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 article analyses the creation of unions and the evolution of protests (demonstrations, tractor blockades) instigated by farmers in the province of Burgos, in the interior of northern Spain, during the period following the death of the dictator Francisco Franco known as the Transition (1975–80). The study uses press articles, documentation from the Civil Government and information gathered through personal interviews. The aim of the article is to show that the farmers of the interior of northern Spain – an electorally conservative region – also participated in the citizens’ protests that were the driving force behind the democratisation process in the country during the 1970s.

This article explores the intellectual culture of Catholic architectural production in 1950s Ireland through the study of a church-building project in rural West Cork. It analyses the phenomenon of the Irish ‘church-building priest’ in terms of their socio-economic background, fundraising abilities, and position within rural communities – in the context of significant rural emigration and economic stagnation. It also considers the role that the Irish countryside played in conditioning clerical understandings of architectural style and taste, and priests’ political readings of the rural landscape. Furthermore, it explores the phenomenon of Marianism in church design and ornamentation around the time of the international ‘Marian Year’ of 1954, and the political meanings of the rhetoric employed by clerics at church consecration ceremonies. The article concludes with reflections on social and economic aspects of Irish rural life and religious expression in a decade primarily understood as one of cultural insularity and conservative Catholicism.

Ducats were issued for the first time in the second half of the thirteenth century. Although practically invisible in Western Europe nowadays, they are still hoarded and used by the rural population of the Balkans. The wealth stored in them is considerable; its level does not show signs of structural decline yet, even in the age of the almighty euro. The history of the use of ducats in the Balkans can be divided into three distinctive periods. Using a descriptive economic-historical approach, the characteristics of these periods, their main evolutionary aspects and particularities are being observed and explained. An overview of countries issuing ducats in the Balkans is given and some economic comparisons used to illustrate the significance of ducats as an economic phenomenon. Finally, the very important question of the use of ducats in jewelry in the Balkans is considered.

A great deal has been written in recent years concerning the role and changing status of women in the context of rural development, and especially in the countries of the so-called Third World. Attention has been paid to the impact of cash-cropping and labour migration upon rural women (cf. Boserup, 1970: ch.3 and passim; Murray, 1981), to the failure of development agencies properly to appreciate their role in agriculture (cf. Swantz, 1985; Nelson, 1979), to the special burden which they carry in situations of famine and times of stress (Sen, 1983; Vaughan, 1987; ch. 5 and passim), and, as in other contexts, to the differences between women in different sections and strata of society (Moore, 1988: 79–82 and passim).

In 1956 in an international symposium at Princeton on the theme Man's role in changing the face of the Earth, one of the principal contributors, Carl Sauer, reflected that as much as anything it was a festival of remembrance to George Perkins Marsh. Marsh was perhaps the inspiration for viewing man within his natural world, within his ecological setting, but a setting which had evolved as much as anything by the actions of his own hand as it had been by natural agents. Marsh's great work Man and Nature, has been dubbed ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement.’ Thus Sauer suggests that this study is based on man's:

One of the legacies of the great landed estates in England is the large number of distinctive estate cottages which are scattered throughout the countryside. These are, of course, more in evidence in some counties than others, particularly in those where a considerable proportion of land was owned by the elite. Estate cottages survive in some numbers from the eighteenth century, but the greatest number was built in the nineteenth. Research on estate buildings has tended to highlight the model village, built largely during the first half of the nineteenth century and created for aesthetic reasons. A well-known example is Somerleyton in Suffolk, designed in the 1840s for the then owner of Somerleyton Hall. Here, the cottages, built in a variety of styles – some with mock timber-framing, others with thatched roofs – surround the village green. Ilam in Staffordshire is another example, where cottages which were designed by G.G. Scott in 1854 display a range of styles and materials, many alien to the local area. A third example is Edensor on the Duke of Devonshire's Derbyshire estate, where the stone buildings exhibit distinctive Italianate features. The list could be extended, but these examples were clearly designed to impress, to provide aesthetic pleasure for the owners and, in the case of Ilam, to create a picturesque image of idyllic contentment among the labouring population as much as to provide good, spacious, sanitary accommodation for employees. In each of these examples, the cottages are generally of individual design and thus expensive to build.

Taking J. A. Baker's celebrated book The Peregrine as its focus, the article seeks to locate Baker's writing within a broader, less elevated field of postwar observation and publication that worked to shape new ways of understanding, apprehending and taking pleasure from the natural environment. This included the recording practices and publications of the national and county naturalist and birdwatching societies that flourished in these years. The article shows how Baker's book was as much the product of this world of organised amateur natural history as it was of the world of high literature. Baker's book also sheds light on the reconfiguring of bird-human relations within competing postwar cultures of nature and the article uses it to explore the relationship between birdwatching and the bird-centred field sport of falconry. As organised birdwatching sought to establish moral authority over other bird-centred countryside pursuits in its understanding of natural relations, it cast field sports and other countryside practices as atavistic and archaic relics of older cultures of nature. Baker's The Peregrine allows us to see the convergences between the close attention to birds of prey and an intimacy with them that was shared by birdwatchers like Baker and falconers, even as Baker's narrative also sheds light on the differences between the two practices.

In interwar debates about Hungarian modernity, the countryside played a prominent symbolic role. For conservative nationalists, the Hungarian countryside became a symbol and source of authentic, ‘traditional’ Hungarian national culture, unchanging, hierarchical, ordered society and stable community, and national uniqueness. Entertainment films of the 1930s provided alternative representations of the countryside that upheld the possibility of modernising traditional Hungary. According to the films, modern Hungary would be created at the intersection and out of the cooperation between rural and urban, modern and traditional. The films questioned and challenged the idea that the rural was ‘pure’, authentic, untainted, but they also rejected the idea that it was shameful, hopelessly backward, or unable to change. Showing the countryside as both traditional and part of modern mass culture, as both nostalgically stable and an exotic vacationland, the films offered an integrative vision of Hungary which destabilised assumptions of both liberals and conservatives. Popular films used the countryside to provide a unique and alternative vision of modern Hungary that was integrative and reconciliatory; they provided an outlet for a liberal, democratic, capitalist perspective unavailable elsewhere in the public sphere.

This article considers the Dukeries estates of north Nottinghamshire in the heyday of aristocratic power and prestige, from the mid Georgian to the mid Victorian period. It poses a contrast between visitors' impressions of the area as one of constancy and continuity, a point of reassurance in an age of political and social upheaval, and the reality of internal changes from within. Closely crowded as these estates were, their aristocratic owners competed with one another to fashion the most economically viable and aesthetically pleasing symbol of status and power. The article pays close attention to the hold which picturesque principles exercised on individual owners and considers the role of plantation, animals and water in parkland management and improvement. Finally, the article considers the extent to which the estates were sites of contestation. Owners attempted to keep unwanted plebeian incursions at bay, whilst carefully controlling access on set-piece occasions such as coming-of-age festivities.

The article seeks to determine the causes of the agrarian debt in rural Switzerland since the First World War and illustrate this growing phenomena in the 1920s and 1930s, by correlating the increase to the costs of the change in production beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, to the cut in the prices of agricultural products and the parallel depreciation of the soil after the war. After having outlined the effects of indebtedness reflected in the increase in the number of distraints, the article focuses on the political responses put in place to ensure the smooth running of mortgage loans – integrated since 1930 into a system of guarantees designed to limit the risks for creditors. The bill of the federal government intended to promote agricultural debt relief was long put off by some political circles, preferring to step in with precise measures, such as credit payments and extraordinary subsidies.

The workhouse remains a totemic institution for social historians, yet we still know very little about the day-to-day experiences of the indoor poor. Nowhere is this clearer than in discussions about workhouse clothing, which remain overwhelmingly negative in the literature and consistent with the predominant view of the workhouse as a place of suffering and humiliation. Yet more often than not, this view is based on relatively shallow empirical foundations and tends to rely on anecdotal evidence or on the uncritical use of subjective sources such as photographs, newspaper editorials and other cultural products. This article takes a different approach by looking again at the whole range of meanings that workhouse clothing held for paupers and those who oversaw its allocation, and at the practical and symbolic usages to which it was put by them. On the basis of this evidence the authors argue that, contrary to the orthodox view, workhouse clothing was rarely intended to be degrading or stigmatising; that it would have held very different meanings for different classes of paupers; and that, far from being a source of unbridled misery, paupers often found it to be a source of great strategic and practical value.

The part played by the public health movement in controlling epidemics in urban areas has received considerable attention from historians, as has the regulation of the milk and meat industries that commenced in the late nineteenth century. However, comparatively little work has been carried out on health in a rural context – and the role played by the horticultural sector in the spread of contagious diseases has barely been covered. Yet, as this article shows, it was a sector that had the potential to produce potent contaminants. By examining histories of the production of one horticultural crop, watercress, it reveals how issues around the provision of a clean urban water supply and idealised imaginings of the countryside as a pure space, played a part in exacerbating the extent of outbreaks of typhoid in the industrial city. It also shows that there was governmental reluctance to regulate an industry that grew a staple product, even when growers themselves were keen for guidance.

This article explores the outlines of an ‘agrarian-industrial knowledge society’ that developed from about 1895. Farmers, breeders, experts and leaders of dairy companies worked in close cooperation to increase the fat percentages in milk. The challenge was to measure these percentages on the farm, and process the information in a systematic way. Feedback mechanisms resulted in the selection of productive cows, because the fat content of milk is highly inheritable through the male as well as the female line. Data gathered from dairy companies and herd books in the Netherlands has uncovered considerable geographical differences in this process of knowledge-based growth. Focusing on Friesland, a Dutch province with a rich tradition of dairy farming, the importance of institutions is illustrated. A dairy counsellor, societies for milk measurement and cattle examination as well as price systems introduced by dairy companies advanced the biological quality of cows.