The poacher has been closely studied by historians of crime and protest in England. While much has been done to reveal the complex nature of poaching, this work has tended to concentrate on the nineteenth century and been largely concerned with practice. By shifting attention to the opening decades of the twentieth century, and by focusing instead on representation, this article explores the place of the Edwardian poacher in a rapidly expanding cultural landscape. Pointing to an inverse relationship between physical presence and representational weight and throw, the article shows how the idea of the poacher was not just a by-product of Edwardian ruralism, but was integral to a deeply felt ruralist sensibility that strongly informed contemporary debates on the control and use of land and related matters of national identity and wellbeing. In considering how this ostensibly marginal figure became so embedded in the popular imagination, the full extent of the poacher’s cultural usability is revealed. Like ruralism itself, the representational poacher had many facets and served many needs.

The interlocking relationships between agriculture, nature, science and modernity underwent fundamental, far-reaching change in mid-twentieth-century Britain. This article examines Ladybird’s iconic, bestselling but under-researched ‘What to Look For’ seasonal natural history series, focusing particularly on the illustrations by the distinguished wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe and their relationship to the text by the biologist Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson. Beneath their apparent simplicity, the ‘What to Look For’ books attempt an ambitious, forwards-looking synthesis between mechanisation and tradition, nature and livelihood that calls into question historiographical critiques (by Newby, Miller and Bunce, for example) of contemporary representations of the rural as nostalgic and evasive. The ‘What to Look For’ books quietly subvert some of the more distorting tropes of English landscape representation. People are shown going about their everyday work (in contrast to the ‘landscape without figures’ tradition) and modern farm machinery such as tractors and seed drills are also acknowledged and even celebrated. Tunnicliffe and Grant Watson sought to harmonise these potentially discordant elements; their vision of the rural was an inclusive one that accommodated working women, children and even to some extent ethnic diversity. Yet in the second half of the twentieth century attempts to imagine a positive relationship between rurality and modernity such as Ladybird’s were increasingly undermined by escalating ecological crises.

When Poland was re-established as an independent state one hundred years ago, one of its political priorities was to implement a land reform, as the ‘agrarian question’ was an extremely sensitive socio-economic problem. In Poland at that time, two thirds of its inhabitants made their living by working in the agricultural sector. A ‘land craving’ phenomenon was notorious, as was rural poverty, especially among smallholders. On the other hand, almost half of the total area of farmland in the Second Polish Republic was held by huge landowners. The situation led to ever louder political calls for land redistribution to peasant smallholders. The Land Reform Implementation Act of 1920, and its amendment of 1925, laid legal foundations for land redistribution. By the Second World War, 2,654,800 hectares of land had undergone redistribution, as a result of which 734,100 new farms were established. However, this land reform did not achieve its goal, namely the empowering of efficient smaller farms, as quantitative analysis showed a continuing process of agricultural land fragmentation.

We discuss the extension of corn and potatoes in Galician Atlantic agriculture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an innovation process that facilitated rapid circulation of a new cattle feed from the Americas to Europe. Specifically, we focus on Galicia from 1890 to 1940, a time of significant scientific interest with regard to genetic improvements. This new science made it possible to develop double hybrid corn plants that became widespread after the 1920s. In this article we will describe the conditions accompanying the introduction and spread of these American crops, as recorded by modernist historiography, then analyse the institutional and social framework – knowledge networks, innovation systems and institutional and social tools – that enabled genetic advances in the twentieth century. To accomplish this, we must trace the journey of seeds and knowledge across the Atlantic from places such as the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (1918) to the Galician Biological Mission (1921), among others.

By studying the guilds of the seven maritime cargo handling trades of Barcelona, this paper aims to contribute to the relatively limited, but growing scholarship of port labour during the late artisan phase, and of service-sector guilds in general. It examines the relationship between occupational and organizational cultures, the types and means of inculcating human and social capital, and the formal and informal determination of qualification in view of the different guild responses to liberalization and abolition. Unlike guilds in the secondary sector, these corporations were organized horizontally among masters and had neither journeymen, nor apprentices in their respective trades. Some of them provided services individually while others worked collectively. They generally prohibited internal and external employment schemes, and many of them used a turn system or another to level work opportunities. One of these guilds transitioned directly into a trade union; others became owner associations or dissolved into unorganized competitors. The period studied covers the flexibilization of the labour market through progressively advancing liberal reforms of monopolistic guild privileges and the formal abolition of Spanish guilds in 1836. Comparisons with other European ports further highlight the multiplicity of considerations for understanding occupational and organizational cultures and the trajectories of guilds in the service sector.

This article examines the question of how architects in São Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s addressed the political nature of their work, and more specifically the connections between their practice and the lives and politics of the urban poor in the context of a rapidly expanding metropolis of the Global South. More specifically, it assesses how they elaborated strategies to articulate the semiotic and material practices of Brutalism and the political repertoire of national developmentalism, initially in its democratic and later in its authoritarian form. The article argues that these architects deployed two semio-material strategies to operationalize the articulation between that political repertoire and the field of architecture: metaphorical indexicality and the impetus for the industrialization of construction. The image of the urban poor reinforced by that political repertoire was marked by a severe distance from their empirical life experiences, which deeply affected the practices of design and construction that progressive architects advanced.

This article explores the legal and temporal dimensions of the transition from British Mandate Palestine to the State of Israel on 15 May 1948. I examine the paradoxical character of Israeli jurisdictional claims during this period and argue that it reveals the Israeli state's uncertainty as to whether the Mandate had truly passed into the past. On one hand, Israel recognized the validity of the Mandate administration's jurisdiction until 15 May; I employ the Israeli trial of the British citizen Frederick William Sylvester to demonstrate how Israel even predicated its own jurisdictional claims on their being continuous with those of its predecessor. In this case, the Mandate administration was cast as having entered the realm of the past. Conversely, the Israeli state contested Mandate laws and legal decisions made prior to 15 May to assert its own jurisdictional claims. In the process, Israeli officials belied their efforts to bury their predecessors in the past and implicitly questioned whether the past was in fact behind them. By simultaneously relying upon and disavowing past British legal decisions, the Israeli state staked a claim on being a “completely different political creature” from its British predecessor while retaining its colonial legal structures as the “ultimate standards of reference.” Israel's complex attitude toward its Mandate past directs our attention to how it was created against the backdrop of the receding British Empire and underscores the importance of studying Israel alongside other post-imperial states that emerged from the First World War and the mid-century decolonizing world.

For many city dwellers in Pakistan the distant memory of outdoor cinemas in their ancestral villages rekindles the thrill of first contact with film exhibition. This paper considers attempts made in colonial British India and postcolonial Pakistan to understand, wield, and benefit from the staging of such memorable and affective filmic events. In its cultivation of “cinema-minded” subjects, the British Empire commissioned studies of audiences and their reactions to film exhibition in hopes of managing the unruly morality and materiality of the cinematic apparatus. After Partition and the creation of the Dominion of Pakistan, similar studies continued, evincing a residual strategy of elicited contact. The elicitation of film contact aimed at the exertion and commandment of the event of film exhibition for the purposes of knowing their constituent subjects at a moment of malleability. Yet the Empire's struggle with the perceived problems of “Muslim tastes” and audience members’ ambivalence over rural screenings in post-Partition Pakistan calls for a reconsideration of the efficacy of these tactics. I argue that what complicated these encounters are affective responses that questioned the address, permissibility, and efficacy of film exhibition. In these tactics of elucidation, disenchantment, and denial, ruptures are refused and the new is dismissed as inoperable, incompatible, or impermissible.

If historians now recognize that the Habsburg Monarchy was developing into a strong, cohesive state in the decades before the First World War, they have yet to fully examine contemporaneous European debates about Austria's legitimacy and place in the future world order. As the intertwined fields of law and social science began during this period to elaborate a binary distinction between “modern” nation-states and “archaic” multinational “empires,” Austria, like other composite monarchies, found itself searching for a legally and scientifically valid justification for its continued existence. This article argues that Austrian sociology provided such a justification and was used to articulate a defense of the Habsburg Monarchy and other supposedly “abnormal” multinational states. While the birth of the social sciences is typically associated with Germany and France, a turn to sociology also occurred in the late Habsburg Monarchy, spurred by legal scholars who feared that the increasingly hegemonic idea of nation-based sovereignty threatened the stability of the pluralistic Austrian state. Proponents of the “sociological idea of the state,” notably the sociologist, politician, and later president of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Masaryk and the Polish-Jewish sociologist and jurist Ludwig Gumplowicz, challenged the concept of statehood advanced by mainstream Western European legal philosophy and called for a reform of Austria's law and political science curriculum. I reveal how, more than a century before the “imperial turn,” Habsburg actors came to reject the emerging scholarly distinction between “nations” and “empires” and fought, with considerable success, to institutionalize an alternative to nationalist social scientific discourse.

Etymologically related, the concepts of terroir and territoriality display divergent cultural histories. While one designates the palatable characteristics of place as a branded story of geographic distinction, the other imbues the soil with political meaning. This paper traces the production of eno-locality in a contested space on both sides of the Green Line in Israel/Palestine. The case of the Yatir award-winning winery shows how terroir and territory are blended in the political economy and cultural politics of colonial place-making. Located on a multiscalar frontier—climatic, geopolitical, and viticultural—Yatir Winery positions itself simultaneously within the Mediterranean transnational landscape and in a biblical site of historical authenticity. Enacting strategic regimes of signification to target the increasing demand for high-end wines on both the global and local markets, it makes a claim for place, while appropriating Palestinian land and redefining ancient Jewish heritage. The result articulates a settler colonial landscape whose symbolic and material transformations are reflected in the Israeli search for rooted identity. Analytically, we explore the power of border and frontier wines to reconfigure the differences between New World and Old World paradigms. We conclude by outlining a comparative framework of the charged relations between terroir and territory that articulates the nexus between border typologies and the colonial politics of wine.