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The part played by the public health movement in controlling epidemics in urban areas has received considerable attention from historians, as has the regulation of the milk and meat industries that commenced in the late nineteenth century. However, comparatively little work has been carried out on health in a rural context – and the role played by the horticultural sector in the spread of contagious diseases has barely been covered. Yet, as this article shows, it was a sector that had the potential to produce potent contaminants. By examining histories of the production of one horticultural crop, watercress, it reveals how issues around the provision of a clean urban water supply and idealised imaginings of the countryside as a pure space, played a part in exacerbating the extent of outbreaks of typhoid in the industrial city. It also shows that there was governmental reluctance to regulate an industry that grew a staple product, even when growers themselves were keen for guidance.
This article explores the intellectual culture of Catholic architectural production in 1950s Ireland through the study of a church-building project in rural West Cork. It analyses the phenomenon of the Irish ‘church-building priest’ in terms of their socio-economic background, fundraising abilities, and position within rural communities – in the context of significant rural emigration and economic stagnation. It also considers the role that the Irish countryside played in conditioning clerical understandings of architectural style and taste, and priests’ political readings of the rural landscape. Furthermore, it explores the phenomenon of Marianism in church design and ornamentation around the time of the international ‘Marian Year’ of 1954, and the political meanings of the rhetoric employed by clerics at church consecration ceremonies. The article concludes with reflections on social and economic aspects of Irish rural life and religious expression in a decade primarily understood as one of cultural insularity and conservative Catholicism.
After the crisis of the late nineteenth century, the role of the state in European agriculture expanded to many new areas: education and technical innovation; commercial policies and market regulations; farm support policies, and sometimes interventions in property rights. The development of these policies was a difficult and costly process, without the intervention of intermediary organisations like agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ associations. This article analyses the early agricultural policy in Catalonia (Spain) and the role of cooperatives in its implementation. It argues that this regional case was quite exceptional in the early twentieth-century Spanish context, where state intervention in agriculture was extremely limited. In 1914, an autonomous government was set up in Catalonia, and a modern agricultural policy was introduced in which technical education and cooperatives played a crucial role, as well as politics. The agricultural policy promoted and developed by the Catalan government was part of a state-building project based on a regionalist ideology.
This article briefly considers how the integration of the biophysical world into our analyses of the past can enhance our understanding of the socio-economic inequalities of the modern world. Taking Ulbe Bosma's The Making of Periphery as its central reference point, it argues that the process of “peripheralization” – generally treated as an economic or social phenomenon – can also be usefully approached as an interaction between human and non-human forces. It uses the example of Southeast Asian rubber production to show how the different arrangements of people, plants, soil and water on European estates and indigenous smallholdings gave the latter distinct ecological advantages that boosted their oft-cited economic competitiveness, and that consequently forced plantations to extract even more value from cheap labour. In this sense, the environmental history of Southeast Asian rubber offers further evidence for Bosma's core theses about the heterogeneity of peripheralization processes and the importance of demography and labour relations in shaping them.
The theme of place guides much exploration in rural history and local history. Attempts have been made to create definitions and typologies of place, but these have had to contend with the diverse, complex and dynamic realities of historical pattern and process, local and regional. Nonetheless, historians and those in other disciplines have evolved different approaches to the concept. This study considers how these can inform the investigation of places existing in historical fact in particular periods in the past, and can do similarly for those places located contemporaneously in fictional constructions. Reference is made to various academic writings on place, including by the local historian, David Dymond. The analysis takes the work of the author of fiction, Bernard Samuel Gilbert. Gilbert, although relatively obscure now, incorporated a feature of special note into his later literary output, and one meriting greater attention. This was his personalised, reflective and explicitly articulated approach to forming and expressing place. Moreover, Gilbert’s ‘Old England’, with its imaginary district of 'Bly', can be recognised as corresponding to landscapes and communities existing more broadly in the years up to and through the First World War, and with creations by other authors of regional fiction.
Stan was born in 1911 in a small village near the north Somerset coast. When recalling his life in the countryside, he felt that ‘there wasn’t much to do in the evenings … at least not here’. Drawing upon evidence from personal accounts of growing up in the south-west of England in the early twentieth century, this article examines memories of youth in the countryside, with a particular focus on the leisure lives of young people and their experiences of rural space and place. In addition to adding to our knowledge on the lives of rural youth, this study also provides new insights into the complex relationship between people and their environment, and has implications for our understandings of the early formation of a distinct youthful identity in England. The countryside was not simply a backdrop in these recollections; rather, it was formative in how those that grew up in rural communities understood their experience of being young.
This chapter discusses the ways in which speech was related to class and gender. It shows that boundaries between public and private were blurred in early modern communities, and that reputation was central to people’s lives. National, regional and local identities receive attention, especially the meaning of ‘Country’, alongside attitudes to foreign communities. Urban neighbourhood receives attention, especially the issue of the extent to which neighbourly values obtained in small districts of towns and cities, and the extent of urban anomie. Dispute settlement is studied, especially informal settlements made within communities. Gender and neighbourhood receives attention, in particular masculine artisanal identities, women’s networks and mutual support, and neighbourly reactions to male domestic violence.
This chapter deals with the processes of exclusion and inclusion that defined community. It deals with popular hostility to religious change, especially the ‘disciplinary revolution’ that Puritans attempted to impose. It discusses witches as the reverse of neighbourly ideals, and hostility to perceived antisocial practices such as informing. The place of the established poor is scrutinized, as are measures against the mobile poor. Dearth, famine and disease are assessed as acid tests of communal solidarities, and it is shown that in many communities the poor were excluded from ideas of neighbourhood during times of food scarcity or the circulation of infectious disease. The role of wealthier villagers and townsmen in the government of small communities receives attention. The focus of the chapter is on the hard edge of neighbourhood.
This chapter discusses the collective basis for communal life in early modern England, showing that contemporaries were strongly averse to division (including religious conflict). Rather, Christian social values encouraged an organic sense of community built upon reciprocity and common interest. Paternalism simultaneously reinforced the social order while providing the poor with tangible benefits. Charitable giving was underwritten by Christian social codes. The clergy and gentry had powerful social expectations made of them, especially to provide for the poor. The collective consumption of alcohol underwrote many social rituals, forms of commensality and festivity, and much of the plebeian social world was centred upon the alehouse. Rituals such as Rogationtide, along with other forms of festivity and play, articulated powerful social norms.
This chapter discusses the widespread belief in early modern England that neighbourliness was dead and charity grown cold. It assesses the melancholy that was built on a nostalgic sense of lost social virtues. Yet, contradictorily, it shows that even as contemporaries lamented the end of neighbourhood, they simultaneously celebrated and asserted neighbourly values. The chapter therefore balances evidence for social atomization against ongoing investment by early modern people in Christian discourses of charity and good neighbourhood, which generated powerful senses of local reciprocities and continued social bonds that included gifts of cash, food and shelter to the poor; communal feasting and festivity; and Christian values of friendship.
This rejoinder is part of the round table discussion on the book The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor. It pays tribute to the development economist and Nobel Prize winner Arthur W. Lewis, who studied the predicaments of plantation societies. The rejoinder addresses critical observations made about the above-mentioned book by Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Pim de Zwart, Corey Ross, and Alberto Alonso-Fradejas. It underscores the importance of the role of demography and long histories of labour coercion to explain processes of peripheralization and mass emigration. It also points out the limits of classical development economics, namely a relative neglect of the ecological damage attending plantation exploitation. The commodity frontier approach is suggested as a way to address this shortcoming.