This article tells the story of 36 Chinese peasants and their audacious campaign to defend their private rights on two tiny islands in Manchuria from the Japanese empire and a Chinese warlord regime. A borderland in Northeast Asia, Manchuria was a site of intense inter-imperial rivalry in the first half of the twentieth century. Using newly discovered local Chinese archival documents as well as sources produced by Japanese, Korean, and American actors, I discuss how the peasants leveraged their knowledge of multiple property regimes in the borderland to delay and deflect the demands of two states. This microhistory of a transnational dispute illustrates the workings of a form of convergent legal pluralism in the Northeast Asian borderland. While historians agree that state capacity grew substantially in the East Asian borderlands in the early twentieth century, the case shows how that growth also complicated the nature of the state and created new possibilities of bottom-up socio-legal action. It exemplifies the kind of legal cosmopolitanism grassroots actors practised in a world of justice dominated by not-so-cosmopolitan nation-states.

This article explores the vision, process, and reaction to the privatization of Mapuche lands in Araucanía, Chile, from 1871 to 1916. It shows how politicians developed a racial vision for Araucanía between 1871 and 1882 during the final battle with independent Mapuche forces. Chilean government officials and elite societies created land policies that targeted the removal of indigenous populations from fertile lands to expand industrial agriculture by favoring large Chilean-owned estates and partitioning small to medium-sized plots to European settler-farmers. From 1883 to 1896, the Chilean government put its vision into practice, investing in the recruitment of European farmers and reconsidering new laws regarding colonization, land rights, and indigenous settlements. However, after the 1891 civil war, the government retreated from expensive state-building projects. From 1896 to 1916, Chilean small farmers intensified land grabs and, in response, indigenous communities formed organizations to defend their lands. At the core of the conflict were the issues of land and racialized policies that defined land access. By examining laws, government reports, missionary chronicles, and indigenous writings, this article demonstrates the progression of a racialized language that excluded indigenous peoples from their lands, founded in the desire to privatize native lands and accelerate the making of a modern Europeanized nation.

India's agrarian history has for the most part been cast within colonial and nationalist frameworks or in analyses of modernity and development in the South Asian historiography on both sides of the independence divide. This leaves plenty of space to discuss both the vast engagement of American actors with Indian elite formations and modifications to the agrarian projects contingent upon those interactions. A focus on the Americanist drive for agrarian modernization in India allows for exploring the distinct cultural location of modernization in a long-term perspective and its engagement with colonial “development.” A study of their mutual interaction gives insights into modernization's somewhat distinct itinerary on the subcontinent and provides specificity to the history of the otherwise spatially wider American intervention in global and inter-Asian contexts.

This article explores the contradictory history of lower castes converting out of Hinduism yet not out of lowliness or casteism in early twentieth-century Panjab. It begins by contextualizing what B. R. Ambedkar's undelivered 1936 Lahore speech on annihilating caste might have meant to an audience of largely landless agricultural laborers. Next it examines the changing constellation of caste names and occupational designations for these groups amid the emergence of the Ad Dharm movement and its struggle to impart equality, dignity, and community to Panjabi Dalits. To situate this new sense of identity in the context of actual labor practices, the article then analyzes the fraught relationship between landholding cultivators and landless laborers working side-by-side while continuing to be separate and unequal. That a large proportion of lower castes could adopt religions other than Hinduism or even start their own and yet remain excluded and exploited reveals the limits of a politics centered on conversion, as well as a different horizon for emancipation.

In this article we discuss an aspect of economic growth that has not been the subject of much consideration in economic and agrarian history to date: the effect of biological innovations on farming development between the mid nineteenth century and the 1930s. We have focused on dairy farming for two reasons. Firstly, dairy farming played a relevant economic role in a number of European regions during this period. Secondly, one of its products, liquid milk, was probably the most significant food during the early stages of the European nutrition transition. We present new statistical data for the evolution of dairy farming in different Northern European countries as well as Spain, and evaluate the impact of cattle population and milk yields in each case. We also link milk yields and the availability of fodder, but special attention is paid to the breeds kept and techniques for their improvement. The article shows that cattle improvement played a significant role in Central and Northern Europe from the mid nineteenth century, but that this was not the case in Spain. Improvement through inbreeding was soon discarded in Spain, absorbent crossbreeding failed, and the sector became dependent on foreign imports of bulls and cows, first from Switzerland and later from Holland. By taking these factors into consideration we can better understand why the dairy sector in Mediterranean Europe did not really begin until the late nineteenth century and why it stagnated in the wake of the First World War.