Abstract
This book addresses the history of the Czech and Czechoslovak ministry of agriculture in the years 1938-1989. It offers a fresh perspective on the activities and operations of this department during the Second Republic, the Nazi occupation, and the Third Republic.
It also provides the first formulation of the history of the ministry under the communist dictatorship. The book looks in detail at the organizational structure of the department and describes the activities of its individual units.
It is a contribution to the history of state administration as well as to the history of agriculture. It analyses all the main processes that took place in Czech and Czechoslovak agriculture in the defined period as they were managed or fundamentally influenced by the ministry.
It describes the activities of individual agriculture ministers, while providing brief biographies of the most important ones, and it gives an overview of the work of other prominent employees at the department. It also mentions the most fundamental legal regulations that had a pivotal impact on the lives of farmers. Last but not least, the book strives to describe how the ministry's competences changed, how important the department was at individual periods, and which authorities it eventually became subject to.