In this article we study the distinct formative stages of the labour market for external wet nurses employed by Galician foundling hospitals in the second half of the nineteenth century. We focus on changes in the nature of wet nurses’ work due to the benevolence laws (1822, 1836, 1849) that were driven by Spain’s liberal state. We also examine wet nurses’ socio-demographic profile and the geographic distribution of their labour markets. Finally, we explore the economic impact that Galician foundling hospitals had on rural districts, looking closely at the importance of external wet nurse wages for family budgets.

This study looks at the role of hiking in the development and the identity of a French region. Both rural and agricultural, Brittany saw a reorganisation of its territory during the 1970s, partly due to activities such as hiking. By becoming a political focus, the activity contributed to making paths, only previously used for field labour, a tool for territorial development. It also rejuvenated Brittany’s regional identity as it explored a forgotten heritage. The course of action adopted aimed to bring new populations, particularly urban ones, to rural areas. Behind the attention focused on paths, as an essential requirement for hiking, lay a concern for environmental and social sustainability with effects on lifestyles, tourism, and the shaping of a region in transition.

Female day labourers regularly appear in the accounts of capitalist Flemish farmers throughout the eighteenth century. Their persistent employment challenges the dominant view that female day labour was marginalised in areas of agrarian capitalism across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hitherto unexplored accounts of nine capitalist farms reveal the seasonal employment patterns, sexual division of labour and wages of those female day labourers in Flanders. While spring weeding was an important source of employment, women also continued to be hired during the harvest and for the cultivation of labour-intensive crops. Throughout the century, female day wages amounted to 0.4–0.73 of male wages. Women were excluded from well-paid tasks, but equal rates for equal work do not suggest wage discrimination in the strictest sense. The Flemish accounts thus reinforce the idea that female day labour persisted in areas with labour-intensive agriculture and alternative employment opportunities.

One of the most important systems of sheep transhumance since the Middle Ages in Spain occurred between the mountains of northern Leon and the Extremadura Meadow lands – a 500-kilometre journey on foot. We analyse here an interesting collection of thirty letters, written at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, and sent by the shepherds responsible for the flock from the wintering land to the owner of the animals. The only connection with the owner for seven long months but also with their villages and families, were these letters.

A determined expansion in the productive capacity of Spanish agriculture was a fundamental and contentious objective during the crisis of the country’s ancien régime and the formation of the liberal state, in the years of transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this study we examine a fundamental reorientation that occurred in an ambitious project for the expansion of irrigation in the region of Valencia. In this region, characterised by a well-rooted commercial agriculture, the original scheme, initiated by an enlightened aristocrat well connected with the royal court, would be profoundly altered in the transition from one political regime to another. The irrigated area increased much more than had been anticipated, and very diverse sections of the social hierarchy eventually benefited from this agricultural expansion. In contrast, the control exercised over the irrigation canal by the aristocrat himself would be increasingly questioned in the context of the nineteenth century.

On the basis of eight available terriers of a large royal estate of Niepołomice in southern Poland and of the vital records of two parishes located on its area, all dating from the early eighteenth century, this article examines the effect of famines on the economic situation of both feudal lords and their peasant tenants. The restrictive framework of the second serfdom in Poland did not prevent two severe mortality crises at the time triggered by crop failures. The key hazards caused by the famines for demesne economy were shortages of corvée labour and peasant-owned draught animals. While the famine mortality that affected the peasants reported as farmers in the terriers was not high, the famines were conducive to peasant impoverishment and reshuffled groups of various financial statuses.

The central and associated county or district chambers of agriculture have attracted little attention from historians. Their origins have been attributed to the perceived lack of a national coordinating body for agriculture highlighted by the 1865–7 cattle plague. This article based on the records of the Shropshire Chamber of Agriculture, newspapers and printed histories reconsiders their role. Members were initially drawn from landowning society and larger tenant farmers, although membership widened with the growth of rival organisations. Activities included lectures, talks and debates on agricultural subjects, visits to farms, factories and the county agricultural college and farm institute, dinners and social occasions at which those interested in agriculture could meet. By foregrounding the people and politics of the chambers of agriculture, it is argued they need to be incorporated more fully into the historiography of agricultural and rural politics of Britain during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Rural electrification is closely linked one way or another to rural development, and enables the understanding of the complexity of social and economic development paths. The objective of this work is to analyse rural electrification in a European peripherical country like Spain throughout the twentieth century, contributing to the international debate on the issue. The article studies the territorial expansion of electricity in the Spanish countryside, tracing different phases and explaining the delay in the construction of a national network. It also analyses the relationship that arose in the long term between electrification and the evolution of the agricultural sector. The article concludes that, in the Spanish case, rural electrification played a modest role in agricultural change until the 1980s and was, to a great extent, the consequence, rather than the cause, of the modernisation of the sector to these years.

The literature about the nutrition transition has been discussing the existence of different paths. The case of Uruguay is introduced as a different case of transition. We focus on the period 1900–70 when the country shifted from an agricultural-based economy to industrialisation through import substitution. We estimate the annual historical time series of per capita consumption of the main food items in the Uruguayan diet using the commodity flow approach complemented by the FAO’s Food Balance Sheets methodology. We identify the major trends in food consumption and discuss the main explanatory factors. We find that Uruguay showed a transition from a very high animal food-based diet towards a more diversified pattern with more milk, cereals, and vegetables. On top of that, we sustain that not only income is important to explain the major shifts in food diet, but also preferences, changes in relative prices, and productivity.

Our article conducts a critical reassessment of one of the most influential cultural myths in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nationalist definition of peasantry as embodying the quintessence of the nation. In order to evaluate the imagological scope and ideological implications engendered by this so-called ‘people-nation myth’, we focus on the Romanian culture, whom we consider fully representative for the Eastern European context. More exactly, our study employs a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century, precisely the literary subgenre supposed to reflect the coalescence between the peasantry and the nation. By analysing the co-occurrences in these novels between words belonging to the vocabularies of nation and rurality, we aim at showing that – contrary to traditional historiographic consensus – nation building has less to do with language or ethnicity, and much more to do with social emancipation.

The article presents a trend in rural and small-town architecture, in central Poland, consisting in the reuse of material from river-going vessels. As part of the research, twenty objects (existing and non-extant) were identified that had been constructed using material from wooden vessels that had navigated the Vistula River in the past (nineteenth and twentieth centuries). There was also a reinterpretation of the origin of construction material from a farm building that had been moved in the 1980s from near the Vistula to one of Polish open-air museums. The results indicate that these are probably the last material traces of a boat mill that operated on the Vistula in the late nineteenth century. Also, many preserved millstones embedded in buildings located near the Vistula seem to confirm this conclusion.

During the period of the Republic of China, a heated debate emerged among Chinese intellectuals concerning whether China should first educate peasants into citizens or help them feed themselves. Some agriculturalists, such as P. W. Tsou, argued that the first essential goal should be to apply technology and increase agricultural production to improve farmers’ lives. In 1945, Tsou proposed the Agricultural Engineering Program for China to the International Harvester Company. This programme provided Harvester Fellowships to sponsor twenty Chinese students to study agricultural engineering in the US. In addition, this programme instituted the Committee on Agricultural Engineering, led by J. Brownlee Davidson, to direct teaching, research, and promulgation of agricultural engineering in China. The talent cultivated through this programme chose to remain in mainland China following the Revolution of 1949. They became the first generation of agricultural engineers in the People’s Republic of China.

This article discusses Costa Rica’s policies and institutions created by the state to redistribute land during the 1960s and 1970s, when Latin American was implementing agrarian reforms. The paper also addresses the creation of the national parks system and forest conservation state policy supported by different scientific organisations during the same period. Within this context, this research seeks to explore the interface between the agrarian question (surrounding land and agrarian reform) and the ecological question (related to forest, national parks and conservation policies). The study examines how the transformations in land tenure and forest conservation have led to the structuring of a ‘new agrarian question’, which encompasses the concentration of land as well as the concentration of payments for environmental services.

This article examines the various ways new wealth infiltrated the Welsh gentry during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, considering the behaviours and actions of new men, together with the processes they followed to assimilate into the world of the old families. This study emphasises a level of openness of landed society to new arrivals able to comport themselves according to the expectations of the existing social elite. It demonstrates that acquiring land and property, which served as a visible display of their wealth, was only one strategy deployed by new wealth to secure gentry status. Other approaches included building country houses, consuming fashionable goods, undertaking public duties, political representation, drawing on culture and living heritage by projecting an image of ancient lineage (Welsh gentry understanding of Welshness was heavily reliant on lineage) through name-changing, adopting coats of arms and family mottos.

A social history of Ireland (encompassing rural communities) is needed if historians are to fully come to terms with what really happened between 1914 and 1918 and to properly tackle the question of ‘consent’ and ‘constraint’ in relation to the war effort. In addition, historians need to devote a comprehensive book-length research to the April 1918 Conscription Crisis in Ulster (but more generally to the anti-conscription movement in Ulster), determining if the urban/rural – Belfast/countryside divide existed (and, if so, what its magnitude was). Finally, in a few years’ time, anyone will be able to say if the Republic of Ireland of today opted to anchor the global conflict in the collective memory of its people, or if the Centenary of the First World War was just a politically motivated parenthesis to commemorate a lost generation that still struggles to find its rightful place in modern Irish history.

This article studies the changes in ownership of real estate, livestock and objects belonging to agricultural workers in the region of Girona, north-eastern Catalonia, through the analysis of a sample of nearly one thousand postmortem inventories dated between 1725 and 1807. It shows that a sizable number of agricultural workers gained greater access to property rights in land and other means of production, as well as undeniable improvements in their consumption levels during that period. Regarding the latter point, comparisons with inventories of the lower classes in Great Britain and other areas of north-western Europe show that the differences are not nearly as radical as suggested by the stereotype often applied to Mediterranean areas. The article thus discusses the apriorisms that have led many researchers to reject the idea that an industrious revolution was possible in southern Europe, and vindicates the need to strengthen dialogue between historiographies.

Extractivism has marked the history of Latin America whose operations are in rural territories inhabited mainly by indigenous populations. Mining has had a remarkable expansion in rural territories of the Andes. Critical studies of these processes have focused on the disruptive aspects and conflict between companies, local populations, and States. However, mining has also been intertwined with the territories based on contradictory relationships at different timescales. To examine this issue, we carried out a historical reconstruction of the productive practices of the Caspana community indigenous (northern Chile) and their different forms of connection with mining development. We combine diverse data sources and methodological approaches: oral histories obtained from ethnography, censuses, explorers’ records, and academic literature. We identify different types of relationships over time, according to the different forms of indigenous participation in the extractive markets and the deployment and rearrangement of diverse economic strategies by the indigenous population.

This article surveys a range of work on the later medieval English countryside published since 2000, and offers some predictions and suggestions about future research. It shows that the field of ‘rural history’ has rarely been closely defined, and indeed has tended to be treated as a broad church that can accommodate many different kinds of approach, themselves drawing on a variety of disciplinary traditions. The article identifies and discusses recent and current innovation and creativity in research within two such broad approaches, one mainly ‘economic’, the other ‘cultural’. It concludes by arguing for the gains that can be enjoyed through the combination of elements of the two approaches, and especially through a renewed emphasis on the illumination of the general through an intensive focus on the local.