The Upper Saintonge region of western France was one of the primary production centres for the supply of exotic pottery to Britain and northern Europe between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The principal manufacturing sites were rural workshops in the parishes neighbouring La Chapelle-des-Pots, on the wooded, limestone plateau north east of Saintes and some fifty kilometres down the river Charente from the maritime port of La Rochelle. The expansion of rural industries, producing for extra-regional markets, was a Europe-wide phenomenon between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The theory of proto-industrialisation has been used to explain this process. It has been argued that regionally-dense, rural industries grew up as urban merchants sought cheap production methods to profit from growing overseas demand for manufactured goods, especially textiles and metals. By the later eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, the participation of large numbers of country people in industrial work altered traditional regional demographic and agrarian regimes, resulting in population growth, land-holding fragmentation and the creation of mercantile profit. This provided labour, finance and motive for a ‘second phase’ in the transition from feudal to capitalist economic relations in some regions of Europe and fully-developed industrialisation in others.

Livestock production has long been important to the Highland economy, before no less than after the clearances for sheep that first spread across the region from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. However, key questions about how it may have developed over the century or so immediately prior to the clearances have still to be answered, as well as questions about how the clearances actually changed farm output. Using stocking data primarily for the southern Highlands and Islands, this paper proposes to examine four particular questions. First, by way of an introduction, it will briefly consider the role of stock within the traditional or pre-clearance township economy. Second, it will use detailed data for the closing decades of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century to characterise the broad stocking balance of townships at the point when detailed figures first become available. Third, it will look at stocking figures for the eighteenth century with a view to establishing how livestock production may have altered during the century or so prior to the clearances. Fourth, and finally, it will consider how the clearances changed the character of livestock production.

What is common in community is … the fact that the members of a community are engaged in the same argument … the same discourse … in which alternative strategies, misunderstandings, conflicting goals and values are threshed out.

In central and south-western Scotland, squads or groups of Irish migratory seasonal workers, largely comprised of women and teenagers from Mayo, Donegal and Galway, were employed by Scottish potato merchants to harvest the potato crop throughout the harvesting season which extended from June until late October or November. As migratory workers, they started their employment in Ayrshire and Wigtownshire, to deal with the first earlies, and then moved eastwards into the Lothians, and northwards into Fife, Perthshire and Angus, to harvest the later ripening first earlies, second earlies and maincrops. As they moved their employment from farm to farm, staying at each from a few days to as long as six weeks, they lived on or close to the farms where they worked. They were usually accommodated in ‘bothies’, farm buildings such as byres, stables, lofts, stores, barns, stables, potato sheds, disused farm cottages and farm houses, all of which were converted into temporary accommodation for the workers. This accommodation was subject to much criticism and many attempts were made to try to improve its condition, not only by legislative control, but through other action, for example by trade unions and specially appointed committees. Of these channels, the latter (non-legislative means) has received very little attention by scholars and much of it is little known.

The … history of the rural areas during the Second World War is virtually unstudied. There is some work on agriculture and agricultural policies, but the extent to which these rely on K.A.H.Murray's ‘official’ history, published in 1955, is testimony both to the quality of Murray's work and the general paucity of more recent published research. Moving away from the directly official, or economic history, we move into the field of memoir and reminiscence. Good as many of these are, they obviously seldom make any attempt at sustained analysis. Crucially, the rural areas have been left out of accounts of the social history of the war, such as Angus Calder's magisterial studyThe People's War, first published in 1971.

In 1988, HTV made a series of programmes about a Somerset village called Luccombe. Their starting point was the Mass-Observation survey carried out over forty years before and described in Exmoor Village. No mention was made of the larger project - the ‘wholesome’ British export, for which the survey and perhaps even more importantly, the photographs, were commissioned. The difficulties of producing and reproducing fine-quality colour photographs at that time, however, suggest that the social investigators and the photographer were pursuing widely differing goals. The different approaches of social documentary photography and pictorial photography may not be obvious in a beautiful print, embedded in an anthropological text, but the use of photographs, which were essentially reconstructions of idealised village life disguised as documents, indicates how much importance the Ministry of Information attached to exporting the image of the wholesome, ‘traditional', English rural community.