The study considers the economics of the oil palm (Elaeis guinensis) to rural farmers in a rural community in south-eastern Nigeria. It compares the economic benefits of all products of the oil palm industry – palm oil, palm kernel, timber, palm wine and brooms. It posits that the most important product of the oil palm to the Enugu Ezike farmer is oil palm wine. This contrasts with the view that holds palm oil and palm kernel as the chief products of the oil palm. In a study conducted in Enugu Ezike, findings reveal that annual revenue from palm wine surpasses the six-yearly income from palm oil, palm kernel and brooms together. The study employs an eclectic framework of data collection, involving oral interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation, and the use of secondary sources. The oil palm is by every standard the most economically important tree crop and proceeds from it have positively influenced the socio-economic life of the rural communities, and as a result it has improved their living conditions.

Using about 1,730 probate inventories, this article studies the wealth of peasant farmers in Sweden for the years 1750, 1800, 1850 and 1900. Average wealth grew rapidly, tripling over the nineteenth century, but it did not grow equally: the Gini coefficient for the farmers’ wealth grew from 0.46 in 1750 to 0.73 in 1900. Farmers who lived close to the major grain markets in Stockholm and the mining district of Bergslagen were wealthier than others, as were farmers on fertile plains and, in 1900, those living in coastal areas. Increased market access – in terms of cities and foreign demand – meant that farmers well placed in terms of geography and infrastructure benefited much more than farmers on what became the periphery. The diversity of farmers’ wealth grew, as did their financial sophistication.

State control over Greece’s agricultural institutions increased during Metaxas’s authoritarian regime (1936–41). Analysing such state control allows us to address, in the Greek context, two questions with regard to fascist agrarian regimes. First, considering the trajectory of agricultural policy before the emergence of these regimes, how much of what they did was new, and how much was not? Second, how did the cadres of agricultural specialists participate in, or at least accommodate, the new regimes? Our research shows that Metaxas received support from the agronomists who had been active in Greece under previous liberal administrations. Such support did not take the form of laudatory statements or ideology-driven activism. It was rather a discreet acceptance of the new circumstances, combined with defection from one’s previous political camp. Metaxas’s dictatorship inherited most traits that made it a fascist agricultural regime from previous liberal administrations.

This article focuses on the way that staff and guardians in the rural Nottinghamshire workhouse of Southwell sought to exert control and containment over pauper inmates. Fusing together local and central records for the period 1834–71, including locally held punishment books and correspondence at The National Archives, Kew (TNA), we argue that the notional power of the workhouse authorities was heavily shaded. Most paupers most of the time did not find their behaviour heavily and clumsily controlled. Rather, staff focused their attention in terms of detecting and punishing disorderly behaviour on a small group of long-term and often mentally ill paupers whose actions might create enmities or spiral into larger conflicts and dissent in the workhouse setting. Both inmates and those under threat of workhouse admission would have seen or heard about punishment of ‘the usual characters’. This has important implications for how we understand the intent and experience of the New Poor Law up to the formation of the Local Government Board (LGB) in 1871.

The civilian food shortages and accompanying malnutrition that characterised the latter stages of the First World War were instrumental in fundamentally changing the course of European history. In Russia, food shortages were a key underlying factor in precipitating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, while in Germany, food shortages led to the so-called ‘turnip winter’ of 1917, which effectively helped to undermine commitment to the war effort and contribute to the country’s defeat. In spite of Britain’s precarious dependence on imported food, and the shipping losses inflicted by German U-boats, the population was less badly affected. This achievement has been attributed to the work undertaken by Lord Rhondda, the second food controller, whose actions were characterised as the ‘heroic age of food control’. This article uses evidence from official government reports, newspapers and diaries, memoirs and biographies to challenge the prevailing historiography about the success of food control measures in Britain during the First World War. It shows that the Ministry of Food under Lord Rhondda’s period of tenureship was not only indecisive, but that efforts to save the nation from malnutrition, if not actual starvation, were in large part the result of initiatives implemented at the local level.

The collective management of irrigation is an essential factor in agrarian development, both present and past. However, the relationship of irrigation associations with the state remains underexplored, despite the increasingly important role played by water policies in the modern world. The present article examines this relationship in Spain over the last two centuries. Our results suggest that, first, the state played a decisive part in the emergence and evolution of irrigation associations, and this belies the assumption of the traditional origin of these institutions; second, that farmers, despite being subject to the regulatory framework, enjoyed substantial autonomy in the management of water resources; and, third, that the relationship between local associations and the state changed over time, in response to political regime changes and the transformation of irrigation agriculture. When the state tried to impose authoritarian policies upon irrigation users, these reacted by developing unprecedented forms of organisation.

This article examines coastal defence in East Norfolk between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1802 until 1932 sea defence between Happisburgh and Winterton was the responsibility of the Commissioners of Sewers for the Eastern Hundreds of Norfolk, more commonly known as the Sea Breach Commission (SBC). This article explores the geographies of authority shaping sea defence, with the SBC a body whose relationship to the local and national state could be uneasy. The article outlines the SBC’s nineteenth-century roles and routines, and examines its relationship to outside expertise, including its early hiring of geologist William Smith. The article reviews challenges to the SBC’s authority following late nineteenth-century flood events, details its early twentieth-century routines, and examines disputes over development on the sandhills. The article details the SBC’s dealings with an emerging national ‘nature state’, around issues such as coastal erosion and land drainage, matters which led to the SBC’s demise following the 1930 Land Drainage Act. The article concludes by considering the SBC’s contemporary resonance in a time of challenges to the role of the nature state, and anxieties over coastal defence.