Agricultural production,social participation and domination in late eighteenth‐century Bengal: Towards an alternative explanation

This article attempts an analysis of the problems of social participation by non‐peasants in agricultural production and of the pattern of domination they shaped over the peasants. The historical context of this analysis is the Indian province of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The problematics of non‐peasant participation and domination are historically important in as much as they focus attention upon the wider class basis of agricultural production and the nature of commercialisation in the economy. This essay also seeks to provide a critique of some analytical models which seek to establish the existence of semi‐feudalism in Bengal. The critique is based on the re‐examination of the historical evidence available; it is not intended to be a theoretical exegesis alone. Arguing against the utility of semi‐feudalism as a category for the analysis of Bengal's social formation, this article suggests an alternative explanation in terms of commercial exploitation of small‐peasants under conditions of formal subsumption of labour to capital.     

Accommodating ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’: homemaking,home entertaining and domestic advice literature in post‐war Britain

This article analyses the effects of the ‘servant problem’, meaning the contraction of the domestic service industry in the twentieth century, as represented in domestic advice literature (etiquette, homemaking and home decoration books). Before World War II, domestic advisors assumed that readers employed staff, while by the 1970s no such assumption could be made. Managing a home unassisted, especially when entertaining guests in the role American etiquette expert Emily Post termed ‘Mrs. Three‐in‐One’ (hostess, cook and waitress at once), formed an enduring topic for British and North American domestic advice writers between 1920 and 1970. Rather than reapportioning parts of the homemaker’s labour to other family members, the solutions offered by domestic advisors revolved around reshaping domestic space and its uses in order to facilitate the simultaneous performance of multiple tasks. Multipurpose objects were promoted to act as ‘bridges’ between distinct domestic regions, while multifunctional spaces and open‐plan interiors collapsed distinctions between such regions. Thus changes in the roles of women within society and the family are shown in this analysis of domestic advice literature to affect the design and layout of the home, and domestic advice books are seen to have promoted ultimately conservative solutions.     

Land,kinship and identity: The cultural roots of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland

This paper seeks to uncover the underlying causes of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland. It argues, in contrast to existing explanations, that rural unrest was a highly complex form of popular protest, disciplined and with clear objectives. These objectives centred on the Irish peasantry's defence of traditional rights and customs with regard to the ownership, occupation and use of the land. It is further argued that these rights and customs were in turn grounded upon a system of social norms, beliefs and obligations which governed the relationship between land, kinship and identity in Irish peasant communities.     

Ephemeral ‘communities’: spatiality and politics in rangeland interventions in Mongolia

In recent years, the number of community-based natural resource management projects for rangeland conservation and development has grown rapidly in Mongolia. Such projects seek to develop social capital through the formation of herder groups and pasture user groups, in order to enable the coordination of complex, collective tasks needed for sustainability. Through analysis of social networks, interviews and ethnographic data from two places where such projects have been implemented, Bayanjargalan, Dundgovi, and Tariat, Arkhangai, the paper demonstrates that the spatiality of pastoral social relations is much more extensive than assumed by these projects. Furthermore, rather than being neutral technical interventions, such projects are embedded in and proliferate politics. They often bolster the informal power of wealthy herders who gain more access to pasture, while at the same time leading to tensions between different levels of government and becoming objects of struggle between Mongolia’s two dominant political parties. For all of these reasons, these efforts have tended not to build trust, and the ‘communities’ they create, in the form of herder groups and pasture user groups, have tended to be ephemeral.     

Rules of thumb: British history and ‘imperial culture’ in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain1

Abstract

This paper examines the traditions of both British imperial and British domestic historiography and calls for a re-mapping of both so that the so-called separate spheres of ‘home’ and ‘away’ may be brought back into the same fields of debate. Its central claim is that imperial ideology and its effects were not phenomena ‘out there’. Empire was not a singular place; nor did ‘home’ exist in isolation from it. In spite of the polarization, which has been characteristic of their historiographies, their relationship was dialectic rather than dichotomous. These insights, while derived in part from new trends inside British history itself, owe both their theoretical rigor and their self-avowedly political concerns to post-colonial and feminist historiographical work, which together insist on the desacralization of ‘Britain’ proper.     

On the politics of production: A comment on ‘peasants and politics’ by Eric Hobsbawn

This article examines how poor rural families in India cope with the food insecurity associated with seasonal troughs in the agricultural production cycle, and with calamities such as drought and famine; the effectiveness of the coping mechanisms they adopt; the intra‐household sharing of the burden of coping; and the appropriate state and non‐state interventions that would strengthen the survival mechanisms adopted by the families themselves. The family is seen here as a bargaining unit, the ability of different members to command food (among other resources) depending on their relative bargaining strengths, determined in turn by their ownership endowments (of land, labour, etc.), exchange entitlements, and external social and communal support systems. Gender and age both form the basis of intra‐family inequality in this respect. While seasonality reveals a face of the family which is one of co‐operation, famine mirrors one of disintegration. In both contexts, the burden of coping falls disproportionately on female members within poor households, traceable to women's already weak and further weakened (during calamity) bargaining position within the family. A re‐interpretation of existing facts about the 1943 Bengal famine illustrates the process of family disintegration and the abandonment of wives and children during a severe calamity. State efforts complemented by non‐state interventions therefore need to be directed to programmes that ‘empower’ poor families and the more vulnerable members within them.     

‘Quality’, Cinema and the ‘Superior Woman’ Persona: understanding women’s film criticism in post‐war Britain (1945–59)

Criticism was a particularly buoyant area of film culture in Britain during the post‐war period, a regular feature in newspapers, periodicals, magazines, and BBC radio programmes. What has not been widely recognised is the central role that women played as critics of film at this time, and where their interests differed from those of their male peers. This article recovers the contribution made by women film critics, arguing that middle‐class writers such as C. A. Lejeune and E. Arnot Robertson adopted a form of ‘distanced amusement’ with regard to themes of sentimentality and romance (associated with low‐brow female pleasures). This strategy permitted them to engage with the broader cultures of film‐watching, commenting on subjects such as female crying and character identification, and recognising cinema‐going as a pleasurable activity for women, subjects which male critics did not discuss. These findings expand knowledge about film criticism in the post‐war period and reconfigure received understandings of film culture to account for women’s gendered contribution to the critical field.     

‘disparate in voice,sympathetic in direction’: gendered political blackness and the politics of solidarity

While political blackness seems to be making quite a comeback, this resurgence has also met with frustration and ambivalence. This paper aims to make sense of why this mobilising concept is accepted in some contemporary black feminist circles and outright rejected in others. It unpicks the diasporic dimensions of political blackness, reflecting on the issues that converged to foreground ‘black’ as the basis for mobilising women of African and Asian decent to engage in collective activism. Attention is given to the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, a national network that linked black women’s organisations and expressed and projected what the author defines as gendered political blackness. Interrogating its implications and the tendency towards ideological policing, the author argues that political blackness must be viewed as a politics of solidarity. If it is to maintain its viability, political blackness needs reframing, contextualising and further analysis. A retelling of its ideological underpinnings, and crucially the tensions and contradictions inherent in political blackness, offers a critical lens through which to rethink how we use it as a mobilising tactic in the present.     

Rethinking the livret d’ouvriers: time,space and ‘free’ labor in nineteenth century France

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the control of labor mobility through the livret d’ouvriers (1803–1890): a sort of internal passport aiming to subordinate workers’ circulation to the abidance of contract terms. The effective enforcement of livrets had a limited scope for various reasons. Nevertheless, those same difficulties offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze the shifting meanings of freedom and coercion in relation to labor poverty. The politics of identification show that it has been necessary to politically act on the spatial organization of productive processes in order to control labor through time, reacting to workers’ mobility as a specific form of collective bargaining. Through the lens of labor defection we see the emergence of a form of integration deriving from the cash nexus, the vehicle of market concurrence. Such integration calls for a form of control which cannot be subsumed within common law and that is rather axed on the modulation of market pressure – which we analyze through the 1850 debate over advance pay. From this perspective, the issues of breach of contract, police identification and debt insolvency allow to rethink the notion of coercion beyond its penal criminalization and, consequently, to frame the continuities between the police des manufactures, and the modern welfare State.     

‘Nature takes no notice of morality’: singleness and married love in interwar Britain1

This article draws attention to the dominance of marriage during the twentieth century and the strain this institution was, and still is, under. This is achieved by focusing upon the single as a problematic category in the context of interwar Britain through an examination of the writings of Marie Carmichael Stopes, one of the leading experts on marriage, and her single correspondents. There are clear contradictions in Stopes's writings, which she was unable to acknowledge, between sex as a normal healthy appetite which it could be dangerous to suppress and the denial of a sex life to the single. These are shown to have had the potential to destabilise marriage as the only site of legitimate reproduction and sexual relations. Examining the differences between her advice to single men and women also exposes the gender divide in relation to the concept of sublimation and the difficulties inherent in the concept of substitute mother as a stable and coherent identity for the single woman. The article concludes by making links between the position of single men and women in the early twentieth century and today.     

Domination,Subordination and Struggle: middle‐class marriage in early twentieth‐century Wolverhampton,England

The aim of the article is to modify our understanding of the history of middle‐class marriage. It draws upon the detailed examination of one Wolverhampton couple’s marriage to explore relationships between husbands and wives—and between ex‐husbands and ex‐wives—in early twentieth‐century provincial England. It argues that patriarchal and companionate marriages co‐existed alongside one another; that even in patriarchal marriages wives were prepared to seek legal redress for their grievances; and that even in insular and unfashionable regions of the country such as the Black Country the courts, both civil and criminal, policed masculinity and femininity in their assessment of where fault lay.     

blogging solo: new media, ‘old’ politics

This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western women's singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure women's singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise women's singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminism's second-wave – women's consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics.     

The spectacle of politics: Wendy Davis,abortion, and pink shoes in the Texas ‘fillybuster’

Despite important inroads, women’s marginalization in the public sphere is still very real. From a feminist theoretical perspective, and informed by Guy Debord’s conceptualization of the society of spectacle, this study examines local and national newspaper coverage of Wendy Davis’s filibuster to block an abortion-restricting bill in the Texas State legislature in 2013. Qualitative and quantitative assessments show that gender was particularly encoded and marked in the mediated discourse, with reports focusing on Davis’ personal life and giving her celebrity status. The filibuster became a political spectacle that reified dominant gender values and norms.     

Peasants and conflict in nineteenth‐century rural England: A comment on recent articles

This note replies to two previous contributions by Mick Reed in the Journal of Peasant Studies. The author agrees with Reed on the importance of family labour to the peasantry. While recognising that subsistence was significant, he cannot, however, agree that peasants stood outside the capitalist economy, since they depended on the market for the bulk of their living. However, within the capitalist economy the distinction between the peasant and estate systems is important, making attention to the open‐closed model a necessary part of studies such as those of Roger Wells and Mick Reed. In this context, the author asserts a more limited role for the concept of ‘conflict’, by distinguishing it from ‘friction’.     

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.