriculture: the careful managing of water sources, the participation of sharecroppers in entrepreneurial risks, the integration of vine-growing and fruit gardens and so on - these were all aspects of a living organism that no conscious imitation could reproduce. Sismondi's praise of the social stability engendered by Tuscan sharecropping became a commonplace and passed into [Prime Minister] Sidney Sonnino's project of agricultural reform around the turn of the century and even into the scientific debate of the 1920s and 1930s" (Frederico D'Onofrio, Observing Agricultu

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