{"title":"K. J. Saville-Smith, Provincial Society and Empire: the Cumbrian Counties and the East Indies, 1680–1829, Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2018, xvi + 296 pp., £65, 9781783272815","authors":"J. Beckett","doi":"10.1017/S0956793319000347","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793319000347","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44300,"journal":{"name":"Rural History-Economy Society Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"117 - 118"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0956793319000347","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46638779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Land reform in the Second Polish Republic","authors":"M. Błąd","doi":"10.1017/S0956793319000311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793319000311","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract When Poland was re-established as an independent state one hundred years ago, one of its political priorities was to implement a land reform, as the ‘agrarian question’ was an extremely sensitive socio-economic problem. In Poland at that time, two thirds of its inhabitants made their living by working in the agricultural sector. A ‘land craving’ phenomenon was notorious, as was rural poverty, especially among smallholders. On the other hand, almost half of the total area of farmland in the Second Polish Republic was held by huge landowners. The situation led to ever louder political calls for land redistribution to peasant smallholders. The Land Reform Implementation Act of 1920, and its amendment of 1925, laid legal foundations for land redistribution. By the Second World War, 2,654,800 hectares of land had undergone redistribution, as a result of which 734,100 new farms were established. However, this land reform did not achieve its goal, namely the empowering of efficient smaller farms, as quantitative analysis showed a continuing process of agricultural land fragmentation.","PeriodicalId":44300,"journal":{"name":"Rural History-Economy Society Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"97 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0956793319000311","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42685619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Steven King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s, Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019, xviii + 463 pp., £27, 9780773556485 hb; 9780773556452 pb","authors":"J. Innes","doi":"10.1017/S0956793319000293","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793319000293","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44300,"journal":{"name":"Rural History-Economy Society Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"115 - 116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0956793319000293","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49633668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ladybird landscapes: or, what to look for in the What to Look For books","authors":"J. Burchardt","doi":"10.1017/S095679331900030X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S095679331900030X","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The interlocking relationships between agriculture, nature, science and modernity underwent fundamental, far-reaching change in mid-twentieth-century Britain. This article examines Ladybird’s iconic, bestselling but under-researched ‘What to Look For’ seasonal natural history series, focusing particularly on the illustrations by the distinguished wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe and their relationship to the text by the biologist Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson. Beneath their apparent simplicity, the ‘What to Look For’ books attempt an ambitious, forwards-looking synthesis between mechanisation and tradition, nature and livelihood that calls into question historiographical critiques (by Newby, Miller and Bunce, for example) of contemporary representations of the rural as nostalgic and evasive. The ‘What to Look For’ books quietly subvert some of the more distorting tropes of English landscape representation. People are shown going about their everyday work (in contrast to the ‘landscape without figures’ tradition) and modern farm machinery such as tractors and seed drills are also acknowledged and even celebrated. Tunnicliffe and Grant Watson sought to harmonise these potentially discordant elements; their vision of the rural was an inclusive one that accommodated working women, children and even to some extent ethnic diversity. Yet in the second half of the twentieth century attempts to imagine a positive relationship between rurality and modernity such as Ladybird’s were increasingly undermined by escalating ecological crises.","PeriodicalId":44300,"journal":{"name":"Rural History-Economy Society Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"79 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S095679331900030X","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43112353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gentlemen regulators: landlord/tenant conflict and the making of moral economy in early nineteenth-century Ireland","authors":"T. Dunne","doi":"10.1017/S0956793320000011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793320000011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The central contention of this article is that early nineteenth-century Irish landlords were constrained in their ability to control their estates by the prospect of peasant resistance. The apex of that resistance took the form of what are generically known as whiteboy movements, and this article examines the impact of one particular such movement, the Whitefeet, active in the East Midlands and South-East in the early 1830s. The article argues that two forms of landlord versus tenant conflicts can be identified: an absolute form, in which landlords (or subletting rentiers called middlemen) behaved as if they had absolute rights over their properties and were the victims of retaliatory violence; and a negotiated form, in which landlords (or their agents) proceeded in a more restrained, and piecemeal fashion, and compromised in the face of opposition. The fact that the magistracy, at least in some instances, condemned the practitioners of absolute conflict would suggest that more measured approaches were the socially accepted norm, precisely because of the potential for retaliatory violence. The article will conclude with a discussion framing the foregoing in terms of moral economy. It will be argued that the balance between landlord power and tenant resistance created a grudging acceptance of respective rights.","PeriodicalId":44300,"journal":{"name":"Rural History-Economy Society Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"17 - 34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0956793320000011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41437221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perceptions of ‘normal’ climate in Queensland, Australia (1924–34)","authors":"M. Cook","doi":"10.1017/S0956793319000219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793319000219","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The concept of ‘normal’ climatic conditions reflects the complexities of human understandings of the environment. Scholarship on settler societies has explored how culture, science and state imperatives combine to construct a notion of ‘normal’ climate. This study of the Callide Valley settlement (1924–34) in northern Australia, draws on government propaganda, farmers’ submissions to a 1934 government inquiry and meteorological data to reveal the discrepancy between rainfall reality and expectations. Promised fertile soil, plentiful water and an ideal climate by the government, new settlers flocked to the Callide Valley, many without farming experience or knowledge of the region’s subtropical climate. Drought and flood soon challenged the promises of a bountiful climate. These confused understandings of a normal climate continue today to shape agriculture in central Queensland.","PeriodicalId":44300,"journal":{"name":"Rural History-Economy Society Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"63 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0956793319000219","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43805814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Bruno Esperante, Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, M. Cabo
{"title":"Old and new plants from the Americas to Europe: potatoes, corn and the genetics of double hybrid corn (1800–1940)","authors":"Bruno Esperante, Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, M. Cabo","doi":"10.1017/S0956793319000396","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793319000396","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract We discuss the extension of corn and potatoes in Galician Atlantic agriculture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an innovation process that facilitated rapid circulation of a new cattle feed from the Americas to Europe. Specifically, we focus on Galicia from 1890 to 1940, a time of significant scientific interest with regard to genetic improvements. This new science made it possible to develop double hybrid corn plants that became widespread after the 1920s. In this article we will describe the conditions accompanying the introduction and spread of these American crops, as recorded by modernist historiography, then analyse the institutional and social framework – knowledge networks, innovation systems and institutional and social tools – that enabled genetic advances in the twentieth century. To accomplish this, we must trace the journey of seeds and knowledge across the Atlantic from places such as the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (1918) to the Galician Biological Mission (1921), among others.","PeriodicalId":44300,"journal":{"name":"Rural History-Economy Society Culture","volume":"31 1","pages":"53 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0956793319000396","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47656635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}