Guðmundur Jónsson, ed., Ástand Íslands um 1700. Lífshættir í bændasamfélagi [The State of Iceland at the Turn of the 18th Century: Economic and Social Conditions in Peasant Society] (Reykjavík: Sögufélag, 2024). 442 pp.

Iceland, unlike many other northern and western European countries, did not experience an agricultural revolution in early modernity.As Gumundur Jnsson notes in the introduction to The State of Iceland, Iceland was the only European country that did not undergo sustained population growth in the 1700s (p.12).Consequently, historians of early modern Icelandic rural society and economy have at times been preoccupied with examining what impeded breakthroughs and progress, rather than studying Icelandic early modern society on its own terms.The State of Iceland takes a different approach.This work is the product of a research project based on an extraordinary set sources produced by a research commission consisting of the philologist rni Magnsson and lawyer Pll Vdaln.Starting in 1702, the commission conducted a population census, a livestock census, and a national register of estates.The resulting book provides readers with a detailed and wide-ranging account of Icelandic peasant society at the turn of the eighteenth century, enriched at times with comparative examples from neighbouring countries.A central theme is the effort to correct and redefine older depictions of early modern Iceland, which portrayed it as a homogenous group of poor but free peasants.As such, the aim of the book is not to answer causal questions about political or economic development, but rather to provide a reliable crosssection of early eighteenth-century Icelandic society.The first two chapters of the book are an introduction, written by Gumundur Jnsson, and a discussion of its sources.In chapter 3, Sigrur Hjrds Jrundsdttir relates the Icelandic hardships of the late seventeenth century to hemispheric climatic cooling cause by the eruption