Biodiversity and Sectoral Responsibility in the Development of Swedish Forestry Policy, 1988–1993

In 1993 the Swedish parliament deregulated national forestry policy and established an environmental goal in parallel with the previous, long-standing goal of high wood production. This paper shows how the change occurred in the context of major changes in Swedish environmental policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Within a short time, new environmental legislation and the introduction of legal protection for small forest and agricultural habitats of high ecological value reoriented national forestry policy, away from an overriding focus on wood production to an increased awareness of nature conservation and biodiversity preservation. Reflecting a major compromise with the state, forest owners have gained greater freedom to manage their land, but must also improve environmental conditions while achieving high wood production, a policy known as ‘freedom under responsibility’. The paper explains how both the parliament and industry supported increased nature conservation and biodiversity to maintain forest health and support the forestry industry, by favouring responsible resource use and not simply protection from human influence.     

The Archaeology of the Peasant Land Market in Pre-Plague England c ad 1290–1350: A Way Forward

WHILE ARCHAEOLOGISTS are well informed about plague and climate change, many are less familiar with the emergence in pre-plague England of a vigorous market in peasant land in which both freemen and villeins were represented. Yet the tenant’s growing freedom to buy and sell land arguably played a larger part in transforming the social structure of late-medieval England than either the Black Death (ad 1348–9) or Great Famine (ad 1315–17). Accustomed to seeing the five decades before the pestilence as a final interlude of prosperity before the onset of recession, archaeologists have looked chiefly to the post-plague years for evidence of change. However, the toxic combination of a hyperactive peasant land market, combined with the worst subsistence crisis that England has ever known, had encouraged the growth earlier in the century of a rich and increasingly acquisitive and dominant peasant or ‘kulak’ class with properties it needed to protect. The large and more permanent village house, it is argued here, originated at this time. It is also suggested that it was successful peasant engrossers, rather than status-hungry, would-be gentry, who were probably the diggers of the overwhelming majority of non-manorial moats which survive in such numbers across England. Although more work is needed to date these moats archaeologically, it is already widely assumed that they belong primarily to the first half of the 14th century. If this is correct, the smaller domestic or ‘homestead’ moat, occurring in multiples of up to 13 in some parishes, can now be seen as persuasive material evidence of a catastrophic crisis in law and order which historians know only from the documentary sources.     

Peasant Settlers and the ‘Civilising Mission’ in Russian Turkestan, 1865–1917

This article provides an introduction to one of the lesser-known examples of European settler colonialism, the settlement of European (mainly Russian and Ukrainian) peasants in Southern Central Asia (Turkestan) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It establishes the legal background and demographic impact of peasant settlement, and the role played by the state in organising and encouraging it. It explores official attitudes towards the settlers (which were often very negative), and their relations with the local Kazakh and Kyrgyz population. The article adopts a comparative framework, looking at Turkestan alongside Algeria and Southern Africa, and seeking to establish whether paradigms developed in the study of other settler societies (such as the ‘poor white’) are of any relevance in understanding Slavic peasant settlement in Turkestan. It concludes that there are many close parallels with European settlement in other regions with large indigenous populations, but that racial ideology played a much less important role in the Russian case compared to religious divisions and fears of cultural backsliding. This did not prevent relations between settlers and the ‘native’ population deteriorating markedly in the years before the First World War, resulting in large-scale rebellion in 1916.     

The Origin,Development and Decline of Back-to-Back Houses in Leeds, 1787–1937

This paper traces the development of back-to-back house building in Leeds. It first outlines the origin of the house type, before examining the urban layout, building form and social aspects of back-to-back courts in the first half of the 19th century, and the role of speculative developers, building societies and sanitary reformers. The focus then turns to the bills, acts and by-laws of the later 19th and early 20th century, and the determination of the people of Leeds to retain their preferred house type. Together, these brought improvements to the design and facilities, culminating in a house type that was far superior to that which was condemned by the back-to-back critics, and arguably had overcome all of the criticisms by the time construction of back-to-backs was prohibited in 1909.     

William Gould,Land Agent and the Rural Community in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire 1783–1788

The land agent played an important role in community relationships. His position was frequently one of mediator and liaison between landowner and tenant, although his role often extended to settling disputes more generally. These relationships are often hidden in estate correspondence but in the case of William Gould agent to the Duke of Portland are more readily available through his diaries. This article will utilise this valuable resource to explore how the land agent of a large estate which was entering a period of industrialisation interacted with both agricultural and industrial communities.     

From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955

This paper examines the early years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its conceptualization of ‘rural welfare’, an approach that foresaw the modernization of agricultural societies and the alleviation of poverty through improvements in labor, housing, health, education of people working in agriculture. Based on the correspondence of FAO officials and experts, the paper shows how in the late 1940s, the Rural Welfare Division, under the leadership of its Director Horace Belshaw, promoted a low-modernist and local-sensitive approach to rural development that emphasized the subjectivity of welfare and that was skeptical of top-down development programs. As the paper argues, Belshaw's holistic understanding of rural communities was abandoned in the early 1950s in favor of an increasingly technical development consultancy, characterized by short-term interventions rather than by an intellectual and scientific debate about the larger implications of development.     

The Family and Demographic Behavior in Belgium,Germany, and Italy, 1700–1920: A Review Essay

Abstract

In the past decades, numeracy has taken an increasingly important place in the study of human capital formation, as well as in literacy studies and studies on formal education and book production. In order to understand levels of education, scholars have recently tried to develop new ways to measure the level of education, particularly because it has since become apparent that the measures of literacy historically have not always been very accurate. To measure numeracy, population surveys have been used to show that in the past respondents who were innumerate had a tendency to state their ages as round numbers, ending in 0 or 5. Finding suitable data in the pre-modern age to analyze numeracy via age heaping is a cumbersome task, however. In this article, the authors explore the possibilities of using art, especially individual portraits in which the age of the sitter is indicated on the portrait by means of the Aetatis suae formula, as a source to study human capital formation and numeracy. This article has two main objectives that contribute to different areas of economic history as well as art history. The authors first demonstrate which criteria should be taken into account when building a database, especially for artistic artifacts. Secondly, they use the dataset to contribute to the understanding of numeracy levels among the well-to-do in the Low Countries in the early modern period. The analysis will show that women's numeracy was often even higher than that of men. Notwithstanding the high overall level of women's numeracy compared to other countries in Europe, the authors will also test the recent hypothesis put forward by Peter Földvári, Bas Van Leeuwen, and Van Jieli Leeuwen-Li that when women's ages were mentioned, they were usually reported as part of a married couple and possibly adapted to the ages husbands reported.