Twentieth‐century rural England: A case for ‘peasant studies'?

Reed and others have argued for the continuing existence of a peasantry in nineteenth‐century England. The present article uses the instance of an upland Yorkshire area to suggest that a ‘peasantry’ continued there until the mid‐twentieth century sustained and to some extent re‐shaped by trends in the national agricultural economy. Family‐centred farming on small acreages, low rents and capital inputs, flexible attitudes to work and the dual economy proved efficient mechanisms for surmounting economic conditions which were often disadvantagous to larger farmers. Investigation of other areas of England for similar phenomena is invited.     

European capitalism and the effects of agricultural commercialization on slave labor in Tunisia, 1780s–1880s

Abstract

The paper argues that while the significance of Tunisian state economic and political reforms during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has reflected the changing patterns of the caravan slave trade in previous research, much of this research has not considered the role of slaves in the emergent Tunisian economy. Nowhere is this negligence more apparent than in the agricultural sector, which was predominantly responsible for strengthening economic growth from the late eighteenth century until its weakening as a result of encroaching European capitalism by the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on Tunisian state population data known as the Majba Census and the extant economic literature, the paper addresses this gap by exploring the implications of the Tunisian state economic reforms on enslaved labor in the agricultural sector. Exploring this research gap will enable us to ascertain the extent to which enslaved labor contributed to Tunisia’s burgeoning agricultural sector in a manner that has dodged academics’ attention. After providing a historical context of European capital penetration and its implications on political and economic reforms from the Ottoman conquest through the Husaynid periods, the paper looks at how European capital infusion after the first quarter of the nineteenth century transformed the agricultural sector and examines the role of slave labor prior to the European capital infusion and commercialization of the agricultural sector. Using the Majba Census records’ regional distribution of blacks in the Regency the paper sheds light on the implications of the precarious economy engendered by agricultural commercialization under the aegis of European capitalism on the structure of enslaved labor.     

The peasant image and agrarian change: Representations of rural society in nineteenth‐century French painting from millet to van Gogh

In the upsurge of rustic themes in French painting during the second half of the nineteenth century is articulated a range of urban responses to agrarian and industrial transformation of country and city at the time. The recreation through art of ‘peasant culture’ was rooted in preoccupations about work and production, changing social relations and forms of sociability, the idea of the nation and the growth of political consciousness. This article examines some of the processes underlying the abundant production of peasant images ‐ the role of patronage, the growing importance of contemporary art criticism in formulating and diffusing values and sensibilities — as well as the complex and, at times, contradictory strains within the iconography of rural life in nineteenth‐century French art.     

Manning the Fields: Remaking Women's Work in the Tobacco South in the Twentieth Century

Today, men make up the vast majority of the workforce in the tobacco fields of the American South. This was not always the case. For more than two centuries, enslaved women worked alongside men in the tobacco fields. In the late nineteenth century, the unpaid labor of female kin made possible the household's replacement of the plantation as the center of production, and it remained critical for farm families well into the twentieth century. Following World War II, agricultural engineers developed new technologies to eliminate tasks traditionally done by women. In the 1980s, the process of defeminization accelerated as growers began to hire male guestworkers from Mexico as more women moved into the non-farm labor market to supplement their families' farm incomes. The transition from family to wage labor in the tobacco South was far from a ‘natural’ process, but one nurtured by state agricultural, labor, and immigration policy.     

Frances Wright: The other woman of early American feminism

This paper focuses on Frances Wright, the first woman to lecture publicly in the U.S. to “promiscuous” audiences, those audiences composed of both sexes united in a public place. Despite her achievement, Wright has been ignored in historical analyses of nineteenth‐century feminist rhetoric, I argue that historians have avoided Wright because she differs radically from those feminists who directly succeed her. As the Other Woman of the women's movement, Wright practiced a rhetoric imbued with the ideals of the Enlightenment and Owenite socialism. She publicly interrogated the cult of domesticity and demanded equal rights for women at a time when gender anxiety was Intense. Wright caused a furor and provided a negative example for later nineteenth‐century feminists, most of whom developed “womanly” strategies of accommodation. I conclude that it is precisely because of her otherness that Wright is important, historically significant because she was marginalized and silenced within the feminist movement.     

The German agricultural worker, 1815–1914

This paper examines the history of the German agricultural worker from the early nineteenth‐century abolition of serfdom up to 1914. Initially, peasant labour services and the compulsory farm service of peasant youth on Junker farms were replaced by contractually hired farm servants and the cottager system. The latter involved the exchange of labour for an allocation of the land, whereby the worker become a petty commodity producer and also an employer of labour, in the form of the ancillary workers (Hofgänger) he was obliged to provide. Subsequently, from the middle decades of the century, this form of labour was increasingly replaced by confined labourers living in tied cottages, who were virtually landless and paid largely in kind; and were therefore effectively economic objects. At the same time, especially from the 1870s, conditions necessitated increasing reliance upon labourers receiving cash wages. However, this category remained relatively small, and largely impervious to socialist ideology, on account of a growing dependence of German agriculture on foreign (Polish) seasonal migrants.     

Popular culture,symbolism and rural radicalism in nineteenth‐century France

This article explores the relationship between the modernisation of economic life, collective protest and politics and the centuries‐old pattern of popular festivals and rituals. The rise of social‐democratic republicanism among the small peasants of Mediterranean France in the mid‐nineteenth century did not occur at the expense of popular culture. The reconciliation of these two mainsprings of collective life was facilitated by the use of symbolic modes of public behaviour, investing politics and popular culture with mutually reinforcing potency. Only in later decades did socio‐economic and political developments decay this culture.     

Growth of money economy and some questions of transition in late pre‐colonial India

One of the more remarkable but neglected features of the growth of commercial capitalism on an international scale from the sixteenth century consists of widespread processes of monetization affecting a number of Asian societies, and especially India. This was in turn connected with commercialization of both agrarian and urban economy, and the development of markets and manufactures. By the middle of the eighteenth century, this development had become distorted through increasing European intervention in both trade and manufacture; in this respect colonial occupation was both a culmination of earlier processes, and the means (through political monopoly, use of violence, control over the taxation system) for the East India Company to destroy competition and drive prices downwards in an increasingly competitive world. The corollary was that up until the mid‐nineteenth century at least India's integration into a colonial empire was marked by a broad‐based process of under development of which deindustrialization was merely part, and including a process of relative demonetization.¹ This article begins by presenting the problem in terms of the unprecedented international flow and sub‐continental use of monetary media which took place between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author then considers the implications of these phenomena for an understanding of the development of commercial capitalism during this crucial period, firstly within India itself, and secondly within a broader international context. Finally, he ends with some statements concerning the implications of this hypothesis for an understanding of the early colonial period. The result is to place India firmly on the map of developments affecting the world more generally, long before colonialism.     

Everything will be in order

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented a period of new conceptual theorizations of “woman” both in the sphere of biological discourse and in literature and philosophy. My focus in this article is on how G.W.F. Hegel constructs gender identity and gender difference philosophically and conceptually. I argue that although the concept “gender identity” was not part of nineteenth‐century vocabulary, Hegel does in fact construct gender difference through a conceptual differentiation between reflexive self‐differentiation and undifferentiated identity constructed as a “difference from difference”. This fundamental logic of gender difference is apparent both in the sphere of Hegel's natural philosophy, in bodily differences between male and female bodies, and in the sphere of social life, in the differentiated spheres of action Hegel prescribes for men and women. Behind both the female body and the position of women as belonging to only one domestic sphere of action lies for Hegel the undifferentiation of spirit, the incapacity to active self‐differentiation and divided or “torn” self‐consciousness. The male body and the position of man as citizen, in contrast, are described by Hegel to be determined by their inner and outer negativity, struggle, and differentiation.     

Faith,Fetes and Domesticity in Australia

To feminists in the 1970s the fete symbolised women’s marginalisation in church and society but in the nineteenth century its respectability was far from assured. This article uses the shifting history of the fete and other forms of women’s fund‐raising over the years between the 1880s and the 1970s to examine changes in ‘ordinary’ women’s subjective and practical experiences of domesticity. It shows how women used the fete to carve out a place for themselves on the borders of the public and private spheres and, in the process, ‘created and sustained communities’; how churchmen overcame their reluctance to allowing women into the public gaze because of the church’s financial need and how, as women came to envision a greater role for themselves in the church from the early twentieth century, a strand of resistance to being ‘used’ as fund‐raisers emerged. The history of women’s fund‐raising for the church offers insights into the under‐researched area of women and domesticity.     

Peasant counter‐revolution?

This paper discusses some aspects of the wide peasant support of Spanish counter‐revolutionary movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This support should not be viewed as a mere manipulation by the church of the religious ‘fanaticism’ of the rural population, but as a political reaction consistent with the peasants’ perception of their antagonisms with other classes. The peasant opposition to liberalism does not necessarily signify support of the old order but can be understood as the expression of a preference for an alternative to that project which was materialising in the politics of the liberal governments.     

Women on the Move: a review of the historiography of Irish emigration to the USA, 1750–1900

Emigration was an integral part of Irish life in the nineteenth century and much of that experience was characterised by banishment, exile and loneliness. This article reviews the historiography of Irish emigration to America and focuses on Irish women's unique experience of emigration, specifically looking at their reasons for leaving, the mechanics of departure and the kind of life that awaited them in the USA. This interpretation places gender at the centre of the narrative and argues that Irish emigrant women were agents of their own lives and not secondary agents and also that, by the end of the nineteenth century, personal ambition and a desire to improve and progress their own lives was as influential with them as the financial imperative to assist family and friends in the USA and Ireland.     

Unmarried mothers in Ireland, 1880-1973

This article explores the changing experiences and representation of Ireland's unmarried mothers from 1880 to 1973. It focuses on the stigma of illegitimacy in political and cultural discourse and the representation of unmarried mothers as immoral and their children as a drain on resources. These remained constant themes within the discourse of unmarried motherhood in Ireland throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The article uses the records of philanthropic, government and religious organisations to chart the rising interest in the moral reformation of unmarried mothers at the end of the nineteenth century and rising tolerance towards them by the end of the twentieth century.     

Peasant insurrection in China reconsidered: A preliminary examination of the Jun Mountain peasant rising,Nantong county, 1863

Focusing on a concrete historical example ‐ the Jun Mountain Peasant Rising, a small‐scale, mid‐nineteenth century insurgency in the Yangzi delta region ‐ this article re‐evaluates standard interpretations of peasant action and resistance in China. Although obscure and abortive, the Jun Mountain rising illuminates the developing role and interpenetration of ‘outsider’ communities, sectarian ideology/organisation, class formation, and long‐term trends in peasant culture in the emergence of an insurgent politics which at once built upon and transcended local ties. Preliminary examination of these politics thus contributes to current debate about the nature of Chinese peasant rebellions.     

Clash of resource use regimes in Colonial Assam: A nineteenth‐century puzzle revisited

In the nineteenth‐century the British colonial government in Assam tried to change the land titles of Assamese peasants from annual leases to decennial leases. But Assamese peasants mostly abandoned their claim to their land after a single harvest. The peasants’ behaviour gives a clue to the impact of the colonial land settlement project whose major effect was to eliminate the access of shifting cultivators and hunter‐gatherers of the Brahmaputra Valley and the surrounding hills to most natural resources. The major beneficiary of land settlement were the tea planters. The behaviour of the Assamese peasant reflected the habits formed by the old resource use regime.     

From a mimetic to a holographic paradigm in fiction: Toward a definition of feminist writing

This paper outlines a theory of fiction by examining the shift from the basically mimetic nineteenth century to be essentially non‐mimetic twentieth century. It further argues that the contemporary novel, as herein interpreted, constitutes a bona fide expression of feminist writing.

The paper contends thatthe transformation undergone by the novel as it moved from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century bears witness to the wide ranging transformation affecting the western world today. A number of inter‐related shifts have occurred ostensibly leading the western mind into a radically new world view, or new paradigm. Indeed, our culture is steadily moving from the absolutes of traditional physics to the relativity of the new physics and quantum theory; from a “logocentric”¹ to a “deconstructive”² universe; from a fragmentary (basically static and non‐creative) to a holistic (essentially dynamic and creative) realm; from representation to holography. Inasmuch as “representation” relates to “mimesis”, this paper ultimately redefines its aim by proposing to explore a shift from a mimetic to a holographic paradigm in fiction.

The notion of the holograph is therefore essential to the paper. As herein interpreted, holography not only challenges representation, but it also devalues the linear view of time (which is central to western culture) by focusing on the “now” and thereby delving into the depths of reality — the realm of the underlying, creative forces which the western world is presently releasing. It is precisely the release of long‐repressed forces that is drastically transforming western culture. This sheds new light on the problematics of western alienation which can now be reassessed in terms of “alienation from the creative source”.

In the final analysis, the paper contends that the emerging forces are essentially feminine. This posits an ultimate, all‐encompassing shift which may be said to be leading us from a male‐oriented to a holistically‐oriented culture: a culture that celebrates the essential oneness and fundamental dynamics of Life. Since the twentieth century novel has superbly explored and expressed the emergence of these forces, the paper regards it as the epitome of feminist writing. This writing is to be viewed as practice in the sense that it expresses the very process of change it has helped foster and in which it participates: the process of integration of the creative depths of being.     

The Missionary Narrative as Coercive Interrogation: seduction,confession and self‐presentation in women’s ‘letters home’ 1

This article takes as its starting point the late nineteenth and early twentieth century missionary discourse of feminine self‐denial, and attempts to chart the ways in which it became a subversive theme in women missionaries’ ‘letters home.’ It argues that in the simultaneously public and private act of letter writing, women missionaries created complex sexual and political self‐narratives. By co‐opting the imperial rhetoric of a threatening, violent East, and then setting up their letters as conversations with an invisible interrogator, missionary women repeatedly forced their audiences to discover the various ways in which they had been seduced by this East, and had thereby deviated from accepted feminine norms. In the process, they both reinforced imperial notions of race and civilization and undermined the likewise imperial notion of protective domestic space.     

Did agrarian capitalism exist?

Lack of clarity about key concepts of Marxian political economy and a penchant to apply such concepts too directly to history seriously weakens Brenner's analysis of ‘agrarian capitalism’. It is argued that even as late as 1700 English agriculture is not capitalist to any appreciable extent, when one considers that the corn‐modification of labour power is crucial to considering agriculture to be capitalist, and when one closely examines the actual degree to which labour power is commodified. Further it is argued that English agriculture only becomes substantially capitalist in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.     

Sharecropping and the management of large rural estates in Catalonia, 1850–1950

This article examines the role of sharecropping in the operation of great estates in Catalonia (Spain) from the mid‐nineteenth to the mid‐twentieth century. Noting that the sharecropping option was not the fruit of inertia, but of the failure of alternatives, we look at the various factors which led to its predominance. Next, we show the adaptability of sharecropping to a variety of ecological and social contexts. Finally, we argue that the backwardness of Catalan agriculture is not to be attributed to sharecropping, which, on the contrary, proved comparable to other forms of tenure in terms of economic efficiency, and was also a successful instrument for the reproduction of social inequalities and labour exploitation.     

Rural artisans and peasant mobilisation in the socialist international: The fasci siciliani

This article explores the conditions under which peasant cultivators and rural artisans participate in movements of social transformation, a case in point being the Fascio movement of Sicily in the late nineteenth century. It analyses the reasons why artisans could play a critical role in politicising local protest and articulating it with pan‐European socialist movements, by describing their relations to other classes in a differentiated peasant community.