The workhouse remains a totemic institution for social historians, yet we still know very little about the day-to-day experiences of the indoor poor. Nowhere is this clearer than in discussions about workhouse clothing, which remain overwhelmingly negative in the literature and consistent with the predominant view of the workhouse as a place of suffering and humiliation. Yet more often than not, this view is based on relatively shallow empirical foundations and tends to rely on anecdotal evidence or on the uncritical use of subjective sources such as photographs, newspaper editorials and other cultural products. This article takes a different approach by looking again at the whole range of meanings that workhouse clothing held for paupers and those who oversaw its allocation, and at the practical and symbolic usages to which it was put by them. On the basis of this evidence the authors argue that, contrary to the orthodox view, workhouse clothing was rarely intended to be degrading or stigmatising; that it would have held very different meanings for different classes of paupers; and that, far from being a source of unbridled misery, paupers often found it to be a source of great strategic and practical value.

The article describes the conduct of land reform by the communist regime of People’s Poland. The land reform fitted into the wave of analogous reforms carried out in the other communist countries of Eastern Europe. It was based on the Decree of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) of 6th September 1944, which provided for subdividing landowners’ estates exceeding fifty hectares among peasants, such as small farmers, landless people and fornals. The article discusses problems faced by the founders of the reform and institutional measures applied in order to execute the Decree. Despite numerous obstacles, the reform was carried out quite efficiently and its effects were marked (6,070,100 hectares of landowners’ property was subdivided among 1,068,400 farms). However, those results were to a great extent possible due to the application of regime measures towards landowners (expropriation without compensation, arrests, and even capital punishment). Regarded as a crime and an atrocity by the landowners, for peasants the land reform was a blessing, which can be concluded from the recollections of both groups concerned, which are cited in the article. Despite its efficiency, the land reform did not manage to improve the agrarian structure in Poland, for it caused land dispersion and an increase of the number and the landed share of small farms.

Ronald Blythe is often seen as Britain’s finest living rural writer. He has published over thirty books, some of them, like Akenfield and The View in Winter, widely acknowledged as classics, inspiring a film and follow-up books by others. His literary output has been extraordinary: novels, short stories, poetry, rural documentary writing, oral history, ‘parish’ writing, religious books, his own autobiographical work (among a remarkable milieu of creative people), and historical studies ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. He has also edited a great range of authors and types of writing. Ronald Blythe is especially an East Anglian author, writing about that English region, in whose work the local and the religious are often to the fore. As this famous author approaches one hundred years of age, this article is a forthright academic appreciation of his work, a discussion of its themes and impressive variety, and an analysis of the meanings and importance of his writing to modern readerships.

The cultivation of maize for human consumption started to spread through the Cantabrian region around the end of the sixteenth century. The adoption of the new crop was encouraged by the advent of the Little Ice Age, and the resulting crisis of subsistence, which forced Cantabrian peasants and farmers to search for alternatives to wheat. The importance of maize increased steadily and by the nineteenth century it had become the most important crop grown in the region. This had a number of economic and demographic consequences. In particular, it allowed peasants to produce a surplus that enabled them to become more involved in local and regional markets, providing an essential profit for otherwise precarious farm economies; and it encouraged such markets to become more integrated and more flexible in character. This article explores these issues by focusing on the case of Gipuzkoa, an area with a large amount of previously unused documentary sources.

Language used in depositions in colonial New South Wales shows a mobile non-Aboriginal society of close surveillance, rumour and informing. This derived from the convict system. In response to this there was considerable play with marking and markers, including the widespread use of nicknames and emphasis on personal space. Outside of this was the dreamlike realm of entertainment to be had in public houses, Aboriginal camps and Chinese tents at the diggings. Aboriginal politics was present at all of these places but Aboriginal camps were also places of considerable danger.

This article is an analysis of the influence of blacksmiths, and saw and grain millers on the development of Puritan communities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1660. During this period these artisans played a significant role in defining the physical form of the rural Puritan town and its economic development, without intent and in a social and cultural climate where they were often disliked and distrusted. This article focuses on the impacts of these manufacturers on the formation and physical character of Puritan communities in New England.

It can be argued, based upon a limited range of surviving evidence, that the land-locked centre of Buchan formed a distinctive upland zone functioning alongside and interwoven with the surrounding lower lands during the thirteenth century. The area can be characterised as less densely settled and engaged in extensive pastoral farming regimes that contrasted with contemporary arable farming of a more intensive nature on the lower-lying lands. Subsequent demographic and agricultural changes have rendered that former environment invisible and the limited documentary sources of the thirteenth century have compounded its mystery. Although a relatively remote upland area, its economy was at least as successful per capita than the rich grain lands surrounding it. Rather than representing a place of secondary importance, it may well have been instrumental in fuelling Aberdeen’s rich thirteenth-century export trade of sheep products to the Low Countries and, perhaps, shared a symbiotic relationship with the lower, arable lands.

The research presented in this article concerns common rights to cattle grazing on common lands and manorial properties in nineteenth-century Austrian Galicia. The findings – obtained by analysing sources from archives and libraries in what is now Ukraine – shed light on the right of peasants and townspeople to graze cattle, along with the circumstances and sources of mass social antagonisms. The rich archival resources permitted a representative group of sources concerning each type of existing conflict to be chosen. The key research problems addressed in this article are the sources for a variety of disputes and their impact on relations between the main social groups and people’s standard of living, the processes of pauperisation and modernisation, and the consequences of abolishing these common rights.

Climate change across West Africa has provoked recurrent herdsmen–farmer clashes in the subregion. In Nigeria, the frequency and magnitude of the clashes and the resultant destruction of lives and property has become a cause for concern to both government and citizens. This is especially so because of the danger it poses to society and national security. Accordingly, the need for a close study of the problem can hardly be over-emphasised. This study historicises this unsavoury phenomenon in Nigeria as well as its social and economic cost to society. The research contends that the activities of the herdsmen in various Nigerian communities represent a contest between the values the nomads attach to their cattle and the farmers, to their crops/land. These values were overheated by the political undercurrent in Nigeria in recent times. Our study shows that, contrary to insinuations that herdsmen rein all the havoc in most Nigerian communities, some were the handiwork of criminals; hence, religious and ethnic bigots who have taken advantage of the crisis. Our analysis is partly descriptive and quantitative, and is based on secondary data and information culled from direct interviews from the field, as well as newspaper reportage.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Romanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia experienced a series of modernising reforms, some of them concerning the agrarian regime. The enforcement of the Organic Statues in the 1830s attempted to reform the political and economic life of the principalities, but it favoured the big landowners, at the expense of the peasantry. The agrarian reform enacted in 1864 put an end to serfdom and granted the right to own land to former corvée peasants. It was soon followed by the appropriation for the newlyweds, a law that offered land to newly married peasants in order to settle them in low populated rural areas. Population growth triggered a new demand for agricultural land because the big landowners still controlled approximately two thirds of the arable land. As a result, in 1881 and 1889 the state passed two laws concerning the sale of public domains to the peasantry, attempting to improve their standard of living. This article focuses on the process of rural colonisation, which took place at the end of the nineteenth century after the sale of state-owned estates to the peasants. Using data extracted from official statistics the article analyses, from a spatial point of view, the creation of a series of new settlements in low populated but fertile regions of the country. Finally, the article investigates how, at that time, this rural colonisation was perceived by peasants, politicians and rural sociologists.

Poverty is the consequence of not having sufficient income to sustain lives and ways of life. While there are many papers addressing poverty in today’s Poland, no comprehensive study was done to explain and describe rural poverty also in a historical aspect. Therefore, this article attempts to synthetically identify the patterns and particularities of rural poverty in Poland between the wars, and to present the multifaceted and diverse nature of Polish poverty in the initial years of national independence. The authors’ main objective is to indicate the changes in the scope of Polish poverty and to describe the adaptive mechanisms and the discomfort involved in the depreciation of needs. Before independence, the situation varied across the Polish territory. The relatively worst socio-economic conditions were experienced in Galicia due to absence of non-agricultural activities. The population of Prussian rural areas found themselves in a more advantageous situation because of industrial development and working outside agriculture. The situation of peasants was exacerbated by the destructive and resource-draining First World War, whereas rural misery was made even worse by the combination of unemployment and underdevelopment of the country. In the Second Polish Republic, the situation of the rural population did not improve even though the country made great progress at that time. Note that rural poverty varied across employee groups, with cultural and lifestyle differences, limited competences and passive attitudes playing an important role.

After the First World War, agricultural work became a subject of intense interdisciplinary scientific inquiry. The shortage of agricultural labour, the nutritional and agricultural crises and the increasing significance of the movement for the rationalisation of work contributed to the creation of new scientific institutions that focused on the study and improvement of agricultural work. This contribution sketches the emergence and development of the science of agricultural work in Europe from the 1920s to the 1960s and explores the intellectual controversies sparked by the attempts to shape farm work along the model of industrial manufacturing. The frictions and tensions between industrial ideals and agricultural idiosyncrasies not only led to a new scientific treatment of agricultural work, but also created a field of contestation between different conceptual approaches to perceiving, analysing and transforming agricultural work in the age of industrial capitalism.

Cuba is a paradigmatic case where the term and concept of the peasantry remains of lived importance. Cuban peasants had a significant role in the past as they did return to the political agenda after the Revolution with particular emphasis under Raul Castro’s administration. However, the Cuban case has not been significantly explored from a long-term perspective that connects the old debates and dimensions of land reforms under developmentalist states to the new agrarian questions in the global era. Based on secondary sources, semi-structured interviews and updated data on land structures, this article explores the long-term process of land reform in Cuba.