Research has emphasised the stability in female landholding between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite demographic shocks and fundamental economic changes. However, in this period, a new type of land exploitation emerges: leasehold. This article wants to introduce a gender perspective into the history of leasehold. It investigates women’s activities on the lease market in late medieval and sixteenth-century Flanders, a region where short-term and competitive leasehold spread early and widely. An analysis of the actual practice, making use of landlords’ manuals and accounts, demonstrates women’s decreasing participation at the lease market. Moreover, their marital status increasingly mattered: from the beginning of the fifteenth century only widows could hold land. This article also demonstrates that, next to marital status, the size of the holding had a marked influence on women’s opportunities. Finally, these results invite us to rethink the grounds of women’s growing participation at the labour market in post-Black Death Europe, since especially single women lost access to land, particularly to land offered on the lease market.

The study considers the economics of the oil palm (Elaeis guinensis) to rural farmers in a rural community in south-eastern Nigeria. It compares the economic benefits of all products of the oil palm industry – palm oil, palm kernel, timber, palm wine and brooms. It posits that the most important product of the oil palm to the Enugu Ezike farmer is oil palm wine. This contrasts with the view that holds palm oil and palm kernel as the chief products of the oil palm. In a study conducted in Enugu Ezike, findings reveal that annual revenue from palm wine surpasses the six-yearly income from palm oil, palm kernel and brooms together. The study employs an eclectic framework of data collection, involving oral interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, and the use of secondary sources. The oil palm is by every standard the most economically important tree crop and proceeds from it have positively influenced the socio-economic life of the rural communities, and as a result it has improved their living conditions.

This article provides an object lesson in the history of the longue durée, reflected in the comprehensive filthiness of rural life in the nineteenth century. Political upheaval had not changed the material conditions of peasant existence or sensibilities relating to hygiene. Economic revolution had as yet made no practical difference to the dirtiness of daily life. Peasants under the Second Empire lived much as they had under the Old Regime – in dark, damp houses with no conveniences, cheek by jowl with the livestock. Their largely unwashed bodies were wrapped in largely unchanged clothes. Babies were delivered with germ-covered hands, drank spoilt milk from dirty bottles, and spent their young days swaddled like mummies and marinating like teriyaki. The Third Republic set out to ‘civilize’ the rural masses, but this snapshot of material life in the nineteenth-century French countryside illustrates just how much work lay in front of it.

Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others, as were farmers on fertile plains and, in 1900, those living in coastal areas. Increased market access – in terms of cities and foreign demand – meant that farmers well placed in terms of geography and infrastructure benefited much more than farmers on what became the periphery. The diversity of farmers’ wealth grew, as did their financial sophistication.

State control over Greece’s agricultural institutions increased during Metaxas’s authoritarian regime (1936–41). Analysing such state control allows us to address, in the Greek context, two questions with regard to fascist agrarian regimes. First, considering the trajectory of agricultural policy before the emergence of these regimes, how much of what they did was new, and how much was not? Second, how did the cadres of agricultural specialists participate in, or at least accommodate, the new regimes? Our research shows that Metaxas received support from the agronomists who had been active in Greece under previous liberal administrations. Such support did not take the form of laudatory statements or ideology-driven activism. It was rather a discreet acceptance of the new circumstances, combined with defection from one’s previous political camp. Metaxas’s dictatorship inherited most traits that made it a fascist agricultural regime from previous liberal administrations.

This article explores the visual culture of rural improvement in Germany, manifested in agricultural exhibitions, model farms and test plots. It argues that, following the English example, nineteenth-century experts increasingly believed that such material sites were the most effective way to persuade small farmers to embrace change and increase productivity. The presumption was that farmers were habitually keen observers who preferred to learn by seeing and that visual displays would alleviate their characteristic mistrust and build confidence in scientific advisers. The fact that these efforts coincided with the professionalisation of agronomy, the increased influence of scientists in rural policymaking and the rise of elite agricultural institutions revises the existing narrative of the spread of agricultural knowledge in Germany. Based on archival evidence from north-western Prussia, it is clear that many small cultivators responded enthusiastically to these sites, defying stereotypes of ‘dull-wittedness’ and ingrained suspicion of the new.

This article focuses on the way that staff and guardians in the rural Nottinghamshire workhouse of Southwell sought to exert control and containment over pauper inmates. Fusing together local and central records for the period 1834–71, including locally held punishment books and correspondence at The National Archives, Kew (TNA), we argue that the notional power of the workhouse authorities was heavily shaded. Most paupers most of the time did not find their behaviour heavily and clumsily controlled. Rather, staff focused their attention in terms of detecting and punishing disorderly behaviour on a small group of long-term and often mentally ill paupers whose actions might create enmities or spiral into larger conflicts and dissent in the workhouse setting. Both inmates and those under threat of workhouse admission would have seen or heard about punishment of ‘the usual characters’. This has important implications for how we understand the intent and experience of the New Poor Law up to the formation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871.

This article examines the role of particular ideas of the countryside in unemployment relief schemes. While interwar thinking on the countryside has received attention, it has not been examined in the specific context of unemployment relief. This article uses four case studies from North East England, namely the Team Valley Trading Estate (Gateshead), Hamsterley Forest Instructional Centre (Durham), Swarland model village (Northumberland) and Heartbreak Hill (Cleveland). All four projects took different approaches to the unemployment problem, but all used some form of rural rhetoric. The ways in which the projects deployed images of the countryside creatively recombined a wide range of ideas to suit their needs rather than being rigidly confined by particular schools of thought.

The civilian food shortages and accompanying malnutrition that characterised the latter stages of the First World War were instrumental in fundamentally changing the course of European history. In Russia, food shortages were a key underlying factor in precipitating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, while in Germany, food shortages led to the so-called ‘turnip winter’ of 1917, which effectively helped to undermine commitment to the war effort and contribute to the country’s defeat. In spite of Britain’s precarious dependence on imported food, and the shipping losses inflicted by German U-boats, the population was less badly affected. This achievement has been attributed to the work undertaken by Lord Rhondda, the second food controller, whose actions were characterised as the ‘heroic age of food control’. This article uses evidence from official government reports, newspapers and diaries, memoirs and biographies to challenge the prevailing historiography about the success of food control measures in Britain during the First World War. It shows that the Ministry of Food under Lord Rhondda’s period of tenureship was not only indecisive, but that efforts to save the nation from malnutrition, if not actual starvation, were in large part the result of initiatives implemented at the local level.

This article deals with the postwar confrontation of the rural and the urban in Poland. It sheds light on a time of mass migration to the cities and the postwar reconstruction in Central Europe, heading towards state-socialism, and focuses on official discourses concerning peasants as new social and political subjects and the intelligentsia’s response to rural newcomers. A testing ground for these processes was the Polish city of Łódź, the biggest textile industrial centre.

These processes became the subject of both journalistic and academic inquiries framed by political efforts to reshape the ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor) through the state’s ‘socialist modernization’. Along with the scale of migration, there was another unprecedented aspect: peasants were becoming citizens, recognised political subjects, later even as privileged representatives of the People’s Republic. The postwar press and political speeches encouraged them to become a part of the modernisation project. Almost immediately, counter-narratives followed and lamented the newcomers’ ‘improper’ uses of the city. The term ‘ruralisation of the city’ was coined to describe the misuses of urban spaces, a moral decline and even the negative influence of peasants on the urban working class.

The collective management of irrigation is an essential factor in agrarian development, both present and past. However, the relationship of irrigation associations with the state remains underexplored, despite the increasingly important role played by water policies in the modern world. The present article examines this relationship in Spain over the last two centuries. Our results suggest that, first, the state played a decisive part in the emergence and evolution of irrigation associations, and this belies the assumption of the traditional origin of these institutions; second, that farmers, despite being subject to the regulatory framework, enjoyed substantial autonomy in the management of water resources; and, third, that the relationship between local associations and the state changed over time, in response to political regime changes and the transformation of irrigation agriculture. When the state tried to impose authoritarian policies upon irrigation users, these reacted by developing unprecedented forms of organisation.

The ‘Super Grid’ network of high-voltage power lines transformed the landscapes of England and southern Scotland in the 1950s. This article examines debates over the siting of pylons, with a focus on the public inquiries into the proposed lines across the Pennines in Lancashire. It brings together archives on electrification from the newly nationalised British Electricity Authority, preservationist groups and local government to reveal deeper insights into processes of local and national decision-making about and popular attitudes to the rural landscape. It uncovers how the public inquiries exposed tensions and differences about the definition of amenity, not just between the electricity industry and preservationists, but also between interests representing urban industrial districts and the National Parks, northern and southern England, and within the preservationist movement. The conflicts over pylons and amenity shows how narratives of landscape preservation were contested and riven with class, region and economic differences in the postwar period.

This article examines coastal defence in East Norfolk between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1802 until 1932 sea defence between Happisburgh and Winterton was the responsibility of the Commissioners of Sewers for the Eastern Hundreds of Norfolk, more commonly known as the Sea Breach Commission (SBC). This article explores the geographies of authority shaping sea defence, with the SBC a body whose relationship to the local and national state could be uneasy. The article outlines the SBC’s nineteenth-century roles and routines, and examines its relationship to outside expertise, including its early hiring of geologist William Smith. The article reviews challenges to the SBC’s authority following late nineteenth-century flood events, details its early twentieth-century routines, and examines disputes over development on the sandhills. The article details the SBC’s dealings with an emerging national ‘nature state’, around issues such as coastal erosion and land drainage, matters which led to the SBC’s demise following the 1930 Land Drainage Act. The article concludes by considering the SBC’s contemporary resonance in a time of challenges to the role of the nature state, and anxieties over coastal defence.