The underdevelopment of agriculture was an important subject during the negotiations for Romania’s accession to the European Union. The problem of backwardness in rural areas is, however, far from new and during the twentieth century several agrarian reforms attempted to resolve it. In order to determine the causes of their failure, this volume focuses on a region in the South-Eastern part of Romania, and investigates the activity of three sets of social actors directly involved in agricultural policy: the national elites, who formulated the modernisation programmes, the administration, who implemented them, and the peasants, who had to deal with their effects. The book covers a period of ninety years, from 1917 until 2007, and attempts to determine the long-term results of modernisation policies.