This article analyses the views of experts and political discourse on river regulation, its objectives, and flood prevention in the rural Demer-Dijle catchment areas, the 1840s–1880s – a period marked by climatological extremes and agricultural transition. Via a close read of state archives and parliamentary discussions, we unravel different opinions and interests and find that not all flooding was unwanted. While the Ministry of Public Works, at first, aimed to better regulate water discharge and to improve watercourses for navigational purposes, it later prioritised agricultural interests. However, managing rivers coherently and efficiently was challenging because river powers were dispersed over ministerial departments, provinces, and municipalities that made coordinating upstream and downstream river works difficult. Floods often resulted in the drawing up of new plans, but their implementation often failed to materialise because the government had other worries and insufficient resources available while parliamentarians prioritised the interests of their constituencies.

The aim of this study is to observe the ability of Southern Italian municipalities to respond to and redefine the management of common lands following the national privatisation and partition policies promoted by the State during the second half of the nineteenth century. The hypothesis tested is whether, through the analysis of new archival sources such as management rules, it is possible to identify good practices of management of common lands, along with the presence of resilience on the part of local communities during a period defined as one of uncontrollable ‘decline’ for these resources. Three Apennine areas (Campania Region) were identified as the observation sample. The analysis revealed that for these specific cases, it is imprecise to speak of decline and a lack of propensity to develop good management practices, but rather of institutions that are attentive to the protection and preservation of their commons through specific rules.

The research reconstructs and analyses the role played by livestock associations in Italy during the 20th century. The article initially focuses on local associative experiences before World War II and subsequently on national associations, whose formation also depended on the goal of promoting the application of technical innovations. Their impact, specifically that of artificial insemination and semen freezing, has indeed influenced the production process in the livestock sector since the 1940s with genetic changes in animals for productivity purposes. Focusing on specific case studies (mainly Associazione Italiana Allevatori, but also ANAFI, ANARB, and ANABIC), the paper analyses the motivations behind the establishment of the associations, the relationships with members and public institutions, and finally, support strategies for breeders.

Leicestershire experienced a uniquely pronounced shift from pastoral to mixed arable agriculture during the Second World War, with changes to farming practice being overseen and enforced by the County War Agricultural Executive Committee. The invasive powers of such Committees have led them to be criticised in recent historiography as an affront to individual freedoms. Opposition and resentment towards these policies would surely be most pronounced where they caused the greatest change – in Leicestershire. This article studies oral testimonies, alongside corresponding farm surveys from the period to provide a more objective basis for comparison, to reveal contemporary farmers did not share the negative historiographical characterisation of wartime policy. By the mid-1950s, agriculture in Leicestershire had embraced the ‘modern’ scientific methods demanded by the committees, but farmers’ recollections of the committee appear to span from favourable to, at worst, ambivalent. They considered the committee’s demands and methods necessary and for the most part, entirely reasonable.

This article explores the competitive hoeing matches, which were a significant feature of certain parts of Scottish rural life in the period 1840 to 1940. An analysis of newspaper reports shows how important such matches were in Aberdeenshire, attracting significant numbers of both competitors and spectators. By contrast, similar reports for the rest of Scotland show only a small number of such matches outside the northeast. Reasons for the differences are attributed to both material factors, such as the visibility of cultivation, and the social structure of the areas. In Aberdeenshire, a culture valorising hard work and skill was set in a social structure of small farmers and farm servants, which led to self-sustaining organisational forms. By contrast, elsewhere a top-down form of organisation prioritising the needs of farm productivity meant that competitive hoeing matches failed to kindle much enthusiasm. The value of a focus on taken-for-granted practices is the way it can shed light on such contrasts.

The twenty years surrounding the regulation of Ashdown Forest in 1885 reveal locally complex tensions and interactions. Designed to ensure the environmental protection of the Forest and to end internal dissent among those connected to it, regulation failed. Instead, protracted in-place conflict continued, as working families rejected new legislation which threatened their livelihoods. So the new body of conservators was faced with balancing such protection with the customary uses by commoners, with the working practices of ‘foresters’, with resurgent calls for small-scale farming, and with the ever-increasing residential numbers by the 1880s, many seeking ‘nature’ and ‘the primitive’, but also social tone. And increasingly, from beyond the locality, came the calls for environmental protection, especially from the newly formed Commons Preservation Society, urged on by newspaper articles recommending the fresh air and ‘natural’ beauty of Ashdown to townsfolk as a rural idyll or for moral improvement.

Armando Palacio Valdés characterised the Asturian village of Sama de Langreo in his novel La aldea perdida (1903), as an unusual example of an industrialised population entity through four variables: the sale of fresh meat, the existence of street lighting, cafés, and public greenspaces. The aim of this article is to verify the author’s approach by comparing the state of the rest of the Asturian parishes at the time of the novel (1879). To do this, a methodology combining the use of literary sources and the analysis of historical documentary sources will be applied. The results obtained confirm the Asturian author’s assessment of the industrialisation process in Sama as an exceptional milestone for the province, as well as evidencing the slow pace of industrialisation in the rest of the Asturian parishes.

The economic success of the intensive poultry and pork sectors is a milestone in the Spanish economic history of the past seven decades. This work analyses the boom in the chicken and pork businesses in Spain, verifying the strengths and weaknesses of both livestock models, and drawing conclusions in relation to the agribusiness system. The influence of chicken and pork in the booming Spanish meat sector is analysed from the perspectives of livestock farming and agroindustry, followed by the impact of both forms of intensive livestock farming on Spain’s domestic consumption and foreign trade. The similarities and differences in their evolution are identified from the perspective of two food supply models: a predominance of economies of scale until the 1980s, and of so-called economies of scope since that time. While the development of mass production in both intensive livestock businesses followed a similar pattern, the progressive segmentation of the market towards higher quality, more artisanal and sustainable products has greatly favoured the sector more deeply rooted in rural tradition: pork.

This study deals with shared ideas about the countryside and its inhabitants during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. It identifies the most significant sources of contemporary representations of the rural. These include, besides historical ideas pre-dating the regime, the party-state itself, expert structures, the arts, and pop culture. In many cases, representations encompassed efforts to transform the countryside, or society, or to maintain the status quo, and, following de Certeau, we can consider such activities to be strategies. On the other hand, villagers approached these representations and strategies using their own tactics. This study demonstrates that rural policymaking was not just in the hands of power structures; the effects it had depended a great deal on the dominated rural inhabitants.

The nutritional transition, together with the demographic and epidemiological transitions, stands as one of the most crucial phenomena shaping societies in the 20th century. A prominent characteristic of the nutritional transition is the increased consumption of animal-origin protein, particularly meat. Within this context, the present article utilises Spain as a case study to provide a close examination of the nutritional transition during the latter half of the 20th century. Spain’s significance lies in its late but rapid development of this transition. In the 1960s, meat consumption was relatively low compared to other European countries; however, within just two decades, it surpassed that of many developed nations. On one hand, the article offers a detailed insight into how budget constraints were eased to foster meat consumption among various consumer groups. On the other hand, the study aims to quantify the influence of income, prices, and preferences in driving this process

Historians credit the interwar period with the demise of the great agricultural estates but many survived, reduced in area and refocussed on new priorities. Three estates lying in close proximity in north Hampshire and south Berkshire had very divergent interests, but there were similarities, and significant differences, in the manner in which they survived the interwar period. One invested in a programme of renewal of houses and farm buildings, and another adopted a more commercial approach to managing its diverse interests and the third retrenched, cutting investment but maintaining the status quo as an agricultural and shooting estate. All three survived, relatively intact and financially stable, and remain in operation today. An examination of estate financial performance before and after the Great War provides the context to the strategies pursued by the owners and their Land Agents, and their place in the broader rural landscape of the 1920s and 1930s.

From the thirteenth until the 18th century, the county of Flanders knew a special citizen status for rural residents. Country dwellers, normally residing under the jurisdiction and fiscality of lordships, could register themselves as external citizens or ‘outburghers’. Outburghership has primarily been researched within the context of state building and urban studies. This contribution prioritizes the perspective of the countryside. Studies on premodern Flanders have shown that the counts and cities tried to undermine the power of local lords by providing as many seigneurial subjects as possible with fiscal and judicial exemptions to the lords’ justice and taxes. The accessibility of outburghership and its varying appeal along time and space has not been adequately researched. This study argues that the heyday of outburghership in Flanders was between 1300 and 1550. After 1600, outburghership endured as defence mechanism against seigneurial lordship until both institutions met their demise in 1795.

This article considers the relationship of two prominent leaders of British women’s temperance, Lady Henry Somerset and Lady Elizabeth Biddulph. They were noteworthy for taking opposing sides when the British Women’s Temperance Association divided on the question of the political reach of its work. Somerset and Biddulph were elite women, daughters of earls and near neighbours around Ledbury, a centre of cider apple and hop cultivation in Herefordshire. Both made their first temperance pledge in the area. We examine their geographical proximity and consider the importance of local agricultural labour and landscapes to their temperance work.

Based on extensive archival research encompassing over eighty rural authorities in Wales, this essay pieces together fragmentary evidence to reveal the main contours of rural responses to infectious outbreaks from the 1870s to the 1918/10 influenza pandemic. At the centre of the essay are those practical, short-term measures that have hitherto been overlooked in the historiography. While infectious outbreaks did have the capacity to extend sanitary initiatives over the medium and long term, looking at how rural authorities reacted to infectious disease helps us better understand how public health practices translated into action at a local level. In doing so, the essay untangles both the nature of rural responses and the challenges confronted by rural sanitary officials when confronted with infectious outbreaks and how they had to adapt public health orthodoxy to different rural environments.

This paper examines the presence of Reeves’ pheasant (Syrmaticus reevesii) in Britain. It investigates how encounters between British people and Reeves’ pheasant informed their imaginings of the species, from its first introduction into Britain from China in 1831 to 1913 when a serious decline in its numbers began. Drawing on natural history texts, records from the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, technical literature on pheasant rearing, and extracts from periodicals, magazines, and generalist encyclopaedias, this paper shows how imagined and physical encounters with Reeves’ pheasant, by naturalists, acclimatisers, pheasant enthusiasts, and sportsmen, informed shifting constructions of the species, which influenced and shaped its presence in Britain.

The article addresses the issue of wealth accumulation by peasant farmers in the post-emancipation era in the Russian Baltic province of Livonia. The Baltic emancipation schemes stand out as the least beneficial for peasants as they set neither time limits nor land price levels, and the state government did not provide any credit to the purchasers of farms. However, in northern Livonia the nominal value of peasant farmers’ wealth grew as much as tenfold from 1850 to 1913. The study reveals that the advantages and disadvantages of high farm purchase prices should be considered in combination with other factors affecting agricultural growth. In the Baltic context, the large size of the farms, land consolidation, well-developed infrastructure, and the commercialisation of production helped the farm owners amass a relatively large amount of wealth within a generation. Technological improvement also contributed to the rise in productivity and wealth.