The article seeks to determine the causes of the agrarian debt in rural Switzerland since the First World War and illustrate this growing phenomena in the 1920s and 1930s, by correlating the increase to the costs of the change in production beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, to the cut in the prices of agricultural products and the parallel depreciation of the soil after the war. After having outlined the effects of indebtedness reflected in the increase in the number of distraints, the article focuses on the political responses put in place to ensure the smooth running of mortgage loans – integrated since 1930 into a system of guarantees designed to limit the risks for creditors. The bill of the federal government intended to promote agricultural debt relief was long put off by some political circles, preferring to step in with precise measures, such as credit payments and extraordinary subsidies.

This article discusses the research potential of rubbish dumps for the study of rural household market access during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By investigating the global commodity networks associated with four rubbish dumps excavated by the authors in the East Anglian region, at Hempstead (Norfolk), Kirton and Falkenham (Suffolk) and Holme Hale (Norfolk), the article will show how these archives can be used to locate individual rural households within the international capitalist system. This article also discusses the potential challenges faced when analysing the historic rubbish dump archives.

Agricultural credit organisations are paramount to every country because agriculture must operate under threats of risk and uncertainty. When small-scale family farms are dominant, all types of agricultural organisations become important to keep farmers’ incomes at a reasonable level and encourage agricultural development. Midhat Pasha understood the importance of agricultural organisations, and he created a well-designed system for agricultural credit. He is the founder of Homeland Coffers that distribute credits to farmers. The original side of these credit organisations was capital accumulation and the methods of using it. Capital for these Coffers were provided by the joint actions of credit users. Midhat Pasha connected two cooperatives while the production cooperative provided capital for Homeland Coffers, they operated as a credit cooperative for twenty-five years in the Ottoman Empire. This credit organisation helped development of agriculture and provided many social benefits to the rural area.

This article examines the role of manorial courts in early modern Lancashire in the regulation of mobility through order making in relation to inmates. The period under consideration is c. 1550–c. 1660. Four aspects of their operation are considered: the volume of court business dealing with issues of mobility, the quality of court orders regulating it, the place of the manor court in the topography of local governance and aspects of continuity and change in the courts’ functioning in the period. Manorial courts are shown to be active and innovative constituents of the local administrative landscape, exercising a role wider than merely the imposition of seigneurial interest and control.

Taking J. A. Baker's celebrated book The Peregrine as its focus, the article seeks to locate Baker's writing within a broader, less elevated field of postwar observation and publication that worked to shape new ways of understanding, apprehending and taking pleasure from the natural environment. This included the recording practices and publications of the national and county naturalist and birdwatching societies that flourished in these years. The article shows how Baker's book was as much the product of this world of organised amateur natural history as it was of the world of high literature. Baker's book also sheds light on the reconfiguring of bird-human relations within competing postwar cultures of nature and the article uses it to explore the relationship between birdwatching and the bird-centred field sport of falconry. As organised birdwatching sought to establish moral authority over other bird-centred countryside pursuits in its understanding of natural relations, it cast field sports and other countryside practices as atavistic and archaic relics of older cultures of nature. Baker's The Peregrine allows us to see the convergences between the close attention to birds of prey and an intimacy with them that was shared by birdwatchers like Baker and falconers, even as Baker's narrative also sheds light on the differences between the two practices.

The now extensive historiography of the ‘Captain Swing’ disturbances of 1830–1 contains two notable lacunae. Firstly, no thorough investigation has been undertaken of their first major episode, the ‘Sevenoaks Fires’ of summer 1830. Secondly, the overwhelming historiographical focus on Swing's perpetrators has ignored its victims almost entirely. This article therefore examines why particular farmers were singled out for incendiary attack in the area, what tactics they and the authorities employed in response and what that meant for social relations subsequently. The evidence reveals a trend towards greater accountability on the part of the elite and a growing confidence sometimes shown by the lower orders in challenging them. It does so, moreover, within an overarching framework of risk and risk transfer, since this provides an entirely new historiographical perspective on both the Fires and Swing generally. Finally, this approach is extended to suggest how it may have underpinned competing conceptions of Poor Law provision among the town's elite, post-Swing.

This article begins from the premise that the margins can shine light on the center, and uses the experience of Jews (thought of as marginal in the Islamic world) in Moroccan courts (similarly thought of as marginal in Islamic history) to tell a new story about orality and writing in Islamic law. Using archival evidence from nineteenth-century Morocco, I argue that, contrary to the prevailing historiography, written evidence was central to procedure in Moroccan shari‘a courts. Records of nineteenth-century lawsuits between Jews and Muslims show that not only were notarized documents regularly submitted in court, but they could outweigh oral testimony, traditionally thought of as the gold standard of evidence in Islam. The evidentiary practices of Moroccan shari‘a courts are supported by the jurisprudential literature of the Mālikī school of Sunni Islam, the only one prevalent in Morocco. These findings have particular relevance for the experience of non-Muslims in Islamic legal institutions. Scholars have generally assumed that Jews and Christians faced serious restrictions in their ability to present evidence in shari‘a courts, since they could not testify orally against Muslims. However, in Morocco Jews had equal access to notarized documents, and thus stood on a playing field that, theoretically at least, was level with their Muslim neighbors. More broadly, I explore ways in which old assumptions about the relationship of the written to the oral continue to pervade our understanding of Islamic law, and call for an approach that breaks down the dichotomy between writing and orality.

What explains the remarkable metamorphosis of elites from warrior nobilities into well-mannered aristocrats in early modern Europe? Existing accounts emphasize the coercive force of emerging states or the novel enticements of royal courts. Well suited to the paradigmatic case of early modern France, such arguments fail to explain cases, like England, in which elites developed pacified lifestyles in the absence of a dominant royal court and largely prior to the monopolization of physical force. This essay shows that explaining such cases requires greater attention to the historical variability of elites’ own interests and strategies. I argue that European elites (also) developed pacified lifestyles insofar as they came to reproduce themselves through strategies that operated without their personal use of physical violence (including, but not limited to, royal courts). Such strategies were contingent on varying configurations of inter-elite and elite–non-elite relations. I employ this perspective to explain the marginalization of violent skills and codes in the lifestyles of early modern English elites, focusing empirically on the practice of hunting, a defining ritual of elite lifestyles. The hunting evidence suggests that the landed gentry were the first English elite to develop a pacified lifestyle. Yet the gentry were neither subject to the coercion of a centralized state nor incorporated into a court society. Instead, I show that the gentry—and later, the nobility and monarchy—developed pacified lifestyles because they came to reproduce themselves through legal strategies, the successful performance of which required nonviolent skills and habits.

West Africans have a long history of investing in their children's education by sending them to Britain. Yet, some young British-Nigerians are being sent to Nigeria for secondary education, going against a long historical grain. The movement of children from London to Nigeria is about the making of good subjects who possess particular cultural dispositions and behave in such a manner as to ensure educational success and the reproduction of middle-class subjectivities within neoliberal globalization. We maintain that this movement highlights the way in which global geographies of power—rooted in a colony-metropole divide—are being challenged and reconfigured, serving to provincialize the UK, through the educational choices that Nigerian parents make for their children. Such small acts disrupt imagined geographies and particular spatial and temporal configurations of progress and modernity, in which former colonial subjects have traveled to the metropole for education, while generating counter-narratives about Nigerian education, society, and economy. Yet, the methods used to instill new dispositions and habits in the contemporary Nigerian educational context are informed by the British educational colonial legacy of discipline through corporal punishment—physical punishment was central to the civilizing mission of British colonial educational policy. Consequently, the choice to send children to school in Nigeria and other African countries both challenges global geographies of power and illuminates the continued relevance of the colonial educational legacy and its disciplinary strategies, which are, in turn, part of the broader project of modernity itself.