As Jesuit missionaries in seventeenth-century China struggled to translate Christian theology into Chinese terms and categories, they embarked on a project of purifying the “political” from the “superstitious.” Their project was structured by the unmentionable: the proscribed luxury of silk robes that facilitated the encounters between the missionaries and the native elite they most sought to convert. This article examines the manifold functions of silk and the problem of “accommodation” by turning to the Brevis relatio de numero et qualitate Christianorum apud Sinas (“Brief report on the number and quality of Christians in China”), a booklet authored by the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini (1614–1661). Written for European circulation, the Brevis relatio touted the triumphs of the mission by incorporating the conceptual imaginary of “China” into the cosmo-political confines of the Euro-Christian world. This article shows how the basic Christian metaphor of horticultural fruitfulness was used to interpret silk and sericulture as material evidence that the Chinese mission field prefigured and promised, both spiritually and commercially, a profitable harvest.

This article examines the various experiences of slavery and freedom of female household workers in the Dutch and English East India Company (VOC and EIC, respectively) ports in Bengal in the early eighteenth century. Enslaved household workers in Bengal came from various Asian societies dotting the Indian Ocean littoral. Once manumitted, they entered the fold of the free Christian or Portuguese communities of the settlements. The most common, if not the only, occupation of the women of these communities was household or caregiving labour. The patriarchy of the settlements was defined by the labour and subjection of these women. Yet, domestic service to VOC/EIC officials only partially explains their subjectivity. This article identifies the agency of enslaved and women of free Christian or Portuguese communities in their efforts to resist or bypass the institution of the European household in the settlements. These efforts ranged from murdering their slave masters to creating independent businesses to the formation of sexual liaisons and parental/fraternal/sororal relationships disregarding the approval or needs of their settlement masters.

Research has emphasised the stability in female landholding between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite demographic shocks and fundamental economic changes. However, in this period, a new type of land exploitation emerges: leasehold. This article wants to introduce a gender perspective into the history of leasehold. It investigates women’s activities on the lease market in late medieval and sixteenth-century Flanders, a region where short-term and competitive leasehold spread early and widely. An analysis of the actual practice, making use of landlords’ manuals and accounts, demonstrates women’s decreasing participation at the lease market. Moreover, their marital status increasingly mattered: from the beginning of the fifteenth century only widows could hold land. This article also demonstrates that, next to marital status, the size of the holding had a marked influence on women’s opportunities. Finally, these results invite us to rethink the grounds of women’s growing participation at the labour market in post-Black Death Europe, since especially single women lost access to land, particularly to land offered on the lease market.

The ‘Super Grid’ network of high-voltage power lines transformed the landscapes of England and southern Scotland in the 1950s. This article examines debates over the siting of pylons, with a focus on the public inquiries into the proposed lines across the Pennines in Lancashire. It brings together archives on electrification from the newly nationalised British Electricity Authority, preservationist groups and local government to reveal deeper insights into processes of local and national decision-making about and popular attitudes to the rural landscape. It uncovers how the public inquiries exposed tensions and differences about the definition of amenity, not just between the electricity industry and preservationists, but also between interests representing urban industrial districts and the National Parks, northern and southern England, and within the preservationist movement. The conflicts over pylons and amenity shows how narratives of landscape preservation were contested and riven with class, region and economic differences in the postwar period.

This article examines the role of particular ideas of the countryside in unemployment relief schemes. While interwar thinking on the countryside has received attention, it has not been examined in the specific context of unemployment relief. This article uses four case studies from North East England, namely the Team Valley Trading Estate (Gateshead), Hamsterley Forest Instructional Centre (Durham), Swarland model village (Northumberland) and Heartbreak Hill (Cleveland). All four projects took different approaches to the unemployment problem, but all used some form of rural rhetoric. The ways in which the projects deployed images of the countryside creatively recombined a wide range of ideas to suit their needs rather than being rigidly confined by particular schools of thought.

This article provides an object lesson in the history of the longue durée, reflected in the comprehensive filthiness of rural life in the nineteenth century. Political upheaval had not changed the material conditions of peasant existence or sensibilities relating to hygiene. Economic revolution had as yet made no practical difference to the dirtiness of daily life. Peasants under the Second Empire lived much as they had under the Old Regime – in dark, damp houses with no conveniences, cheek by jowl with the livestock. Their largely unwashed bodies were wrapped in largely unchanged clothes. Babies were delivered with germ-covered hands, drank spoilt milk from dirty bottles, and spent their young days swaddled like mummies and marinating like teriyaki. The Third Republic set out to ‘civilize’ the rural masses, but this snapshot of material life in the nineteenth-century French countryside illustrates just how much work lay in front of it.

This article explores the visual culture of rural improvement in Germany, manifested in agricultural exhibitions, model farms and test plots. It argues that, following the English example, nineteenth-century experts increasingly believed that such material sites were the most effective way to persuade small farmers to embrace change and increase productivity. The presumption was that farmers were habitually keen observers who preferred to learn by seeing and that visual displays would alleviate their characteristic mistrust and build confidence in scientific advisers. The fact that these efforts coincided with the professionalisation of agronomy, the increased influence of scientists in rural policymaking and the rise of elite agricultural institutions revises the existing narrative of the spread of agricultural knowledge in Germany. Based on archival evidence from north-western Prussia, it is clear that many small cultivators responded enthusiastically to these sites, defying stereotypes of ‘dull-wittedness’ and ingrained suspicion of the new.

This article deals with the postwar confrontation of the rural and the urban in Poland. It sheds light on a time of mass migration to the cities and the postwar reconstruction in Central Europe, heading towards state-socialism, and focuses on official discourses concerning peasants as new social and political subjects and the intelligentsia’s response to rural newcomers. A testing ground for these processes was the Polish city of Łódź, the biggest textile industrial centre.

These processes became the subject of both journalistic and academic inquiries framed by political efforts to reshape the ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor) through the state’s ‘socialist modernization’. Along with the scale of migration, there was another unprecedented aspect: peasants were becoming citizens, recognised political subjects, later even as privileged representatives of the People’s Republic. The postwar press and political speeches encouraged them to become a part of the modernisation project. Almost immediately, counter-narratives followed and lamented the newcomers’ ‘improper’ uses of the city. The term ‘ruralisation of the city’ was coined to describe the misuses of urban spaces, a moral decline and even the negative influence of peasants on the urban working class.