The ESSHC aims at bringing together scholars interested in explaining historical phenomena using the methods of the social sciences. The conference is characterized by a lively exchange in many small groups, rather than by formal plenary sessions. The conference welcomes papers and sessions on any topic and any historical period. It is organised in a large number of networks which cover a certain topic. The European Social Science History Conference is organised by the International Institute of Social History (IISH).

The Rural History Network has been gaining momentum during the last editions of the ESSHC. The sessions proposed for the conference taking place in Amsterdam in March 2006 are as follows:

1. Roundtable: Slicher van Bath’s The Agrarian History of Western Europe.
2. Roundtable: Towards an European Rural History: the model of the CORN project.
3. The professionalization of agriculture in the 19th and 20th centuries
4. Press and written culture in the countryside
5. Religion and the rural world
6. Gender and rural history
7. GIS and rural history
8. The commercialisation of the countryside in the 18th and 19th centuries
9. Environmental history and rural history
10. Nobility and rural history in the ancien regime
11. Landscape and agriculture
12. Rural Heritage Systems along the centurias.
13. Power in Rural History
14. Reshaping the countryside: Agricultural politics in the 19th and 20th centuries
15. Rural life and rural welfare
16. Rural labour and agriculture

Suggestions for further sessions are welcome. The deadline for pre-registration is May 1, 2005. A written version of the paper must be available before December 31 2005.

English is the official language of the conference.

For questions regarding the rural history network please contact Anton Schuurman (University of Wageningen) anton.schuurman@wur.nl or Miguel Cabo Villaverde (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) micavi@usc.es.

For questions regarding the Conference itself (accommodation, payment, etc.) visit the web address provided below, or contact Els Hiemstra at ehi@iisg.nl