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.

The Sandringham Estate was purchased in 1862 by the Prince of Wales to be his home away from London. This article uses a variety of sources to chart the changes to the estate as the prince developed his new holding. The acquisition required staff at all levels and in many and varied roles, which gave opportunities to local people and to those who moved in from further away. The countryside changed dramatically too with new plantations of trees and significantly increased rearing of game birds. There were benefits for the local population in having a royal landlord but there was also tension related to the prince’s predilection for blood sports and his level of control. The hitherto nearly invisible lower ranks of staff on this royal estate come to the fore in this article, which is a striking example of ‘history from below’ set immediately beside the royal family.

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 surveys a range of work on the later medieval English countryside published since 2000, and offers some predictions and suggestions about future research. It shows that the field of ‘rural history’ has rarely been closely defined, and indeed has tended to be treated as a broad church that can accommodate many different kinds of approach, themselves drawing on a variety of disciplinary traditions. The article identifies and discusses recent and current innovation and creativity in research within two such broad approaches, one mainly ‘economic’, the other ‘cultural’. It concludes by arguing for the gains that can be enjoyed through the combination of elements of the two approaches, and especially through a renewed emphasis on the illumination of the general through an intensive focus on the local.

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’.

Who chooses new technology? And how? In this article, we explore the diffusion of agricultural science and technology in Galicia (Spain), and the ways in which farmers adopted innovations in the period of 1880–1940 within the Atlantic Iberian agricultural context of small farms. To answer these questions, we adopt a socio-institutional approach and also an environmental one, changes in breeding techniques and the creation of the Galician Blond cow, as well as the widespread use of threshing machines, which were two closely related innovations in the context of mixed farming agriculture. These two examples illustrate the fusion of science-based and practice-based agriculture, and how technology did not threaten community or family equilibrium; instead, it empowered processes that were already operative in affirming small-scale farming.

The aim of this article is to investigate how the characteristics of the different types of human settlements explain their demographic dynamics and, therefore, which of these have been affected to a greater extent by depopulation processes. For this purpose, we analyse the evolution of the population of Aragón (north-east Spain) in the period 1900–2001, according to the different types of population settlements that exist. Our results show that access to public services has played an essential role, especially when the construction of the welfare state made the rural population feel that there was a penalty for residing in settlements with problems to access them. The main settlements, headquarters of the municipal administration, have had advantages over the secondary settlements. Finally, the scattered population was the most affected and, therefore, emigrated to a greater extent, until this form of residence practically disappeared.

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.

This article examines the various ways new wealth infiltrated the Welsh gentry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the behaviours and actions of new men, together with the processes they followed to assimilate into the world of the old families. This study emphasises a level of openness of landed society to new arrivals able to comport themselves according to the expectations of the existing social elite. It demonstrates that acquiring land and property, which served as a visible display of their wealth, was only one strategy deployed by new wealth to secure gentry status. Other approaches included building country houses, consuming fashionable goods, undertaking public duties, political representation, drawing on culture and living heritage by projecting an image of ancient lineage (Welsh gentry understanding of Welshness was heavily reliant on lineage) through name-changing, adopting coats of arms and family mottos.

The central and associated county or district chambers of agriculture have attracted little attention from historians. Their origins have been attributed to the perceived lack of a national coordinating body for agriculture highlighted by the 1865–7 cattle plague. This article based on the records of the Shropshire Chamber of Agriculture, newspapers and printed histories reconsiders their role. Members were initially drawn from landowning society and larger tenant farmers, although membership widened with the growth of rival organisations. Activities included lectures, talks and debates on agricultural subjects, visits to farms, factories and the county agricultural college and farm institute, dinners and social occasions at which those interested in agriculture could meet. By foregrounding the people and politics of the chambers of agriculture, it is argued they need to be incorporated more fully into the historiography of agricultural and rural politics of Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

A social history of Ireland (encompassing rural communities) is needed if historians are to fully come to terms with what really happened between 1914 and 1918 and to properly tackle the question of ‘consent’ and ‘constraint’ in relation to the war effort. In addition, historians need to devote a comprehensive book-length research to the April 1918 Conscription Crisis in Ulster (but more generally to the anti-conscription movement in Ulster), determining if the urban/rural – Belfast/countryside divide existed (and, if so, what its magnitude was). Finally, in a few years’ time, anyone will be able to say if the Republic of Ireland of today opted to anchor the global conflict in the collective memory of its people, or if the Centenary of the First World War was just a politically motivated parenthesis to commemorate a lost generation that still struggles to find its rightful place in modern Irish history.

The article presents a trend in rural and small-town architecture, in central Poland, consisting in the reuse of material from river-going vessels. As part of the research, twenty objects (existing and non-extant) were identified that had been constructed using material from wooden vessels that had navigated the Vistula River in the past (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). There was also a reinterpretation of the origin of construction material from a farm building that had been moved in the 1980s from near the Vistula to one of Polish open-air museums. The results indicate that these are probably the last material traces of a boat mill that operated on the Vistula in the late nineteenth century. Also, many preserved millstones embedded in buildings located near the Vistula seem to confirm this conclusion.

Rural electrification is closely linked one way or another to rural development, and enables the understanding of the complexity of social and economic development paths. The objective of this work is to analyse rural electrification in a European peripherical country like Spain throughout the twentieth century, contributing to the international debate on the issue. The article studies the territorial expansion of electricity in the Spanish countryside, tracing different phases and explaining the delay in the construction of a national network. It also analyses the relationship that arose in the long term between electrification and the evolution of the agricultural sector. The article concludes that, in the Spanish case, rural electrification played a modest role in agricultural change until the 1980s and was, to a great extent, the consequence, rather than the cause, of the modernisation of the sector to these years.

On the basis of eight available terriers of a large royal estate of Niepołomice in southern Poland and of the vital records of two parishes located on its area, all dating from the early eighteenth century, this article examines the effect of famines on the economic situation of both feudal lords and their peasant tenants. The restrictive framework of the second serfdom in Poland did not prevent two severe mortality crises at the time triggered by crop failures. The key hazards caused by the famines for demesne economy were shortages of corvée labour and peasant-owned draught animals. While the famine mortality that affected the peasants reported as farmers in the terriers was not high, the famines were conducive to peasant impoverishment and reshuffled groups of various financial statuses.

One of the most important systems of sheep transhumance since the Middle Ages in Spain occurred between the mountains of northern Leon and the Extremadura Meadow lands – a 500-kilometre journey on foot. We analyse here an interesting collection of thirty letters, written at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and sent by the shepherds responsible for the flock from the wintering land to the owner of the animals. The only connection with the owner for seven long months but also with their villages and families, were these letters.

In this article we study the distinct formative stages of the labour market for external wet nurses employed by Galician foundling hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. We focus on changes in the nature of wet nurses’ work due to the benevolence laws (1822, 1836, 1849) that were driven by Spain’s liberal state. We also examine wet nurses’ socio-demographic profile and the geographic distribution of their labour markets. Finally, we explore the economic impact that Galician foundling hospitals had on rural districts, looking closely at the importance of external wet nurse wages for family budgets.

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.

A determined expansion in the productive capacity of Spanish agriculture was a fundamental and contentious objective during the crisis of the country’s ancien régime and the formation of the liberal state, in the years of transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this study we examine a fundamental reorientation that occurred in an ambitious project for the expansion of irrigation in the region of Valencia. In this region, characterised by a well-rooted commercial agriculture, the original scheme, initiated by an enlightened aristocrat well connected with the royal court, would be profoundly altered in the transition from one political regime to another. The irrigated area increased much more than had been anticipated, and very diverse sections of the social hierarchy eventually benefited from this agricultural expansion. In contrast, the control exercised over the irrigation canal by the aristocrat himself would be increasingly questioned in the context of the nineteenth century.

Tracing developments in British town and country planning during the 1960s and 1970s, this article describes the sudden upsurge of landscape evaluation method-development among landscape architects and planners, and the disputes that made such efforts come to an end in the late 1970s. In this burst of activity, here referred to as the UK landscape evaluation movement, we can observe competing definitions of visual amenity and landscape quality take form. It is described how practitioners invented or adopted numerical measurement and preference methods as means to gain a supposedly unbiased understanding of how different landscape areas are valued by communities. Struggling to make themselves heard in a planning sector that was dominated by more powerful stakeholders and quantitative approaches (for example, cost-benefit analysis), in the landscape evaluation movement we can also witness how pioneering practitioners adopt advanced statistical techniques and computer mapping to communicate qualitative values of landscape more effectively to each other, communities and decision-makers. These were deliberate attempts by the practitioners to occupy a more active and influential role in landscape and country planning during the period. As this article shows, their success in this regard was limited due to the lack of general agreement with respect to the reliability, validity and generalisability of both assessment methods and produced findings.

In the 1850s goldrush, new communities emerged in Victoria with members from diverse origins of place, faith and ethnicity. Settlers usually migrated to pursue wealth; however, the social cohesion these young towns required often came from beyond logics of economy. As the goldrush waned from the 1860s, communal searches for children lost in the bush became a secular ‘rite’ that helped produce ‘moral communities’, which articulated shared values through common beliefs and social practices associated with lost children. Entire segments of communities would gather, suspend economic pursuits and search for lost children, often for days or weeks at a time. The euphoria of finding the child alive, or the solemn reverie when the child perished, forged communal goodwill through shared sentiment. The rite of the search became disseminated through newspapers, literature and word-of-mouth, while the ‘bush’ – a construction referring to various landscapes in Australia – enabled readers to participate in the searches remotely, as part of an imagining and feeling community in the colonies’ various climates. In the gradually secularising settler colonies of Australia in the late nineteenth century, lost children functioned as a fulcrum on which communities could pivot, while establishing social cohesion and communal belonging.