Based on extensive archival research encompassing over eighty rural authorities in Wales, this essay pieces together fragmentary evidence to reveal the main contours of rural responses to infectious outbreaks from the 1870s to the 1918/10 influenza pandemic. At the centre of the essay are those practical, short-term measures that have hitherto been overlooked in the historiography. While infectious outbreaks did have the capacity to extend sanitary initiatives over the medium and long term, looking at how rural authorities reacted to infectious disease helps us better understand how public health practices translated into action at a local level. In doing so, the essay untangles both the nature of rural responses and the challenges confronted by rural sanitary officials when confronted with infectious outbreaks and how they had to adapt public health orthodoxy to different rural environments.

The economic success of the intensive poultry and pork sectors is a milestone in the Spanish economic history of the past seven decades. This work analyses the boom in the chicken and pork businesses in Spain, verifying the strengths and weaknesses of both livestock models, and drawing conclusions in relation to the agribusiness system. The influence of chicken and pork in the booming Spanish meat sector is analysed from the perspectives of livestock farming and agroindustry, followed by the impact of both forms of intensive livestock farming on Spain’s domestic consumption and foreign trade. The similarities and differences in their evolution are identified from the perspective of two food supply models: a predominance of economies of scale until the 1980s, and of so-called economies of scope since that time. While the development of mass production in both intensive livestock businesses followed a similar pattern, the progressive segmentation of the market towards higher quality, more artisanal and sustainable products has greatly favoured the sector more deeply rooted in rural tradition: pork.

The nutritional transition, together with the demographic and epidemiological transitions, stands as one of the most crucial phenomena shaping societies in the 20th century. A prominent characteristic of the nutritional transition is the increased consumption of animal-origin protein, particularly meat. Within this context, the present article utilises Spain as a case study to provide a close examination of the nutritional transition during the latter half of the 20th century. Spain’s significance lies in its late but rapid development of this transition. In the 1960s, meat consumption was relatively low compared to other European countries; however, within just two decades, it surpassed that of many developed nations. On one hand, the article offers a detailed insight into how budget constraints were eased to foster meat consumption among various consumer groups. On the other hand, the study aims to quantify the influence of income, prices, and preferences in driving this process

This paper examines the presence of Reeves’ pheasant (Syrmaticus reevesii) in Britain. It investigates how encounters between British people and Reeves’ pheasant informed their imaginings of the species, from its first introduction into Britain from China in 1831 to 1913 when a serious decline in its numbers began. Drawing on natural history texts, records from the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, technical literature on pheasant rearing, and extracts from periodicals, magazines, and generalist encyclopaedias, this paper shows how imagined and physical encounters with Reeves’ pheasant, by naturalists, acclimatisers, pheasant enthusiasts, and sportsmen, informed shifting constructions of the species, which influenced and shaped its presence in Britain.

The article addresses the issue of wealth accumulation by peasant farmers in the post-emancipation era in the Russian Baltic province of Livonia. The Baltic emancipation schemes stand out as the least beneficial for peasants as they set neither time limits nor land price levels, and the state government did not provide any credit to the purchasers of farms. However, in northern Livonia the nominal value of peasant farmers’ wealth grew as much as tenfold from 1850 to 1913. The study reveals that the advantages and disadvantages of high farm purchase prices should be considered in combination with other factors affecting agricultural growth. In the Baltic context, the large size of the farms, land consolidation, well-developed infrastructure, and the commercialisation of production helped the farm owners amass a relatively large amount of wealth within a generation. Technological improvement also contributed to the rise in productivity and wealth.

From the thirteenth until the 18th century, the county of Flanders knew a special citizen status for rural residents. Country dwellers, normally residing under the jurisdiction and fiscality of lordships, could register themselves as external citizens or ‘outburghers’. Outburghership has primarily been researched within the context of state building and urban studies. This contribution prioritizes the perspective of the countryside. Studies on premodern Flanders have shown that the counts and cities tried to undermine the power of local lords by providing as many seigneurial subjects as possible with fiscal and judicial exemptions to the lords’ justice and taxes. The accessibility of outburghership and its varying appeal along time and space has not been adequately researched. This study argues that the heyday of outburghership in Flanders was between 1300 and 1550. After 1600, outburghership endured as defence mechanism against seigneurial lordship until both institutions met their demise in 1795.

Armando Palacio Valdés characterised the Asturian village of Sama de Langreo in his novel La aldea perdida (1903), as an unusual example of an industrialised population entity through four variables: the sale of fresh meat, the existence of street lighting, cafés, and public greenspaces. The aim of this article is to verify the author’s approach by comparing the state of the rest of the Asturian parishes at the time of the novel (1879). To do this, a methodology combining the use of literary sources and the analysis of historical documentary sources will be applied. The results obtained confirm the Asturian author’s assessment of the industrialisation process in Sama as an exceptional milestone for the province, as well as evidencing the slow pace of industrialisation in the rest of the Asturian parishes.

This article explores the competitive hoeing matches, which were a significant feature of certain parts of Scottish rural life in the period 1840 to 1940. An analysis of newspaper reports shows how important such matches were in Aberdeenshire, attracting significant numbers of both competitors and spectators. By contrast, similar reports for the rest of Scotland show only a small number of such matches outside the northeast. Reasons for the differences are attributed to both material factors, such as the visibility of cultivation, and the social structure of the areas. In Aberdeenshire, a culture valorising hard work and skill was set in a social structure of small farmers and farm servants, which led to self-sustaining organisational forms. By contrast, elsewhere a top-down form of organisation prioritising the needs of farm productivity meant that competitive hoeing matches failed to kindle much enthusiasm. The value of a focus on taken-for-granted practices is the way it can shed light on such contrasts.

This article considers the relationship of two prominent leaders of British women’s temperance, Lady Henry Somerset and Lady Elizabeth Biddulph. They were noteworthy for taking opposing sides when the British Women’s Temperance Association divided on the question of the political reach of its work. Somerset and Biddulph were elite women, daughters of earls and near neighbours around Ledbury, a centre of cider apple and hop cultivation in Herefordshire. Both made their first temperance pledge in the area. We examine their geographical proximity and consider the importance of local agricultural labour and landscapes to their temperance work.

This study deals with shared ideas about the countryside and its inhabitants during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It identifies the most significant sources of contemporary representations of the rural. These include, besides historical ideas pre-dating the regime, the party-state itself, expert structures, the arts, and pop culture. In many cases, representations encompassed efforts to transform the countryside, or society, or to maintain the status quo, and, following de Certeau, we can consider such activities to be strategies. On the other hand, villagers approached these representations and strategies using their own tactics. This study demonstrates that rural policymaking was not just in the hands of power structures; the effects it had depended a great deal on the dominated rural inhabitants.

Historians credit the interwar period with the demise of the great agricultural estates but many survived, reduced in area and refocussed on new priorities. Three estates lying in close proximity in north Hampshire and south Berkshire had very divergent interests, but there were similarities, and significant differences, in the manner in which they survived the interwar period. One invested in a programme of renewal of houses and farm buildings, and another adopted a more commercial approach to managing its diverse interests and the third retrenched, cutting investment but maintaining the status quo as an agricultural and shooting estate. All three survived, relatively intact and financially stable, and remain in operation today. An examination of estate financial performance before and after the Great War provides the context to the strategies pursued by the owners and their Land Agents, and their place in the broader rural landscape of the 1920s and 1930s.