In the course of recent years, Rural History (broadly defined) has begun to move away from both its predominantly national or local focus and its interpretation bias towards Europe and the Western world. This is a very healthy shift, which we mean to uphold by choosing the relations between old and new worlds as the core subject for this Conference. Such relations between civilisations and cultures across the globe have had multiple effects over the last 500 years on agriculture, property, natural resources and rural societies. They brought about the circulation of people, plants, animals and diseases; transfers of techniques, knowledge, institutions and juridical norms; changes in diet habits, land uses and landscapes; extensive appropriation and expropriation of landholding, land use and property rights; and changes in produce and factor markets (land, capital, labour) at a global scale. The growing keenness to research these global dynamics also drives some of the major theoretical, methodological and historiographical challenges now facing rural history. On the one hand, because such studies call for a wider dialogue among historians of several continents. On the other, because it tends to widen rural history from a specific disciplinary area into a broad research field, on which converge the interests of several other disciplines: from environmental to cultural history, from social to legal history, from economic history to the history of science, among others. The concern to open up and globalise research in rural history, in both the historical and the historiographical senses, drew the guideline for this international conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, hosted by ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon), on the 27th to the 30th of January, 2016, and which simultaneously harboured the V Encontro Rural RePort (Rede de História Rural em Português) and the XV Congreso de Historia Agraria de la SEHA (Sociedad Española de Historia Agraria).

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