Forced labour was central to the provision of public infrastructure in African colonies. Whereas current historiography focuses on the role of external drivers, such as humanitarian organizations or the Forced Labour Convention of 1930, in triggering change, no attention has been paid to the local initiatives that contributed to the end of forced labour. This article explores the transition to paid voluntary labour in the context of road building and maintenance in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, a region where incentives to resort to compulsion were very high due to the lack of alternative sources of revenue to finance public works. The article shows that movements away from forced labour were shaped by local conditions, and rural populations played a crucial part in the shifts in labour relations.

In this article we study the distinct formative stages of the labour market for external wet nurses employed by Galician foundling hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. We focus on changes in the nature of wet nurses’ work due to the benevolence laws (1822, 1836, 1849) that were driven by Spain’s liberal state. We also examine wet nurses’ socio-demographic profile and the geographic distribution of their labour markets. Finally, we explore the economic impact that Galician foundling hospitals had on rural districts, looking closely at the importance of external wet nurse wages for family budgets.

This study looks at the role of hiking in the development and the identity of a French region. Both rural and agricultural, Brittany saw a reorganisation of its territory during the 1970s, partly due to activities such as hiking. By becoming a political focus, the activity contributed to making paths, only previously used for field labour, a tool for territorial development. It also rejuvenated Brittany’s regional identity as it explored a forgotten heritage. The course of action adopted aimed to bring new populations, particularly urban ones, to rural areas. Behind the attention focused on paths, as an essential requirement for hiking, lay a concern for environmental and social sustainability with effects on lifestyles, tourism, and the shaping of a region in transition.

Our article conducts a critical reassessment of one of the most influential cultural myths in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nationalist definition of peasantry as embodying the quintessence of the nation. In order to evaluate the imagological scope and ideological implications engendered by this so-called ‘people-nation myth’, we focus on the Romanian culture, whom we consider fully representative for the Eastern European context. More exactly, our study employs a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century, precisely the literary subgenre supposed to reflect the coalescence between the peasantry and the nation. By analysing the co-occurrences in these novels between words belonging to the vocabularies of nation and rurality, we aim at showing that – contrary to traditional historiographic consensus – nation building has less to do with language or ethnicity, and much more to do with social emancipation.

La Verge de Montserrat is a statue of the Virgin Mary and her son found in Catalonia in the eleventh century in which both characters are depicted as “Black.” This female figure occupies a particular position in current Catalonia since she is considered the patron saint of the country and constitutes one of the symbolic cornerstones of Catalan nationalism. Through the concept of “iconic path,” this article tracks the formation and evolution of this image in Catalonia from its inception until the present day, bringing special attention to the roles and significances that it has acquired within the context of the current pro-independence movement. We also draw a comparison between the “lives” of this image in Catalonia and its development in other countries, namely Puerto Rico, Equatorial Guinea and Sardinia. In each of these places, the image of the goddess has been reinterpreted according to local viewpoints. Yet these conceptualizations are not fixed or homogeneous, but radically dynamic and problematic. The iconic paths of images diverge and converge across time giving birth to new creative exercises. Through this approach, our aim is to propose a relational and processual model for the study of religious images, and images in general, as historical objects.

Sovereignty always relies on a double movement of violence and care. It requires the power to exercise violence as well as the capacity to care, to protect, and to nourish. In the footsteps of Foucault and Agamben, numerous scholars have rediscovered the same paradox in philosophical and legal texts. Anthropologists writing about informal and practical sovereignty pay attention to violence, but sometimes ignore the importance of care for the exercise of sovereignty. Against such tendencies to focus on texts and on violence, this article deals with sovereignty as care. The concrete examples are the relationships of care between commanders, soldiers, and villagers in the Wa State of Myanmar, a de-facto state governed by an insurgent army. In the absence of an effective government bureaucracy, popular sovereignty in this military state relies on a particular logic of personal relations, in which care is central. Subordinates have to care about leaders, whereas leaders are supposed to care for subordinates. Care provides the balance and foil for the exercise of violence, and both are necessary for the exercise of sovereignty. The combination of violence and care in personal relations is scaled up to create “the people” as the subject and object of sovereignty. The article describes the logic of personal relations that allows for the exercise of popular sovereignty in the Wa State and elsewhere.

This article discusses Costa Rica’s policies and institutions created by the state to redistribute land during the 1960s and 1970s, when Latin American was implementing agrarian reforms. The paper also addresses the creation of the national parks system and forest conservation state policy supported by different scientific organisations during the same period. Within this context, this research seeks to explore the interface between the agrarian question (surrounding land and agrarian reform) and the ecological question (related to forest, national parks and conservation policies). The study examines how the transformations in land tenure and forest conservation have led to the structuring of a ‘new agrarian question’, which encompasses the concentration of land as well as the concentration of payments for environmental services.

Female day labourers regularly appear in the accounts of capitalist Flemish farmers throughout the eighteenth century. Their persistent employment challenges the dominant view that female day labour was marginalised in areas of agrarian capitalism across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hitherto unexplored accounts of nine capitalist farms reveal the seasonal employment patterns, sexual division of labour and wages of those female day labourers in Flanders. While spring weeding was an important source of employment, women also continued to be hired during the harvest and for the cultivation of labour-intensive crops. Throughout the century, female day wages amounted to 0.4–0.73 of male wages. Women were excluded from well-paid tasks, but equal rates for equal work do not suggest wage discrimination in the strictest sense. The Flemish accounts thus reinforce the idea that female day labour persisted in areas with labour-intensive agriculture and alternative employment opportunities.

Maulana Ashraf `Ali Thanawi, a reformist Islamic scholar, was very much part of his times in his urgent concern with women’s potential role in individual and societal “improvement,” the goal of the enormously successful encyclopedic work that included the chapter considered here. Thanawi’s teachings included generic elite male “best practices” on health and ethics, undergirded by Greco-Arabic humoral medicine in its Indian form. His text caught a historical moment when medical treatments were more craft than industrial, and when the professionalization of discrete Muslim and Hindu “systems” of Unani Tibb and Ayurveda, with Ayurveda increasingly incorporated into majoritarian Hindu nationalism, was only incipient. Health maintenance in Thanawi’s hands was a matter of empowering women to both spiritual and practical competence and responsibility, freeing them from resort to (as he saw it) quacks, ignorant midwives, and untrained women, along with dubious healers and holy men, Muslim or Hindu or any other. In its description of challenges, strategies, and resources related to health, his text offers a window into women’s everyday world. But it also raises comparative questions about the history of medicine, the history of emotions, ethnicity in a colonial context, and the potentially empowering implications of Islamic socio-religious reform for women.

A determined expansion in the productive capacity of Spanish agriculture was a fundamental and contentious objective during the crisis of the country’s ancien régime and the formation of the liberal state, in the years of transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this study we examine a fundamental reorientation that occurred in an ambitious project for the expansion of irrigation in the region of Valencia. In this region, characterised by a well-rooted commercial agriculture, the original scheme, initiated by an enlightened aristocrat well connected with the royal court, would be profoundly altered in the transition from one political regime to another. The irrigated area increased much more than had been anticipated, and very diverse sections of the social hierarchy eventually benefited from this agricultural expansion. In contrast, the control exercised over the irrigation canal by the aristocrat himself would be increasingly questioned in the context of the nineteenth century.