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.

Yaupon (the unfortunately named Ilex vomitoria) is a holly commonly used as yard décor in the southeast United States, but many North Americans will be surprised to learn that it is the source of a stimulant tea that has been in continuous use for nearly a millennium. Yaupon is more than a drink; it is a window into questions of identity, community belonging, and how the New World was inserted into the global economy. From Cabeza de Vaca's sixteenth-century brush with the beverage, yaupon has iterated between ceremony, medicine, and caffeinated tea as inhabitants of North America—Indigenous, enslaved, and settler colonial inhabitants of North America—have harnessed the leaf's properties to different, culturally situated aims. This article traces narratives, recipes, and medical descriptions of yaupon from contact to the present, and compares these against material and archeological records to explore differences between settler and extractive colonial encounters with Indigenous psychoactive substances (and thus indigeneity). The story of yaupon reveals contests between regimes of knowledge, the political economy of colonialisms, and the fraught intersections of identity and cuisine. Despite abundant ethnographic, documentary, and scientific evidence to the contrary, the scientific and medical literature long mislabeled yaupon as emetic. This raises questions about how knowledge is transferred and how scientific authority is constructed. I argue that indigeneity, race, and class have steered how yaupon has been understood, and help to explain why a popular caffeinated product waned at a time when the use of stimulants was increasing, and “proletarian hunger-killers” were on the rise.

What do Christians do when they read? How can Christian reading be understood anthropologically? Anthropologists of Christianity have offered many ethnographic descriptions of the interplay among people, words, and material objects across Christian groups, but descriptions of Christian reading have often posited an androgynous reader. In response to this we begin from the observation that while reading cannot be done without words, it also cannot be done without a body. We propose that an analytic approach of placing language and materiality (including bodies) together will help clarify that reading texts is an embodied practice, while not undermining the importance of working with words. We draw inspiration from the recent interest in bringing linguistic anthropology and materiality studies together into the same analytic frame of “language materiality.” We explore a language-materiality approach to reading by comparing how the biblical story of Mary and Martha was read by Protestant women in two historical situations: 1920s Norway and the 1950s United States. We argue that in these cases the readers’ gendered, raced, and classed bodies were central to the activity of reading texts, including their bodies’ material engagements with the world, such as carrying out women's work. We suggest that paying attention to embodied reading—that is, readers’ social entanglements with both language and materiality—yields a fuller analysis of what reading is in particular historical situations, and ultimately questions the notion of a singular Protestant semiotic ideology that works consistently toward purification.

Colony and empire, colonialism and imperialism, are often treated as synonyms. This can be acceptable for many purposes. But there may be also good reasons to distinguish between them. This article considers in detail one important attempt in that direction by the classicist Moses Finley. It argues that there is considerable strength in that approach, putting the stress as it does on the distinctiveness of the settler community. It is also valuable in suggesting that early-modern Western colonialism marked a new departure in an older history of imperialism, thus once again suggesting the need for a conceptual separation of the two. But the article concludes that ultimately more may be lost than gained by insisting on the distinction. In particular, it inhibits wide-ranging comparisons between ancient and modern, and Western and non-Western, empires, which can often suggest illuminating connections and parallels. The field of empire studies gains by drawing on the rich store of examples provided by the whole history of empire, from the earliest times to now. Western colonialism is part of that story; to separate it out is to impoverish the field.

Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian dispossession in the resource frontiers of the postcolonial world. The analytical problem of identifying how private firms use legal regimes to take control of land—whether for mining, plantations, or Special Economic Zones—now animates a new body of research seeking the historical antecedents for contemporary land grabs. In the case of colonial South Asia, existing scholarship has often tended to suggest that the law precedes processes of capital accumulation, and that colonial capital operated within the confines of definable, even if legally plural, institutional regimes, such as property rights and commercial law. This perspective suggests, if only implicitly, that capitalist firms prefer to work within formal frameworks of legality. In this article, I outline a different understanding of the place of law in colonial South Asia, which follows the formation of property law for coal at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the discursive framing of coal's status as property emerged out of, rather than preceded, social and ecological displacements caused by a coal commodity boom after 1894. Reconstructing conflicts over coal-bearing agrarian land through civil court records and mining company property deeds, I demonstrate how the absence of coal property within the colonial legal archive was reassembled through a recursive conception of legality. This genealogy of law recovers the historical context for contemporary struggles over mining claims in India's coal region today.

This article analyzes the role of soil in the making of authoritarian regimes and illustrates twentieth-century practices and discourses related to fertility across the globe. It compares two different approaches to and understandings of soil fertility: the first emerged in North Libya under Italian Fascist rule (1922–1943), the second in Central Brazil during the civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). We compare two soil-forming processes that changed physical and chemical properties of the original matter and were embedded within specific ideologies of modernization. In both cases, state agendas of agrarian production played a paramount role not only in socioeconomic projects but also as an instrument to suppress opposition. Technocratic and political aspects of building and maintaining fertility were interwoven, although in different patterns in the two countries. We show how the rejuvenation of land bled into the regeneration of communities through processes that anchored the self-definition and development of these authoritarian regimes, and argue that attempts at landscape transformations through agricultural activity and strategies of fertilization are inescapable features of dictatorships. In so doing, we elaborate the concept of “authoritarian soil.” The juxtaposition of these non-synchronous cases reveals how agricultural modernization developed throughout the twentieth century. Our study is rooted in environmental history and contributes to the ongoing dialogue between that field and science and technology studies. Its cross-temporal, comparative methodology draws upon sources and historiographical debates in English, Italian, and Portuguese.

Megasthenes was an eyewitness to the reign of Chandragupta Maurya, maker of the first India-wide empire (from ca. 321 BCE). The army with which he made that empire depended largely upon the supply of men, horses, elephants, and oxen, a sector which may be called military livestock. Megasthenes’ account of this large sector of government expense and the policies under which it operated gives important testimony about the causes of Chandragupta's success, namely the maintenance of a royal monopoly of horses, elephants, and arms, payment of the soldiers in peacetime and war, the demilitarization of the farmers, and the separation of the soldiers from the land. Over the long run of Indian history, from the Mauryan Empire to the present, the environmental roots of the political order lay in the complementary distribution of horse and elephant country, to the dry west and humid east of a line running down the middle of the Subcontinent; that is, respectively, the valleys of the Indus and the Ganga. The dominating power of India has always had its capital in elephant country, the valley of the Ganga, in cities from Pataliputra (Patna) to Kanauj to Delhi, in a position from which to control the eastward flow of horses and the westward flow of elephants to other states.

While the colonial and contemporary economy of Bengal's Himalayan foothills is most often associated with the tea plantations of Darjeeling and the Dooars, the small farms of nearby Kalimpong were also a key space in which colonial agents and missionaries worked to “settle” the mountainous terrain. Focused on Kalimpong, this article traces the trajectory of one technology of settlement, agricultural extension, from the late 1880s to the early 1940s. It highlights agricultural extension's racialized and gendered politics, as well as its implication in a long-term project that merged material (i.e., food) provision with social reproduction (i.e., childrearing, kin-making). Agricultural extension created a patchwork of relatively biodiverse small farms that historical and contemporary accounts describe as a “green belt”: a socio-ecological outside to the plantation monocultures that dominate the hills. British governors attempted to use non-plantation space for multiple ends. In this sense, their work might be termed “biopolitical,” in that it was geared toward supporting and amplifying the life chances of certain human bodies and certain botanical species. Through a series of experiments, colonial agents made calculated choices about which of these forms of life should be made to flourish, and which might be allowed to perish. Importantly, settlement, as a set of intertwined projects, did not unfold in a coherent or deliberately sequential manner. Settlement was, and continues to be, a sedimentary process.

Insisting on a radical divide between post-1750 ideologies in Europe and earlier political thought in both Europe and Asia, modernist scholars of nationalism have called attention, quite justifiably, to European nationalisms’ unique focus on popular sovereignty, legal equality, territorial fixity, and the primacy of secular over universal religious loyalties. Yet this essay argues that nationalism also shared basic developmental and expressive features with political thought in pre-1750 Europe as well as in rimland—that is to say outlying—sectors of Asia. Polities in Western Europe and rimland Asia were all protected against Inner Asian occupation, all enjoyed relatively cohesive local geographies, and all experienced economic and social pressures to integration that were not only sustained but surprisingly synchronized throughout the second millennium. In Western Europe and rimland Asia each major state came to identify with a named ethnicity, specific artifacts became badges of inclusion, and central ethnicity expanded and grew more standardized. Using Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain as case studies, this essay reconstructs these centuries-long similarities in process and form between “political ethnicity,” on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. Finally, however, this essay explores cultural and material answers to the obvious question: if political ethnicities in Myanmar and pre-1750 England/Britain were indeed comparable, why did the latter realm alone generate recognizable expressions of nationalism? As such, this essay both strengthens and weakens claims for European exceptionalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, violent events occurred in the streets of many African and Middle Eastern countries. Each event had its own logic and saw the intervention of actors with differing profiles. What they had in common was that they all took place in the context of the implementation of a neoliberal political economy. The anger these policies aroused was first expressed by people who were not necessarily rebelling against the adjustments themselves, or against the underlying ideologies or the institutions that imposed them, but rather against their practical manifestations in everyday life. This special issue invites reflections on these revolts and what they teach us about the neoliberal turn in Africa and the Middle East.

The echoes between the present and the recent past are as important for the genesis of this work as they are for those that read it. They must not prevent us from investigating the specifics of these uprisings, with a particular emphasis on the intersection between a global political economy and local challenges, while understanding them through their particular circumstances. This issue aims to stimulate a more general reflection on popular feelings and social responses in the face of neoliberalism.

This article looks at how rural inhabitants navigated state power under a regime led by a former socialist party that negotiated its conversion to a market economy while keeping tight control on the whole society. In that regard, it addresses adjustment in a very specific context, by analysing a distinctive chronology, raising the ruling party's ability to negotiate with the international financial institutions, and considering popular reactions from a rural point of view. The regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) managed to delay measures of structural adjustment during the 1990s and 2000s while deepening structures of state control it partly inherited from the former military junta. Brutal structural adjustment plans were refused, while international financial institutions were kept away from the Ethiopian government's policy mix, by way of elaborate ideological and institutional arrangements. The EPRDF coined its own version of the “developmental state” and renewed state control of the economy while deepening its articulation to global markets. Under the EPRDF, all sectors of society and especially peasantries were closely monitored and mobilized in the name of development. But although the open expression of dissent remained rare, peasants resorted to many strategies to cope with political control and to some extent divert it. By taking agricultural policies as a case study, the article describes peasant practices and questions differences between resistance, false compliance, and diversion, underlining how blurred such labels can actually be.

In the early 1990s, Niger saw growing anger towards the military regime in power, not only because of police violence, but also due to its economic and social policies, particularly its first structural adjustment programme. After several months of revolts, the regime fell, giving way to a democratic government in 1991. Under pressure from international financial institutions, the new government quickly embarked on the same economic and social path as the previous one and adopted an adjustment policy, resistance to which had played a fundamental role in its accession to power. The government faced increasing street protests, and was overthrown by the army in January 1996, with most of the population not mobilizing to protect the democratic institutions. This article examines the conflicts of rationales that marked these few years, and shows how, by whom, and to what extent these rationales were opposed in practical terms. It also offers a social history of the adjustments by looking at how they were received by the people. By so doing, it looks back at a moment that has profoundly marked Niger's recent history: in this country, as in others, the adjustments have reconfigured rivalries, produced violence, and left an indelible mark on the political imaginary up to the present day.