A cursory examination of publishers’ catalogues reveals a number of titles like Environmental History, Green History and An Environmental History of Britain which suggest an upsurge of interest in what has come to be called ‘environmental history’. This weight of scholarship suggests that demands for the ‘greening of history’, or for more studies of the impact of human actions on the countryside, which have been made throughout the present decade, have been answered. It is worth noting the shift of title from ‘Green’ to ‘Environmental’. ‘Green’ is increasingly attached to the political movements and social groups concerned with environmental issues and even, in the case of the German Greens, to political parties whose concerns include ecology as only one of a number of interests. ‘Environmental’ has a much broader range, but, as the titles below demonstrate, this is by no means an absolute distinction. Closer consideration of many of these works reveals that although ‘History’ appears in many titles, the books are actually written by archaeologists, by sociologists, by political theorists, by Green activists and, most frequently, by geographers - all with ‘historical’ appended to their discipline. The Social Construction of the Past is a collection of essays from the Second World Archaeological Conference; Environmentalism proves to be ‘the view from Anthropology’ but contains at least one essay which appears to be a model of what environmental history could be. Historical Ecology: Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, rather confusingly, has chapters on historical transformations and a discussion of the ‘history’ in historical ecology. This is perhaps not surprising. History has always prided itself on interdisciplinarity and on its universal appeal. The usual justifications for undergraduate history begin from the premise that a knowledge of one's own history is necessary for any understanding of society, and that history has so many variations that there is bound to be some congenial corner for anyone interested in the past. What is still lacking, however, is British environmental history, written by historians.

A recent article in Rural History illustrated how the Women's Institutes between the wars Were influenced by contemporary feminism. The argument of the article was that in seeking to change the material condition and status of countrywomen, and in effect, emulating craft trades union strategies, the WI movement sought to alter perceptions of women's labour in the home by enhancing their skills, encouraging co-operative endeavour and promoting an ‘active domesticity’. Furthermore, the domestic arena was extended to cover all aspects of rural life related to the home, garden, farm or allotment.

However, as time passed between the wars, less interest was shown in agricultural work outside the home, and, as Morgan states elsewhere, the agricultural ‘side’ of the movement became ‘severely diminished’. Whilst one might not seriously quarrel with this statement with reference to some periods of WI history, it is, nevertheless, a somewhat reductive approach to have taken when considering the interwar period. During that time, there is evidence to suggest that in some regions at least, WI members maintained more than a passing interest in agriculture per se. This was not simply in relation to the production and preservation of food, but rather as a means of maintaining the influence of women in rural policy making. This interest can be best detected in the educational sphere, from the promotion of classes in a wide range of agricultural activities and demonstrations at agricultural and horticultural shows, to WI membership of local agricultural education committees. Furthermore, the National Federation of Women's Institutes (NFWI) fought in many ways to maintain the agricultural ‘side’ of the movement because it was an integral part of its wider mission to educate countrywomen, particularly those who were destined to live and work in the Empire

In the writing on institutional organisation and collective strike action among agricultural workers in Lowland Scotland during the early twentieth century until the outbreak of the Second World War, Richard Anthony has provided an extensive discussion on farm servants.2 However, in general, little attention has been given to casually employed workers. One such group, known as the Achill workers or the Irish ‘tattie howkers’, employed to harvest the potato crop in south-western and central Scotland, attempted to organise themselves and pursued collective strike action on a number of occasions. That group, which comprised some 1,500 to 2,000 workers, undertook strike action in 1907. That action was followed by intensive campaigns in 1918, 1919, 1920, 1921, and 1938; a further attempted strike was also reported in 1912. Much of their collective action was assisted by institutional support from unions which were already organising workers. But workers also attempted to organise themselves with the assistance of these existing unions in the years 1918 to 1921, 1925, 1926 and 1929, and to form their own union in 1909, 1910 and 1938. This paper will examine these attempts during this period.

In an interview in the early 1980s, Michel Foucault predicated that, from the eighteenth century on, modern government rationality has essentially been a form of urban planning. This article challenges this argument. It discusses the formation of rural social engineering, that is, the state-led efforts to design new men and new social orders outside the cities through plans, during decolonisation in Asia. Based on the comparative study of India after Partition (1947) and British Malaya during the counter-insurgency war (1948–60), the argument is that we can understand rural social engineering particularly in the 1950s less as a consequence of colonial inheritance or international change but as the result of how decolonisation unfolded including its patterns of violence, social conflict, and migration. As such, rural social engineering constituted a central element in the postcolonial ‘art of the government of man’.

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 investigates the development of rural migration in northern Sweden (1850–1950). During this period, northern Sweden experienced a slower rate of urbanisation than the rest of the country. This study proposes that decentralised industrialisation (i.e., rural-industrial labour, predominantly in the timber industry) introduced inertia to the urbanisation process by lowering the rate of rural-to-urban migration. Using longitudinal, individual-level data from the county of Västerbotten, the development of migration rates and migrant characteristics is explored via descriptive statistics. The rural population’s development and migration patterns closely correlate to the development of decentralised industrialisation. The results, therefore, indicate that decentralised industrialisation is a viable model for explaining the slow rate of urbanisation in northern Sweden.

This article attempts to answer the question about the position of women in Polish peasant families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries based on the memoirs of rural women. Contrary to the claim that taking control over the household budget gave women more power on the farm, memoirs of peasant women show that it was rather an additional duty and responsibility. This problem mainly affected low-income families, where income from typically male activities was insufficient, so homemakers supported the family from the female part of the farm: gardening and dairy production. Thus, despite the decisive importance of women’s earnings for the household budget, their power in the family had only a symbolic dimension.

National museums both mediate and inculcate official and formal versions of national culture and by this means make and maintain national identity. Three times in the course of the twentieth century, various groups have attempted, and failed, to establish a national museum, identified variously as British or English. This paper explores just one of those attempts: the Museum of British History Project, first proposed in 1996 and finally killed off in 2008. The focus here is, therefore, on failure and on the role of the conflation of Britishness and Englishness in that failure as well as the nature of British identity construction more generally.

All three attempts to create a national museum placed the rural idyll at the heart of the project. In the course of a detailed investigation of the Museum of British History project, this paper will pay particular attention to the proposed designs for a ‘British Landscape Gallery’ and the project's hegemonic, ruralised and Anglocentric perspectives. The gallery was the principal way in which established constructs of England and Englishness became conflated in the museum with Britain and Britishness and served to perpetuate the dominance of the ‘rural idyll’ in hegemonic manifestations of the nation. But the project remained stillborn in the face of the new museology: a failure which undoubtedly demonstrates the limits to the cultural power of the rural idyll.

Extractivism has marked the history of Latin America whose operations are in rural territories inhabited mainly by indigenous populations. Mining has had a remarkable expansion in rural territories of the Andes. Critical studies of these processes have focused on the disruptive aspects and conflict between companies, local populations, and States. However, mining has also been intertwined with the territories based on contradictory relationships at different timescales. To examine this issue, we carried out a historical reconstruction of the productive practices of the Caspana community indigenous (northern Chile) and their different forms of connection with mining development. We combine diverse data sources and methodological approaches: oral histories obtained from ethnography, censuses, explorers’ records, and academic literature. We identify different types of relationships over time, according to the different forms of indigenous participation in the extractive markets and the deployment and rearrangement of diverse economic strategies by the indigenous population.

This article discusses the received image of free Swedish and Finnish peasants, charting parallels with peasants in the Baltic region. It draws upon the post-Cold War discussion of free and unfree rural labour in early modern Europe. The discussion maintains that the labour service by free Swedish and Finnish peasant landholders and peasant tenants at its heaviest point may have been on a par with the corvée in the early modern Baltic provinces. It is suggested that the Cold War mental map may have led to an overstatement of the East-West distinction between peasants’ circumstances in the Baltic Sea region.

In October 1994, the Environment Secretary and Agriculture Minister announced their intention to publish, for the first time, a joint White Paper, setting out Government policy for the economic, social and environmental well-being of the English countryside. It stimulated a further flurry of interest in how such policy agenda are drawn up and implemented. Although ostensibly, ministers sought fresh policies under the banner of sustainable development, some commentators discerned an even greater concern as to the growing sense of deprivation felt by the 12 million voters who lived in the countryside. Although there had been much rural debate and research in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Cloke and Little have contended it laboured under two deficiencies. Not only was there minimal Government interest, but it did little more than highlight the inadequacies of a simple positivist approach. This time round, much greater use might be made of a political-economy perspective, that took fuller cognisance of the connections that prevailed between economic change, restructuring of society, and the role of the state.

The gamekeeper played an important role in the development of modern gamebird shooting but has been peripheral in many analyses of the sport, which have tended to focus on the poacher, the landed elite, or the game laws. This study places the gamekeeper in a central position and, for a selection of counties, provides a detailed examination and comparison of changes in gamekeeper numbers between 1851 and 1921. The influence on gamekeeper numbers of population changes, estate area, landowner numbers and poaching prosecutions were also examined. Significant differences were found between the counties in gamekeeper numbers, and the magnitude and timing of changes in these. Average estate area varied greatly with no direct link to the area of the county, or to the number of gamekeepers on an estate. The type of quarry and interest of the landowner were important in determining the number of gamekeepers employed. In some counties, there may have been a link between the level of poaching and gamekeeper numbers, but there were significant differences between the counties. The results indicated a complex, regionally nuanced, picture in which factors such as the location, primary quarry and poaching pressure, as well as the interests of the landowner and the depth of his pockets, determined gamekeeper numbers.

Although not a figure now widely known, Sir Ebenezer Howard has had a profound influence on British and, indirectly, on European and American urban planners. The historian Robert Fishman noted in 1978 that while Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright had become legendary as visionary architects and urban planners, Howard, probably more influential in the evolution of urban planning than either of them, has remained relatively obscure. Howard, like his more famous contemporaries, has always been characterized as Utopian by some because he imagined that city planning could aid in the creation of an entirely new society. For Howard, this society was to be one in which social divisions would be eliminated and the standards of living of all citizens would be raised through participatory social democracy organized at the city level. Howard attempted to realize this new society through building experimental communities to serve as models to be emulated elsewhere.

In a poem written at Dean Prior in Devonshire sometime between 1630 and 1648, and addressed to the Earl of Westmoreland, Robert Herrick invites the Earl to watch a procession of harvesters bringing in the last load:

Come forth, my Lord, and see the Cart

Drest up with all the Country Art.

See, here a Maukin, there a sheet,

As spotless pure as it is sweet:

The Horses, Mares, and frisking Fillies

(Clad, all, in Linnen, white as Lillies.)

The Harvest Swaines, and Wenches, bound

For joy, to see the Hock-cart crown'd.

The two major censuses of religion that have most preoccupied historians and cultural geographers have, without question, been the Compton census of 1676 and the Census of Religious Worship of 1851. Over more than two centuries, probably indeed throughout British history, no other religious censuses were conducted to rival these two sources. The religious history of the intervening period has however, been researched by using other documentation, including the Evans list of 1715, the returns of Papists in 1767 and 1780, selected visitation returns, and the 1829 religious returns.

On the 25th June 1789, Jean Louis Varey, of the village of St Ferreole near Faverges in Haute Savoie, met Jean Burdet in the local inn to discuss the future of a field the latter had rented from Varey's father. After the conclusion of this business they took a glass of wine specifically with four others: Jean Baptiste Prevost, the son of the notary, and three local peasant householders Jean Roderigue, Pierre Raucaz and Aime Guignon. Many others were also in attendance. Varey had recently returned to his home after a period of time trading in France, and he clearly fancied himself as something of an enterpreneur. The others thought him a bit above himself.

There has been much historical debate over the role of aristocratic landed families in local and national politics throughout the nineteenth century, and the impact of the First, Second and Third Reform Acts on that role. Additionally, the period from 1881 in the Scottish Highlands was one of acute political and ideological crisis, as the debate over the reform of the Land Laws took a violent turn, and Highland landowners were forced to address the demands of their small tenants. This article addresses these debates, taking as its case-study the ducal house of Sutherland. The Leveson-Gower family owned almost the whole county of Sutherland and until 1884 dominated political life in the region. This article examines the gradual breakdown of that political power, in line with a more general decline in financial and territorial influence, both in terms of the personal role of the Fourth and Fifth Dukes of Sutherland, and the broader impact of the estate management on the mechanics and expectations of politics in the county.