Through a case study of dairy products in Spain, this article discusses the evolution of what economist Louis Malassis called ‘food consumption models’ in the West from the Second World War. Two distinct consumption models are identified: a first model based on the massification of milk consumption, and a second model featuring decreasing dairy consumption, an increasing role for second-degree processed products and the emergence of new consumer segmentations. Rather than a sudden shift from the first to the second model, there was a punctuated sequence comprising an intermediate transition period in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Using an evolutionary political economy approach, I argue that the key to this transition was a transformation in consumer preferences resulting not only from changes in nutritional discourse, but also from changes in the profit making strategies of dairy agribusinesses and from the interaction of both trajectories of structural change with consumer agency.

Documentary, cartographic and archaeological sources suggest that agrarian practice in the north east of Scotland from the late sixteenth to the mid eighteenth centuries was more diverse, dynamic and targeted than often supposed. The evidence suggests that Strathbogie saw extensive agricultural expansion throughout the entire period, especially in areas demonstrating earlier under-utilisation. Real improvement and expansion occurred as a result of developing existing traditional systems of agriculture, which was socially at odds with the later and much vaunted ‘Improvements’. These practices maximised productivity by targeting the production of a range of commodities at their most appropriate ecological zones within the overall landscape of the estate, the Lordship of Huntly. Such a model for production appears to have influenced the settlement strategy within those individual ecological zones. However, an over-emphasis upon grain production may, ultimately, have resulted in unsustainable practices, contrasting with earlier more ecologically-targeted ones.

This paper examines the issue of pauper agency under the old poor law. It relies on an examination of the ‘voice’ of paupers as it appears in a hitherto neglected source, pauper letters. The ‘face-to-face’ nature of poor relief has often been commented upon by historians, yet despite an ongoing historical preoccupation with all aspects of its administration, the question of how paupers actually interacted with, let alone were able to influence, the provision of that relief remains largely unexamined. Concentrating on requests for, or involving the issue of, clothing, this paper argues that paupers not only demonstrated a keen awareness of the imperatives underpinning relief policy in the locality, but also utilised aspects of many long-standing and powerful cultural discourses to strengthen their case for clothing relief.

In December 1917, an article in the Daily Chronicle, entitled ‘The New Land Lady’, stated that:

One of the good things which may issue from this war is a revival of the old English countryside.

The happy village may be born again.

If this reformation should come, it will be the work of the women.

The nostalgia evident in this call for women's wartime ‘return’ to the land to restore a lost, pastoral idyll during an event more usually associated with modernity raises several questions. What meanings can be attached to the ways in which women agricultural workers were seen as the key to a ‘rural revival’ and thus as crucial to a revitalized nation during the First World War? And what are we to make of the seemingly contradictory appeal to women radically to leave their presumably urban and suburban homes and conservatively to restore the countryside?

As Raymond Williams pointed out, this emblematic English countryside has always been placed in a more ideal past, and the desires to return to or to preserve the allegedly unchanging patterns of land and the lives attached to it are integral to the problem of modernization itself. More recently, Alun Howkins has argued that the ideology and ‘ideal’ of England and Englishness have remained essentially ‘rural,’ and that in 1914 this was the vision of Englishness that ‘went into battle'. However, one might certainly be forgiven for assuming that the creation of the Women's Land Army and the resulting appearance of urban women in trousers, breeches and puttees in villages throughout Britain would herald something more like a ‘transformation’ than a ‘revival’.

This article will discuss the background to opposition to hunting within the Labour Party before the Second World War, and in particular the role of the Humanitarian League and its successor the League Against Cruel Sports. It will highlight internal tensions of class and ideology that are still current today. It will examine the fate of two private members bills introduced in 1949 designed to prohibit hunting and coursing. Both bills were heavily defeated after the intervention of the Labour Government. This article will examine the reasons the post-war Labour Government used to oppose the bills before drawing some general conclusions about the Labour movement and blood sports. It will be argued that the primary reason why the bills were defeated was the strong desire of the Government to preserve its relationship with the farmers and the wider rural community.

Studies of poaching in the nineteenth century have tended to understate the involvement of women in this archetypal rural crime. This article will suggest that female offending was both more significant and more widespread than previously assumed, but it will also highlight how in a variety of complex ways dominant conceptions of gender shaped perceptions of female poachers and often influenced their treatment before the courts. It will argue that alongside more widely effectual assumptions about appropriate male and female spheres and behaviours, the response of the authorities to female poachers was also shaped by powerful and increasingly culturally embedded notions about the sexually exclusive nature of hunting.

For the vast majority of men and women in seventeenth-century England the act of marriage created an indissoluble union and represented a life long commitment. Legal divorce was a lengthy and costly procedure which discriminated against women, and informal separations or desertions were socially frowned upon and often economically disadvantageous. So marital discord had to be overcome before it deteriorated into a situation of marriage breakdown. Elaborate ways of restoring and maintaining marital harmony were established through use of the cucking stool and ‘charivari’. By these means, public attention was focused upon behaviour which caused discord: the scolding wife was punished and the husband who was a cuckold or had been beaten by his wife, humiliated. Meanwhile, conduct books proffered advice to couples on how to avoid such marital discontent and its consequences.

Towards the end of his bittersweet novel Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh has his heroine Nina Blount flying across England en route for her disastrous honeymoon. Attempting to make what passed with him for conversation, her stupid and rather boorish husband managed lamentably to misquote John of Gaunt's ‘Sceptered isle’ speech from Richard II. Then, as Waugh wrote:

Like other forms of tourism, the activities of Alpine visitors in the late nineteenth century have normally been understood as created by the tourists themselves. In the narratives of both contemporaries and subsequent historians, local people tend to be marginalised, at best responding to the new demands of the emerging industry. This article focusses on relations between locals and mountaineers in the Eastern Alps to demonstrate that far from being passive recipients of tourist culture, local people were instrumental in defining the forms that tourism took. They were the early pioneers of infrastructure construction, lobbied to bring urban investment to the Alps, challenged urban Alpine organisations over intervention in the landscape, and engaged in collective bargaining to secure better pay and conditions. These roles helped to define tourism in the region, but also contributed to definitions of Alpine people amongst mountaineers that increasingly relied on race and biology.

This paper aims to explain why South Australian agricultural land use is focused on continually increasing productivity, when the majority of produce is exported, at the long-term expense of agriculturally-based communities and the environment. A historical analysis of literature relevant to the agricultural development of South Australia is used chronologically to report aspects of the industry that continue to cause concerns in the present day. The historically dominant capitalist socio-economic system and ‘anthropocentric’ world views of farmers, politicians, and key stakeholders have resulted in detrimental social, environmental and political outcomes. Although recognition of the environmental impacts of agricultural land use has increased dramatically since the 1980s, conventional productivist, export oriented farming still dominates the South Australian landscape. A combination of market oriented initiatives and concerned producers are, however, contributing to increasing the recognition of the environmental and social outcomes of agricultural practice and it is argued here that South Australia has the opportunity to value multifunctional land use more explicitly via innovative policy.

The paper relates the impact of the North American mink (Mustela vison), during the first half-century of its introduction, to the wider governance of the British countryside and, more particularly the agriculture departments, the Nature Conservancy, and their respective interest-groups. Even when evidence emerged of the mink's ability to breed in the wild, the departments strove both to avoid any impairment of the fur-breeding industry and to minimise their own responsibility for controlling the feral population. Such hesitancy and delay made it even less likely that the eventual campaign to eradicate the species in the 1960s would succeed. In pursuit of greater self-reliance of industry in raising agricultural productivity, the Conservative Government of the early 1970s relinquished even the desire to use the powers and resources uniquely available to government to coordinate and effect some measure of control, for example in safeguarding ‘the unique ecology’ of the Western Isles. The paper assesses the respective roles of ministers and officials, and their ‘expert’ advisers in permitting that failure in management to occur at a time when farming took such pride in its new-found ability to effect major improvements to ‘the rural workshop’.

Since the publication of Hobsbawm and Rudé's Captain Swing our understanding of the role(s) of covert protests in Hanoverian rural England has advanced considerably. Whilst we now know much about the dramatic practices of incendiarism and animal maiming and the voices of resistance in seemingly straightforward acquisitive acts, one major gap remains. Despite the fact that almost thirty years have passed since E. P. Thompson brought to our attention that under the notorious ‘Black Act’ the malicious cutting of trees was a capital offence, no subsequent research has been published. This paper seeks to address this major lacuna by systematically analysing the practices and patterns of malicious attacks on plants (‘plant maiming’) in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century southern England. It is shown that not only did plant maiming take many different forms, attacking every conceivable type of flora, but also that it was universally understood and practised. In some communities plant maiming was the protestors' weapon of choice. As a social practice it therefore embodied wider community beliefs regarding the defence of plebeian livelihoods and identities.

The game of camping or camp-ball, best described as a blend of football and handball, was played for centuries in the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex. It survived well into the nineteenth century, and indeed was consciously revived after the Napoleonic Wars. Furthermore, as a traditional form of recreation, it began to attract antiquarian interest at an early date, and was mentioned by several county and parochial historians of the eighteenth century Our evidence for the game is still regrettably scattered and circumstantial, but its quantity has increased appreciably in recent years. This, therefore, seems a good time to offer some new ideas on the subject, in the hope of getting closer to the real nature and social significance of a once popular regional sport.

This paper explains how technological developments and changes in production encouraged and drove the processes of agricultural modernisation that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, taking the region of Aragon in north eastern Spain as a case study. The main agricultural macro-variables reveal a surge in output, coincident with a far-reaching restructuring of production, in which livestock and animal feeds played a key role. The relative success of this high speed agricultural transformation was largely due to technological progress and the development of Aragon's trade links before 1936. Meanwhile, the earlier development of irrigation schemes, the capitalisation of farms and experimentation with different seed varieties allowed the region to adapt quickly to the new Green Revolution technologies that came to the fore after 1950. At the same time, established trade links allowed a swift transition to livestock and related produce destined for fast developing agro-industrial regions, like Catalonia and Valencia. As in other countries, technological and trade path dependency also explain the polarisation of agricultural development within Aragon itself, and in particular the success of the provinces of Zaragoza and Huesca in contrast to failure and depopulation in Teruel. The experience of Aragon may thus be useful to understand the dynamics of other less developed regions currently in the throes of transformation.

In October 1606, London merchant Bevil Lewes proffered a bill of complaint in Star Chamber alleging assault, repeated riot and destruction of property in ‘a great wood and certain lands’ near Faversham in Kent purchased in December 1602 from the local magistrate Sir William Lovelace. His story of tribulations at the hands of ‘inhabitants there, being men of their own disposition contentious and not willing to live answerable to your majesty's most sound and wholesome laws’, recounted one episode in a struggle which began in 1595 and involved at least half a dozen attempts at unilateral enclosure before finally subsiding after May 1609, following Lewes's dispossession and descent into a mire of debt litigation. None of the enclosures survived longer than a few months, one lasted barely a week, and another, by dint of pre-emptive riot, was never completed at all. Defendants confirmed that fences, hedges and ditches were destroyed on four occasions, usually under cover of darkness, and that in 1606 a farmhouse under construction was demolished and crops on the ground were flattened. Bevil Lewes alleged two further rounds of hedge-breaking and property destruction that year, and an earlier riot involving the burning of a timber house-frame. Between 1596 and 1610 allegations of assault, riot, trespass, property destruction and perjury generated litigation in Common Pleas, King's Bench and Chancery, five bills of complaint in Star Chamber, and indictments and convictions at the county sessions and assizes.

This article reflects on the striking economic changes recently experienced in a part of peripheral south-west rural Ireland. In 1960, west Cork's economy was largely dependent on low-productivity agriculture and was undergoing long term decline. Unexpectedly the region began to be revitalised from the turn of the 1990s, reflected in a rapid reversal of chronic depopulation and growth of employment in the service sector. Important to this process was the area's ability to capitalise on several familiar national and global socioeconomic changes, including the ‘Celtic tiger’ macroeconomic boom and the rise of counter-urbanisation and rural-urban commuting. A pioneering regional brand network has been one notable local initiative. However west Cork's historic east/west division in affluence persists, and the adverse impacts of the national economic downturn during 2007–9 highlight that the fortunes of the area are somewhat fragile and still linked to those of the macroeconomy.

Following Perkin's suggestion that western European society is increasingly professionalised, and given the emergence of a stratum of large commercial farms in twentieth-century England, this paper examines the contention that, to some extent at least, English agriculture has been professionalised over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It briefly surveys the literature on professionalisation, identifies a list of professional characteristics, and then tests the attributes of twentieth-century English farmers against this list. It also briefly examines the effects of professionalisation, and concludes that, although it would be excessively simplistic to claim that the whole industry has been professionalised, it is possible to identify professional groups.

This article examines mechanisation during the period of export-led growth in Chilean agriculture, c. 1850–90. According to conventional wisdom, since labour was cheap, landowners did not modernise their haciendas. The introduction of machinery was late and superficial; the large estate remained backward and inefficient. This view is flawed by lack of quantitative evidence and a narrow approach. Using imports and stocks data, and case material from the National Agricultural Society's bulletin, the article presents an alternative interpretation. The development of the market for agricultural equipment involved a fruitful exchange of technical expertise between the foreign importing companies and local landowners and experts. Mechanisation solved labour supply bottlenecks, and developed primarily on harvest tasks, above all the threshing of wheat. The scale and pattern of mechanisation were consistent with the development of this process in other countries’ older agricultures. The area mechanically harvested was much larger than previously estimated. Mechanisation was a significant transformation in the agricultural sector.

This paper examines the role of elite women in estate management, enclosure and landscape improvement in eighteenth-century England, a topic which has to date received little in the way of sustained academic consideration. The paper focuses on four women who took control of sizeable Northamptonshire estates in the 1760s and early 1770s, and demonstrates that these women were active as both managers and innovators. In examining the women's involvement in estate management, the paper explores a series of important questions about women's place in the history of parliamentary enclosure and landscape improvement, as well as women's role in eighteenth-century society more generally.

The history of the labouring poor in the late nineteenth century has been shaped by different and often competing ‘ways of seeing’. Rural labourers occur in histories of social policy as clients or victims of the Poor Law; to the historian of crime they are social bandits or deviants; even to the historian of conventional politics they are the ‘objects’ of reform. All these ways of seeing are important, but I want to concentrate on one in particular, that ‘created’ by the discourse of ‘labour history’. This area laid down, and to a limited extent still continues to define, a structure which concentrates on the formal and quasi-formal organisations of labour. As such it still owes a good deal to the Webb's view of a kind of inevitable and desirable progress from ‘barbarianism’ or non-organisation, through struggle with unjust wages and hard masters, to the organised union with the general secretary and the enlightened employer sitting down together to fix a fair day's work and a fair day's pay.