This monograph explores traditional farming communities in French-speaking areas of the western Alps for the period 1500-1914 and how they endured in such an environment despite the many problems and risks which it posed for their subsistence and welfare. Using an extensive amount of archival material drawn from the relevant regional archives, the book presents a great deal of fresh data. Its central theme is how such communities responded to the opportunities and challenges presented by the highly variegated environment of their setting. The view taken is that their strategies of exploitation stressed diversity and flexibility, mapping the highly varied ecologies and resource opportunities of their setting into these strategies by spreading livelihood and risk as widely as possible. This interpretative framework is developed across all the book's themes: landholding, arable and livestock sectors, use of the commons and, finally, how communities coped with climate-based risks. The book appeals to geographers, historians, environmental scientists and everyone interested in traditional farming communities and their long-term challenges.

This monograph explores traditional farming communities in French-speaking areas of the western Alps for the period 1500-1914 and how they endured in such an environment despite the many problems and risks which it posed for their subsistence and welfare. Using an extensive amount of archival material drawn from the relevant regional archives, the book presents a great deal of fresh data. Its central theme is how such communities responded to the opportunities and challenges presented by the highly variegated environment of their setting. The view taken is that their strategies of exploitation stressed diversity and flexibility, mapping the highly varied ecologies and resource opportunities of their setting into these strategies by spreading livelihood and risk as widely as possible. This interpretative framework is developed across all the book's themes: landholding, arable and livestock sectors, use of the commons and, finally, how communities coped with climate-based risks. The book appeals to geographers, historians, environmental scientists and everyone interested in traditional farming communities and their long-term challenges.

The use of wildlife products, together with advances in livestock feeding, were essential in propelling Western economic growth. Extraordinarily, these early modern and early industrial features are side-lined relative to the role of manufacturing. This book restores the balance, detailing how many species were relocated around the world and how late natural products persisted into the age of synthetics. This text describes how animals were driven immense distances to market and harnessed for transportation and to power machines; even after industrialisation, animals were employed for innumerable purposes, besides being co-opted as pets. The recent rebound from a wholesale persecution of wild nature, and how the plundering of the animal kingdom and the development of livestock farming jointly created the Smithian Growth that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, are also described.

This encyclopedia is the most comprehensive and up-to-date source of reference for sustainability in business and management. It covers both traditional and emerging concepts and terms and is fully international in its scope. More than 700 contributions of internationally renowned experts provide a definitive access to the knowledge in the area of sustainable and responsible management. All actors in the field will find reliable and up to date definitions and explanations of the key terms and concepts of management in this reference work. The Encyclopedia of Sustainable Management represents all aspects of management and business conduct. It takes sustainability as a management concept that gives due credit to the complexity and diverging constraints in which businesses and corporations act today, and it emphasizes and focuses approaches that help ensure that today's management decisions and actions will be the basis for tomorrow's prosperity.

In the 1700s, Jean-Jacques Rousseau celebrated the Alps as the quintessence of the triumph of nature over the "horrors" of civilization. Now available in English, History of the Alps, 1500-1900: Environment, Development, and Society provides a precise history of one of the greatest mountain range systems in the world. Jon Mathieu's work disproves a number of commonly held notions about the Alps, positioning them as neither an inversion of lowland society nor a world apart with respect to Europe. Mathieu's broad historical portrait addresses both the economic and sociopolitical--exploring the relationship between population levels, development, and the Alpine environment, as well as the complex links between agrarian structure, society, and the development of modern civilization. More detailed analysis examines the relationship between various agrarian structures and shifting political configurations, several aspects of family history between the late Middle Ages and the turn of the twentieth century, and exploration of the Savoy, Grisons, and Carinthia regions.

Cipières, in the Alpes-Maritimes, is a French upland landscape rich in archaeology and distinctive in its topography. Cipières: Community and Landscape in the Alpes-Maritimes is a unique exploration which brings together a wealth of documentary sources retained in the village with material evidence in the landscape to produce an interdisciplinary and holistic account of the development of one community and its lands. Beginning with a history of the Project, the volume examines the village’s morphology and archaeology, including a landscape survey and investigation of the agrarian systems of the Plâteau de Calern, before moving on to examine settlement patterns, population, politics, social structure and the local economy from the fifth century through to 1900. After a period of decline, the area is now undergoing regeneration, and history is bought up-to-date and placed in its modern context through reflections of the modern day region.