Rural History-economy Society Culture 

About: Rural History-economy Society Culture is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Agriculture. It has an ISSN identifier of 0956-7933. Over the lifetime, 436 publications have been published receiving 4175 citations.

Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges

Abstract: Analyses of enclosure in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuryEngland have tended to focus on the social work of representations, in particularestate maps. I depart from this emphasis, however, in my attempt to focus onthe consequential and often contradictory role of material objects in producingenclosure.Inparticular,Iemphasisetheimportantworkthathedgesdid,physically,symbolicallyandlegally,inthedispossessionofthecommoner.Actingasanorganicbarbed wire, the hedge was increasingly put to work to protect the lands of thepowerful. Disrupting the propertied spaces of the commoning economy, hedgeswere not surprisingly targeted by those who opposed privatisation. The hedge,as both a sign and material barrier, served complicated and sometimes opposingends. It materialised private property’s right to exclude, but thus came into conflictwith common property’s right not to be excluded. The hedge was both an edge toproperty and was itself property. Both the encloser and the commoner, however,had property interests in the hedge. If broken, the hedge could signal violenceand riot, or the legitimate assertion of common right. The hedge served as an oftenformidablematerialbarrier,yetthisverymaterialitymadeitvulnerableto‘breaking’and ‘leveling’.‘The history of private property is rather silent on the conditions that produced it’(Mitchell, 2002)‘Enclosure was an act, or a series of actions, of creating new forms of boundary. Itinvolved placing hedges, ditches, fences, walls, pales’ (Johnson, 1996: 71)

British National Identity and the English Landscape

Abstract: Heritage is a messy concept ill-defined, heterogeneous, changeable, chauvinist – and sometimes absurd. In a TV programmer's words, just as ‘lifestyle has replaced life, heritage is replacing history'. Rather than ‘history’, Philadelphia's tourist boss now ‘talk[s] about heritage – it sounds more lively’. It is also more equivocal; as Walter Benjamin put it, every cultural treasure that is a ‘document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism’. Yet for all its ambiguity, ‘the idea of “Heritage” [is] one of the most powerful imaginative complexes of our time’.

Waste not, want not: traditional responses to crop failure in Greece

Abstract: On May 29 1986, a storm tracked across central Macedonia. In the hills north of the small market town of Langadhas, a violent fall of hail flattened ripening cereal crops, but the destruction was very patchy: some fields belonging to the village of Assiros were devastated, but others were unharmed and the storm spared a neighbouring village before causing renewed damage further along its path. Farmers hit by the storm were lucky – they received compensation for their losses from the European Economic Community – but their neighbours were less fortunate. Across the whole region, the winter of 1985/6 had been virtually rainless and some farmers unaffected by the storm barely recouped their sowing costs.

Swedish Rural Society and Political Culture: The Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Experience

Abstract: In 1776, baron Salomon von Otter, governor of the neighbouring county of Halland and jus patronatus of the local parish, stood opposite the men of Oja parish at a meeting outside the church. The powerful nobleman was for the third time arguing for the praiseworthy and legally required task of building a combined school and poor-house in cooperation with the neighbouring parish (where he happened to own most of the land). The peasants of O for a third time refused, both in writing and orally, on the grounds of their alleged right to self-government. The baron continued with his persuasions, and presented the support he had from the local nobility, among them the bishop. He was still met with a firm refusal. Eventually the baron ordered that they should build the house, referring (probably without much legal foundation) to his position as jus patronatus . Now everybody surrendered, except one farmer who refused to join in the final decision. This fact was carefully noted by the local clergyman, together with assurances that this unwise stubbornness would not suffice to impede the project.