Farms and families in ninth‐century Provence

Information about the people recorded in 813–14 on the estate of St Victor de Marseilles shows that although considered to belong to the monastery they were an independent peasant class. Family size and structure varied: some farms were run by the labour of the family which included unmarried sons and ‘married‐in’ sons‐in‐law; other farmers employed living‐in servants in husbandry. The mountain sheep farms had large groups of unmarried young people. Inheritance systems ensured that the peasant family property remained intact over the generations and provided support for unmarried sons who remained to work there.     

The Precarity of Young People’s Housing Experiences in a Rural Context

Young people’s housing, economic and labour market circumstances have become increasingly insecure due to the combined effects of the 2007/2008 economic crisis, neoliberal welfare reforms, rising costs of higher education and the shortage of affordable housing. Discussions of young peoples’ experiences in these domains have largely neglected their spatial variability but evidence suggests that young people living in rural parts of the UK have distinctive experiences of housing, which are closely connected to labour markets and educational opportunities. By drawing on qualitative data from young people and housing professionals, this article explores some of these rural distinctions and frames them within theoretical debates about the ‘precariat’. It argues for a more theoretically informed and geographically nuanced understanding of contemporary housing issues as rural youth potentially face greater precarity than their urban peers.     

Communal Tenure and Rural Poverty: Land Transactions in Svosve Communal Area,Zimbabwe

The idea of communal tenure has formed a key plank in the rural governance of Zimbabwe since independence, but its retention following the Fast Track land reforms of 2000–2002 perpetuates a distinction between ‘commercial’ land governed by a land market and ‘communal’ land on which market transactions are illegal. This article draws on recent research in Svosve Communal Area to examine the dynamics of land access and their implications for rural poverty in Zimbabwe. The authors argue that, as in many other parts of Africa, access to land governed by customary authority in Svosve is increasingly commoditized via informal, or ‘vernacular’, sales or rental markets. In failing to acknowledge and address this commoditization of land, the ‘communitarian’ discourse of customary land rights that dominates the politics of land in Zimbabwe — as elsewhere in much of Africa — undermines, rather than protects, the livelihoods of the rural poor.     

Rural children’s role in buffering household poverty through ganyu (piecework) in Zambia

In Zambia, the ways in which social change intersects with rural livelihoods to increase children’s workload and commodify their labour are poorly understood. In this article, changing patterns of rural children’s work are seen as necessitated by their evolving household roles and contributions in an increasingly rural cash-based economy. Drawing on child-focused qualitative research in rural Lundazi district in Zambia, it is explored how children use a traditional labour practice called ‘ganyu’ (piecework) to ameliorate poverty. The infiltration of the cash-based economy, amplified by the Economic Structural Adjustment Programmes, a predominantly adult-centred traditional informal socio-economic levelling mechanism of ganyu, and its evolution into more cash-oriented transactions increasingly involving children are discussed. Although ganyu has largely been seen as characterized by exploitative labour relations, the empirical findings from this research indicate the complex ways in which the practice is empowering children and their families. The resources accrued through ganyu are vital for both personal and household well-being. The findings of this study have important implications to rethink not only contentious issues of child labour but also dominant narratives of childhood that fail to take into account children’s lived experiences as situated in local, social, economic, and cultural contexts.     

The Misappropriation of Malaitan Labour:

During the ‘crisis years’ in Solomon Islands from 1998–2003, Guadalcanal militants and the Guadalcanal provincial government showed resentment to the ‘foreign’ Solomon Islanders, mainly Malaitans, who lived there and forcefully claimed that the indigenous people of Guadalcanal suffered economic disadvantage on their own island. Malaitan counter-justification related to the need to protect their families in Honiara and stabilise the crumbling central government. This paper looks at the historical reasons why Malaitans left their island in the first place. The answer involves complex causes going back to the 1870s. Because Malaita has always been heavily populated, it drew labour recruiters from Queensland, Fiji and within the Protectorate, but for various reasons never attracted traders or planters. Unthinkingly encouraged by the British Protectorate administration and all post-independence governments, a pattern developed of ‘Malaitan muscle for hire’. Malaitan males became primarily a labour force for development projects elsewhere, and little attempt was made to introduce similar projects on Malaita. The paper also explores issues relating to resource development in Malaita Province and concludes that the problems there are no more difficult than on other large Melanesian islands.     

The global countryside: peasant women negotiating,recalibrating and resisting rural change in Colombia

This article utilises a gender lens to consider the notion of the ‘global countryside’ through a case study with four peasant Colombian women living in the mountain town of Toca, Boyacá. In seeking a bottom-up understanding of rural globalisation, as it is experienced in the everyday lives of peasant women in Colombia, we drew on a methodology that included participant observation and photo elicitation interviews. Data reveal the inflections and incursions of the global into women’s work and family lives, in particular, gendered implications of the emergence of a globalised countryside. At the same time, the results demonstrate women’s agency in recalibrating and resisting discourses of globalisation as they create places and strategies for subsistence based on peasant values and economic strategies. Finally, based on our results, we problematise the universalising tendencies of urban/Western feminist critiques of rural women’s lives which have been embedded in assumptions about modernity, development and liberalism.     

Wilderness gained,wilderness lost: wildlife management and land occupations in Zimbabwe's southeast lowveld

This paper explores the physical and imaginative construction of the Zimbabwean ‘lowveld’ landscape. A powerful legacy of the colonial encounter with Zimbabwe was the notion that the lowveld is a wilderness. This logic underpinned attempts to preserve or rehabilitate parts of the lowveld landscape as pristine and glorious pieces of national heritage and, more recently, attempts to exploit sustainably ‘wilderness quality’ and wildlife. The landscape has been physically modified accordingly – often to the detriment of many of its inhabitants. This has played out in oxymoronic attempts to manufacture wilderness in a national park, conservancies and game ranches. But this vision has recently come under its most severe attack to date as these new wildernesses have been re-peopled, and the politics of land and the needs of black smallholders, pushed to the top of the national agenda. The land occupations since 2000 by both state-sponsored war veterans and peasant farmers have revealed starkly contrasting ways of seeing and understanding this landscape which have radically different implications for conservation and development policy.     

The art of link-making in global labour history: subaltern,feminist and Eastern European contributions

Benefiting from the ‘global’ and ‘trans-national’ turns in the larger historiography, labour historians in the past two decades have greatly expanded their geographical scope, developed new methodologies, refashioned categories of analysis and largely abandoned teleological assumptions. In this context, the history of labour in Eastern Europe still constitutes one of the least-globalized research topics in the field, even though the region attracted an array of excellent labour historians both before and after the collapse of state socialism in 1989/91. This introduction to the Dossier on labour history and Eastern Europe reflects on the reasons for the apparent mismatch between Eastern European labour history and the new global labour history. It does so by situating this large question within a discussion of some more or less successful examples of how scholarship on a particular theme in labour history has contributed or attempted to contribute to the conceptual and empirical enlargement of labour history in the past few decades. Focusing on particular aspects of the debates on class analysis, the peasant question, the history of gender, and the history of labour under state socialism, the authors address key questions in the international development of the history of labour. These questions, the authors argue, are at the core of the contributions on Eastern Europe assembled in the Dossier. Situating the four historiographical studies contained in the Dossier in this larger context, the introduction discusses the varied reception of scholarship on aspects of the history of labour emerging in and from different contexts and asks how this scholarship has contributed or might contribute to the development of a more inclusive global labour history.     

‘Aristocracies of thought’: social class in the early folklore of Yeats and Hyde

The years 1888–89 saw the production of two influential collections of Irish folklore: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry by William Butler Yeats and Leabhar Sgeulaigheachta by Douglas Hyde. These works broke strongly with the unscientific and patronising tone of the Buchmärchen tradition in Ireland and established a new theory of folklore. In this theory, Yeats and Hyde distanced peasant narrators in an attempt to secure literary and, ultimately, aristocratic origins for their tales. As a result, Hyde and Yeats, despite their Ascendancy upbringings, could view themselves (and not the peasant narrators) as the legitimate inheritors of folklore narratives. The very stories collected, however, challenge this power dynamic. Stories such as ‘Monachar agus Manachar’ directly critique the perceived unjust division of labour and profit in rural Ireland in a way that parallels the act of folklore collection. The tales themselves resist the rhetorical frameworks of their Ascendancy collectors.     

Tourism,farm abandonment,and the ‘typical’ Vermonter, 1880–1930

This paper explores the relationship between tourism, abandoned landscapes, and the construction of ‘typical’ identity in rural Vermont. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, Vermonters were both celebrated in the popular press as archetypal Americans and depicted as a people in decline. With the state's reputation plagued by rural out-migration, many reformers, state officials, and rural residents tried to shore up and reproduce the identity of the so-called typical Vermonter through the sale of abandoned farms as summer homes. The promise of summer tourism as a means for reproducing typicality in rural Vermont, however, was complicated by the contingency of the category typical and by persistent fears that a new leisure-based economy and allegedly ‘wrong kinds’ of visitors would undermine the integrity of the state's traditional rural identity. As a result, visitors and residents negotiated an ideal of rural typicality according to changing tourist circumstances—a process revealed in this essay largely through published commentaries and promotional works. What this story traces, then, is landscape's role in the production of ‘ideal’, tourist-based notions of rural identity in American culture.     

Forestry policy in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe: continuity and change

Using the case of Mafungautsi Forest Reserve, this paper discusses continuities and changes in policy and practice at the communal and reserved forest interface in Zimbabwe. Colonial forestry policy in Zimbabwe has often been labelled as oppressive, as communal area citizens were not allowed to participate effectively in its formulation and implementation. Independence in 1980, it was thought, would usher in an era of greater participation within the forestry sector. However, the hope that local communities would have greater input in the forestry policies and management has largely remained unfulfilled. The state institutions responsible for managing forests have largely remained unsympathetic to the involvement of local communities in the management of forestry resources despite the pre-independence rhetoric. Alongside the co-management attempt to make local peasants citizens through their inclusion in decision-making has been the continuity of the colonial policy that treated local peasants who used resources as criminals destroying trees and forests. This paper examines how the fundamental policy perspective of forestry in Zimbabwe still perceives local peasant farmers to be unsustainable exploiters of forests. The local resource users have not remained passive recipients of the repressive forestry policies and practices based on science but have actively contested them since the 1950s.     

Editorial

In this article it is argued that men and women have been considered as "too old" in the labour market at an earlier age than people in general have been considered old, irrespectively of the actual biological life expectancy. The article discusses, first, farm servants in the old peasant society on the basis of the Swedish Hired Labour Acts, and, second, the migration restrictions imposed on elderly servants. The third point of discussion concerns age composition and wage by age of industrial workers in Finland at the turn of the 20th century, while the fourth point covers long-term unemployment in the 1930s and the introduction of old-age pension schemes. Some tentative explanations for the variation in the incidence of age discrimination over the past two centuries are suggested.     

The agrarian working class put somewhat centre stage: an often neglected group of workers in the historiography of labour in state-socialist Hungary

This study discusses a body of scholarship which is little-known internationally, written in Hungary in the period between 1949 and 1989: the historiography on agrarian labour from the eighteenth century to the Second World War. This historiography was conceptually inclusive in that it explored the history of many groups of agrarian workers, the varied types of labour in which they were involved, including long-term contracts, day and servant labour, seasonal migration and non-agricultural forms of labour, the role of agrarian labour in socio-economic development, and the political movement of ‘agrarian socialism’. This historiography for a large part remained embedded in three adjacent research clusters: peasant studies, local and regional history, and the history of the labour movement. This study argues that scholarly approaches and interests, and institutional framings specific to each of these clusters, were of key importance in generating the extensive scholarship that is reviewed. The fact that Hungary had been a dominantly agrarian country before 1945, the Leninist vision of the ‘alliance of the workers and the peasants’ that was to bring about socialism in Eastern Europe and the state-condoned interest in the history of the labour movement and labour more generally were other important factors conducive to, and to various degrees putting their stamp on, this research. Given its findings within a Marxian or classical social-history framing, and its focus on an often neglected group of workers, the historiography on agrarian labour written in state-socialist Hungary deserves to be integrated into the historiographical canon. This study discusses this scholarship against the backdrop of present-day global labour history. In pointing to some of its area-, time- and context-specific characteristics, the study aims to contribute to a global dialogue in labour history that is sensitive to and critically appreciative of different historiographical trajectories and traditions across world regions.     

The peasantariat and politics: migration,wage labor,and agriculture in Botswana

This article examines Botswana's wage labor migration in terms of 2 reigning theories: 1) as a dichotomy between traditional and modern society, with workers viewing agriculture as an alternative to more desirable wage employment; or 2) as a subordination of colonial society to capitalist society, with workers drawn from the resulting underdeveloped and impoverished areas and divorced from their agricultural potential. Approximately 90% of Botswanan households have a wage worker; less than 1/4 of households rely on the agricultural economy alone. 80% of the population works in agriculture in some way, but agriculture contributes only 35% of total rural income. Over 50% of households are below the poverty level, and most must rely on a variety of income sources for subsistence. 68% of rural households (Botswana is 84% rural) have absent wage earners while 45% have 1 or more wage earners present. Absent wage earners work mainly in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in Botswanan towns (44%) and villages (22%), and lands and cattlepost locations (5%) in South African mines (19%), and other jobs in South Africa (8%). Individuals with low socioeconomic status tend to migrate to South Africa; those with higher status move to Botswanan towns. Working for wages has become customary for most Botswanans. This article undermines conventional development theories by showing the close interweaving of the modern and traditional societies, and arguing that traditional retention of communal land rights and cattle ownership served the capitalistic system by becoming the basis for wage earning; previous income source (agriculture) did not disappear, but their use was altered. South African mining returns to the Botswanan government since 1965 largely benefited a growing petty-bourgeois class and marginally improved the life styles of the peasant labor class. Botswana's development depends on the relationship between the peripherial laboring class and the dominating petty-bourgeois and its internal structure.     

THE SEMIOTICS OF SERFDOM: How serfdom was perceived in the Swedish conglomerate state, 1561–1806

The Swedish conglomerate state has been characterized by the special status of its provinces. While serfdom did not exist in Sweden and Finland, it was accepted in the Baltic and German provinces. The main aim of the paper is to explore how the institution of serfdom was understood and interpreted in Stockholm. It will analyse the question of how the Swedish central government’s position on serfdom changed between 1561 and 1806. It will argue that there were clichés, stereotypes, and prejudices that have shaped the discourse on serfdom. The sources leave us no doubt that the labels and emotions around serfdom were very important to the authorities, the nobility and later to the public commentators who opined on the issue. Serfdom did not live up to the ideals expressed by the Swedish authorities, and a critical discussion of serfdom started much earlier than the mid-eighteenth century process of peasant emancipation. However, there were always both practical and ideological considerations around serfdom and Stockholm’s policy did not change throughout the 17th and 18th century when it came to restricting peasants‘ free movement or using serf labour in manor fields.     

Minimum Wage Policy,Rural Development and Poverty Alleviation in Malawi

This article examines the pattern of minimum wage changes in Malawi and some of their effects, and considers more generally the appropriateness of a minimum wage policy in developing country situations similar to that of Malawi. After a progressive decline in the real value of the minimum wage during the 1970s there is evidence that the government is attempting, through periodic and rather erratic corrective action, to maintain something like a constant real wage. Data from a Ministry of Labour survey demonstrate that such changes in the minimum wage do have a direct effect on wages paid, but that this is concentrated in specific sectors: outside these, minimum wage policy is ineffectual, and the effective coverage achieved in terms of the national work-force is very narrow. Since the most significant influence on the wages of hired workers is the elastic supply of unskilled labour available at very low wages from the smallholder sector, efforts need to be concentrated on raising the supply price of labour through positive policies pursued in the rural sector. Some special features of the rural labour market are therefore examined. Various measures could be taken here: one which seems likely to be effective in producing immediate results is the progressive transfer of burley tobacco quotas to smallholders.     

Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1900

This essay looks at the role that Anglo‐American women played in governing their Irish immigrant domestic servants and at the racial and gendered meanings that were attached to servitude. In the second half of the nineteenth century, female Irish Catholic immigrants predominated in domestic service employment in the north‐eastern United States. Newspaper and magazine articles portrayed the home as a site of conflict where Protestant, middle‐class families clashed with Irish Catholic ‘peasant’ girls newly arrived in the US. Employers depicted ‘Bridget’ or ‘Biddy’, the collective nickname given to Irish domestic servants, as insubordinate, unrefined and prone to violent outbursts. While reliant on domestic service for wages, female Irish immigrants understood that service represented racialised labour in the United States and was viewed as an occupation befitting non‐white populations.     

The politics of self-help: The Rockefeller Foundation,philanthropy and the ‘long’ Green Revolution

While scholars of contemporary philanthropy have observed a concerted interest in the promotion of ‘self-help,’ little has been said about the political history of this investment and its significance in determining both domestic and international development priorities. We locate this modern conceptualisation of self-help in early twentieth-century philanthropic practice that sought to ‘gift’ to individuals and communities the precious habit of self-reliance and social autonomy. The Rockefeller Foundation promoted rural development projects that deliberately sought to ‘emancipate’ the tradition-bound peasant, transforming him or her into a productive, enterprising subject. We begin by documenting their early agricultural extension work, which attempted to spark agrarian change in the US South through the inculcation of modern habits and aspirations among farmers and their families. These agrarian schemes illustrate the newfound faith that ‘rural up-lift’ could only be sustained if farming communities were trained to ‘help themselves’ by investing physically and psychologically in the process of modernisation. We then locate subsequent attempts to incentivise and accelerate international agricultural development within the broader geopolitical imperatives of the Green Revolution and the Cold War. While US technical assistance undoubtedly sought to prevent political upheaval in the Third World, we argue that Rockefeller-led modernisation projects, based on insights gleaned from behavioural economics, championed a model of human capital – and the idea of ‘revolution within’ – in order to contain the threat of ‘revolution without’. Approaching agricultural development through this problematisation of the farmer reveals the ‘long history’ of the Green Revolution – unfolding from the domestic to the international and from the late nineteenth century to the present – as well as the continuing role of philanthropy in forging a new global order.     

Making a Life: Getting Ahead,and Getting a Living in Aboriginal New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper offers an ethnographically grounded examination of the intersections between work, employment and identity for Indigenous people living in a country town in far western New South Wales, Australia. It argues that work, employment and labour are locally deployed categories that meet mainstream discourse in a precarious fashion and, that this disjunction has clear material and ideological repercussions. For most Aboriginal people in Wilcannia, you are who you are, not by virtue of what you have ‘become’ in any economic, professional or educational sense. Who you are is not a becoming, it is established at birth. These genealogical forms of being through kinship see a construction of self which in many ways is at variance to the standard ‘autonomous self‐regulating individual’ (Sennett 1998:215). This sense of self, for most, is not determined by engagement in the capitalist division of labour; indeed, the greater the engagement in the capitalist economy, the more problematic and fraught a sense of self and of belonging can become.     

Declining Food Security in a Philippine Oil Palm Frontier: The Changing Role of Cooperatives

The long‐held redistributive function of agricultural cooperatives — one of moral economy and poverty alleviation — has changed dramatically as they emerge as core brokers for agro‐industrial development in the so‐called ‘green economy’. This article examines the changing role of cooperatives involved in brokering oil palm production and its impact upon the food security and livelihoods of smallholders who labour in plantation regimes situated in historically uneven agrarian political economies. Findings show how, increasingly, cooperatives reinforce uneven agrarian social relations of production and exchange in which indigenous smallholders experience loss of land, poor wage labour conditions tinged with insecurity and prejudice, and mounting debt in an expanding oil palm complex. The article suggests that these changes in agrarian social relations negatively influence indigenous farmers’ food security pathways, with their access to and use of appropriate foods diminishing. It asserts that understanding the impacts of cooperatives on food security pathways requires a relational and situated analysis of livelihood change and agrarian relations in extractive frontiers.