The Fluidity of the ‘Farming Ladder’: The Experience of the Duffin Family,Yorkshire, 1870-1950

This article examines the nuances of the ‘farming ladder’ through a case study of the Duffin farming family. It explores the circumstances in which they flourished and faltered; the internal and external determinants affecting their ability to maintain a grip on the ‘farming ladder’; and the fluidity of the ladder. Drawing upon the personal archive of the family and complementary sources, the variable position of the family on the ‘farming ladder’ as they progress from agricultural labourers to farmers and then back to labourers is charted within wider historical and geographical frameworks. The social and spatial relationships forged are identified as being particularly important in the operation of the ‘farming ladder’.     

Three's a Crowd?: Government, Owners, and Workers during the Nationalization of the British Coalmining Industry 1945-47

The passing of the coalmining industry into public ownershipon 1 January 1947 should have been an occasion for rejoicingby the Labour Party and its supporters, yet celebrations weremuted by the looming shadow of critical coal shortages Despitethis concurrence of nationalization and coal crisis, littleattention has been focused on possible linkages between thetwo events. More generally, scant consideration has been givento the question of what happened to the industry when facedwith nationalization. This article's principal argument is thatthe fuel crisis was rooted not (as other historians have argued)in the atrocious weather, but in the very process of nationalization—or,rather in the combination of a lack of preparation for publicownership and (even more importantly) in the preoccupation withnationalization at the expense of the ‘stabilization’of the industry before entering the uncharted waters of publicownership. The chief conclusion is that during the run-up toVesting Day neither miners nor owners had any substantial incentiveto improve industrial productivity and output The period wasat best a standstill, and in many ways—as the crisis indicated—wastedmonths that a fuel-starved Britain could ill afford ^*This article is based on my MA thesis, ‘Fresh Start orFalse Dawn⁷ the coalmining Industry and Nationalisation, 1945–7'I would like to thank my supervisors, Ranald Midne and PhilipWilliamson for their continued support, and also David Howelland the referees of Twentieth Century British History for theirvaluable comments on earlier drafts of this work.     

Mirrors of Modernity: Time–Space,the Subaltern,and the Decolonial

This essay is cast as something of a personal narrative. It recounts how I have arrived at inklings and intimations of space and time, particularly pervasive procedures of the spatialization of time and the temporalization of space, in tandem with understandings of disciplines and subjects of modernity. The account begins with my pre-apprentice days in Delhi, moves onto my apprenticeship at Cambridge, covers my journeyman sojourns in Mexico, and extends unto my artisanal concerns in the present. At stake especially are encounters and entanglements with time and space as folded within the creases of subaltern studies and de-colonial understandings (yet also postcolonial perspectives and historical anthropology). On the one hand, I explore how these shifting orientations have drawn upon hegemonic representations as well as non-certified imaginations of time and space, to now press familiar associations and now unravel unusual enunciations of these concepts and processes. On the other hand, I track the active construal, the exact production, of space and time within the epistemic practice of these critical perspectives. At stake throughout are wider issues of meaning and power, alterity and authority, difference and disciplines.