The Agrarian Path to Capitalism?

In 1976 an article by the American Marxist historian Robert Brenner inaugurated a debate in Past and Present on the relationship of agrarian conditions and structures to the differing rates and forms of capitalist development in Europe. He was especially concerned to challenge what he termed ‘neo‐Malthusianism’. Exemplified in the work of M.M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie this explained the decline of feudalism in terms of impersonal economic and demographic forces. In stressing instead the role of class struggle between lords and peasants, Brenner brought critical responses not just from this school, but also from Marxists who considered his explanation too ‘super‐structural’. The publication of the critical pieces and of Brenner's response in a single book provided an opportunity to take an overview of a major and stimulating debate which can be considered still very much alive.

The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre‐Industrial Europe, edited by T.H. Ashton and C.H.E. Philpin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp.viii + 339; £27.50.     

Agrarian reform and the transition to socialism in Chile, 1970–1973

The purpose of this article is to examine Popular Unity's agrarian policy in the light of the failure of the revolutionary forces to capture power and initiate a transition to socialism in Chile. We argue that Popular Unity's agrarian policy reflects the limitations and contradictions of its strategy to power. Although Allende's agrarian reform was extensive, drastic and rapidly executed, it nevertheless limited the peasantry's contribution to the revolutionary struggle for power. In the first part we briefly examine the agrarian legacy left by the Christian Democrat government of Frei to the Popular Unity and present the agrarian programme of Allende's government. We proceed in the second part with an analysis of peasant mobilisation and organisation, focusing on land seizures and peasant councils. In the third part we devote our attention to the organisation and functioning of the expropriated latifundia, which constituted the reformed sector, and examine why socialist relations of production failed to develop. Finally, in the fourth part, we attempt an assessment of Popular Unity's agrarian policy from the viewpoint of the accumulation of revolutionary forces in the rural sector by highlighting some of its contradictions.     

‘Think of the Children!’ Desire and Innocence in British Queer Fiction of the Early Twentieth Century

Nearly all relationships have power imbalances, none more so than age-dissimilar ones. Women writers of the early twentieth century addressed the issues of sexual innocence and ignorance in literary same-sex relationships with differing levels of perception and tangents of criticism. This article examines how innocence is portrayed, deployed and perceived in Clemence Dane’s Regiment of Women (1917), Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer (1927), Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) and how the idea of queerness complicates the issue of childhood innocence. It explores to what extent characters cast as innocent become vehicles for their female authors to express sexually and socially transgressive desires at a time when feminism was publicly and scientifically linked to lesbianism.     

From tribe to peasant? The Limbus and the Nepalese state

This article's context is the distinction inform and meaning of land tenure systems as between tribes and peasants, and the role of the state in the transformation of traditionally inalienable tribal lands into alienable private property. The historical circumstances which have shaped and transformed the economy and culture of a particular tribal population ‐ the Limbus of east Nepal ‐ are examined. There is analysis of the programme of land reform introduced by the Nepalese state, whose chief outcome for the Limbus was the abolition of their kipat tenures and the conversion of their lands into private property. The implications in terms of land and identity are considered, and the outcome of heavy dependence on a small class of high caste Hindus who are now their landlords, creditors and employers is outlined.     

‘Tied to the kitchen sink’? Women's Lives and Women's History in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain and Australia

In the decades after World War Two, women in Britain and Australia lived with—and sometimes against—a compelling expectation about women's role: they should marry and devote their lives to suburban domesticity and childcare. This article considers how the life stories of four women—born in Britain between 1928–38, and living in Australia from the 1950s to the 1970s—can illuminate and complicate our understanding of the experience of the postwar suburban dream. It shows how women sometimes articulated imaginative responses to limiting circumstances and thus stretched the boundaries of possibility.     

From Metaphor to Metamorph? On Science Fiction and the Ethics of Transformative Encounters

This article explores how the science-fictional figure of the metamorph can serve as a feminist figuration, a tool for rethinking structures for determining sameness and difference. The article offers close readings of selected metamorphs in contemporary science fiction and connects these imaginaries/imageries to recent feminist debates about representation, materiality, and agency. I suggest that contemporary metamorphs in visual science fiction open up space for a consideration of changeability and flexibility rather than fixity when issues of identity and ontology—of being in the world—are at stake. In light of the current political situation, where mass migration to Europe is foregrounding the fundamental differentiation between Self and Other, this article invites a discussion of the ethics at stake in the potentially transformative encounter between “us” and “them”, and the political potential of rethinking representation and signification through the figure of the metamorph.     

Whatever happened to the women in folktale?

This study examines the representation and function of women in English romance, specifically their development from older traditional Western narrative forms. It considers three English romances and their analogues: Le Petit Berger from the Lorraine valley, Cu Chulainn and the Wooing of Emer from Ulster, both folktales, and The Lord of Learn, a Scottish ballad. Then to show how the function of women dilates in romance, Sir Orfeo, Havelok the Dane, and King Horn are examined. In Western folktales women are stock characters who symbolically complete the hero's experience; their marriage provides a resolution to the action. In romance, however, women begin to determine the hero's sense of himself and his role in the world. This study provides a new way to look at the structural function of women characters in a genre that is thought to reinforce the values of the ruling class.     

The ‘other’ Agrarian transition? Structure,institutions and agency in sustainable rural development

This essay reviews some of the new literature on the transition to sustainable rural development (SRD). By considering various accounts of environmental degradation, its links with poverty and aspects of the agenda for SRD, the essay notes an ambiguity regarding the role of the state, which is held, in this literature, as culpable for environmental degradation, as well as given a substantial role, implicitly or explicitly, in making the transition to SRD. This ambiguity is shown via an analysis of the treatments written from historical, socio‐cultural and political economy perspectives, from which the essay draws the theme of state‐class relations, arguing a central position for these relations in SRD agendas. The essay concludes with an argument for a move to create a framework of analysis which takes into account not only public policy but also political economy and popular politics.

State, Society and the Environment in South Asia, edited by Stig Toft Madsen: Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Richmond, 1999. Pp.xi + 337. £40 (hardback). ISBN 0 7007 0614 3

Sustainable Rural Development, by Andrew Shepherd. Basingstoke and New York: St Martin's Press, 1998. Pp.x + 294. £40 (hardback); £12.99 (paperback). ISBN 0 333 664 841 and 664 85X

Sustainability, Growth and Poverty Alleviation, edited by Stephen A. Vosti and Thomas Reardon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Pp.xxii + 407. £45.50 (hardback). ISBN 0 8018 5607 8

River of Sorrow: Environment and Social Control in Riparian North India, 1770–1994, by Christopher V. Hill. Ann Arbor, MI: Association of Asian Studies (Monograph and Occasional Papers Series No.55), 1998. Pp.xii + 200. $33 (hardback). ISBN 0 924304 36 7

Forest Use and Management in Japan and India: A Comparative Study, by K.N. Ninan. Tokyo: Institute for Developing Economies (V.R.F. Monograph Series No.286), 1996. Pp.v + 123. NP (pb). No ISBN     

From Career Girl to Sexy Stewardess: Popular Culture and Women’s Work in the Canadian and American Airline Industries

This article examines three popular renditions of female flight attendants in Canada and the United States in teen fiction, film, and advertising, with attention to representational shifts from the 1940s to the 1970s. Our analysis demonstrates that the more sexualized image of the 1960s was a significant departure from the more complicated immediate postwar presentation of the flight attendant as a resourceful and capable career girl, albeit one still constrained by dominant notions of white, middle-class femininity. Created by management decisions in the face of increased capitalist competition, in concert with the influence of popular culture and gender ideology, the sexy stewardess altered the workplace environment for female flight attendants, but the legacy of earlier popular culture may well have aided their resistance to sexualization.     

Relations of production,productive forces and the mass line in the formation of the rural people's communes in China∗

The structure, pace and uneven progress of the collectivisation of Chinese agriculture can be explained in terms of contradictions that persisited between relations of production and productive forces in the countryside and the ways in which these contradictions could be confronted through the application of the principle of the mass line. The formation and subsequent re‐organisation of the Rural People's Communes is interpreted as a necessary response to the fact that collectivisation was not predicated on prior modernisation of agriculture, but rather that Chinese political economy predicated the modernisation of agriculture on the success of the communes.     

Abusing Vulnerability? Contemporary Law and Policy Responses to Sex Work in the UK

There has been an exponential rise in use of the term vulnerability across a number of political and policy arenas, including child protection, sexual offences, poverty, development, care for the elderly, patient autonomy, globalisation, war, public health and ecology. Yet despite its increasing deployment, the exact meaning and parameters of this concept remain somewhat elusive. In this article, we explore the interaction of two very different strategies??one in which vulnerability is relied upon by those seeking improved social justice as a mechanism by which to identify, problematise and compel state responses to a universal condition of precarious dependency, and the other in which it is used as a category of neo-liberal governance which legitimates state encroachment whilst constructing ??vulnerable?? individuals as ??risk-managers?? who must behave ??responsibly?? in the face of disadvantage. We suggest that the co-existence of these divergent approaches highlights the fluidity and malleability of the concept of vulnerability. Using sex work as a specific case study, we explore the ways in which vulnerability bears multiple meanings, and has been used in recent times in the furtherance of moralistic and regressive agendas, which collude with, rather than challenge, state power. Without seeking to reject the label or normative import of vulnerability, we call, therefore, for a more circumspect approach to its usage, and a more critical evaluation of recent claims which hail it as a mechanism, preferable to the conventional use of equality paradigms, by which to secure progressive feminist outcomes.     

How the Sublime Comes to Matter in Eighteenth Century Legal Discourse – an Irigarayan Critique of Hobbes, Locke and Burke

This article examines the way in which the sublime comes to matter within various eighteenth century legal discourses, particularly in the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Edmund Burke. The essay seeks also to relate the theoretical works of these philosophers and lawyers to practical legislative developments of the period, in particular, the passage of the Black Act in1726 and the Marriage Act in 1753. The sublime comes to matter to the law in this period in the sense that philosophical conceptualizations of the sublime in terms of power and transcendence become increasingly significant to representations of the nature and function of English law. Such theoretical accounts of the law as are found in the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Burke, moreover, translate into juridical practices designed to affirm the status of the law as a transcendentally sublime source of political authority in the eighteenth century. This article subjects that understanding of the law to a feminist critique that draws upon the work of the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray. It will be shown that the sublime within Western thought is generally associated with a sense of dread as to the possibility of the annihilation of consciousness. This ontological dread entails, in Jean Francois Lyotard’s terms, a recognition of the possibility of “nothing further happening” to the subject. Within Western discourse, this dread is projected onto, or made material in the form of, some ‘other’ that is, in Irigaray’s estimation, most usually feminine. Thus, the sublime comes to matter in this second, ontological sense and it is within this context that the transcendental sublime emerges as a response to a sense of dread that is projected on to some material, feminine, or feminised, ‘other’. In eighteenth century legal discourse, this ‘other’ take the form of the ‘state of nature’, or the revolutionary mob, or the revolutionary female who signifies more than anything a return to animality and chaos –an ontological and political fall from grace. The Black Act and the Marriage Act, with their shared emphasis upon the preservation of political stability and patriarchal property rights, may in this context be regarded as manifestations in the legal domain of the metaphysical principles of the transcendental sublime – with its emphasis upon an escape from, and a control of, the dreadful, feminine ‘other’. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Beyond the Centre: women in nineteenth-century Iceland and the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history

In recent years, women’s and gender historians have paid attention to the dissonance between the grand narratives of European women’s history and the history and experiences of marginal regions and countries. This article discusses the challenge of writing women’s history from the margins—Iceland—into the framework of the grand narratives of European women’s and gender history. It is argued that this framework grounded in theories of progress and modernisation is too narrow, offering little space for different or marginal voices from rural societies. Using the case study of the ‘ordinary’ woman Sigríður Pálsdóttir (1809–1871), the article argues that more voices from the margins and different histories, broaden our understanding of the multi-vocal and multi-levelled history of women in Europe.