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.

The controversy around Bruce Gilley's article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in the USA, and Pieter Emmer in the Netherlands, have all published similarly revisionist claims about colonialism, arguing that postcolonial guilt and political correctness blind the majority of their colleagues to the positive side of the colonial project. Their argument chimes with wider societal trends, transforming the revisionist defenders of empire into heroes of a reinvigorated nationalist right within and beyond academia. The public influence attained by these approaches to colonialism requires historians to expose the deep methodological flaws, misreading of historical facts, and misrepresentations of prior scholarship that characterize the writings of this emerging revisionist trend. It is for this reason that the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History (IRSH) has decided to devote its first ever Virtual Special Issue to labour history's case against colonialism. This article, also an introduction to the Virtual Special Issue, sifts through the logical implications of the claims made by Gilley and like-minded scholars, providing both a contextualization and a rebuttal of their arguments. After assessing the long absence of colonial labour relations from the field of interest of labour historians and the pages of the IRSH itself, this article shows the centrality of a critique of colonialism to labour history's global turn in the 1990s. Using a selection of articles on colonial labour history from the IRSH's own archive, the article not only reconstructs “labour history's case against colonialism”, but also shows why labour history's critical insights into the nature of colonialism should be deepened and extended, not discarded.