This paper examines the impact of weather conditions on wheat production in the Florence and Siena regions in the early modern age, emphasizing the need to contextualize this influence within historical, geographical, and economic frameworks. Our quantitative findings suggest that, on average, hotter and wetter spring and summer weather conditions were beneficial for wheat yields in early modern Tuscany, though this relationship holds true only within a certain optimal range; otherwise, extreme conditions are detrimental. However, the boundaries between optimal and non-optimal conditions vary based on the historical, economic, and geographical context, ultimately determining the level of agricultural productivity. Specifically, we argue that two macro causes – primary production factors and the degree of market volatility – play a crucial role in shaping the effects of weather on agricultural outcomes. First, soil conditions, technology (broadly defined), and capital-labour ratios are the most significant determinants of agricultural productivity. Second, competitive and integrated markets, when supported by countercyclical institutions – in our case, the annona system – can mitigate the negative consequences of adverse weather by reducing the resulting volatility. Where such institutions are weak or absent, speculation (i.e., hoarding), driven by price expectations under high volatility, may arise and amplify disruptions.

This paper analyses the precarious balance between the economic demands of landowners and the defence of public interest in the Tuscan Maremma in a significant time frame for Italian land reclamation (from the 1860s to the 1950s). Increasing productivity in marginal lands was the primary reason for reclamation work, but the considerable investment involved did not always ensure significant gain in land value. Landowners exerted powerful pressure on the state to contribute to the implementation of more complex projects, but the state also needed their co-operation for its territory-wide plans. This new land acquisition fitted into a complex socio-economic context in which poverty, social tensions, health, and sanitation challenges as well as migration demanded incisive political policies which could not always be fully implemented. This essay shows that certain economic factors outweighed others and that, more often than not, the public social policies adopted played into the hands of private economic interests, and the large-scale reclamation work implemented in the Maremma led to the almost total disappearance of a deeply rooted farming tradition, the silvo-pastoral economy.

The present article stresses the unmatched quality of late-medieval English manorial documents, both in quantity and quality, and their importance for both economic and environmental history. The corpus of manorial documents is used here as a case study to reinvigorate interest in late-medieval agricultural history of England. To do so, the paper suggests to integrate manorial documents with methods and data from other palaeo-scientific disciplines: palaeoclimatology, palaeoecology, aDNA analysis, stable isotope analysis, palaeo-epigenetics, and molecular analysis of parchments. The paper argues that involving scientists from these fields in collaborative work and integrating the novel analysis of manorial documents and palaeo-scientific data will both help resolve various outstanding controversies and reshape the discipline. But beyond that, such interdisciplinary interdisciplinary framework has a strong potential to ask and answer new questions, create new data knowledge, and take our knowledge to new heights.

Government efforts to improve land productivity during 1917–1918 encouraged a wider interest in land drainage schemes. Building on the efforts of the County War Agricultural Executive Committees, new legislation brought local authorities into play to provide governance and direction; a proliferation of local bodies managing drainage schemes ensued, with a common aim that those benefitting from improved drainage should fund these schemes. Government support, in the form of financial assistance, remained firm after the War as such schemes were seen as opportunities to create employment for former servicemen. But in a scheme to clear rivers flowing across north Hampshire, west Surrey, and south Berkshire, landowners pushed back, manoeuvring to gain control of the scheme with the aim of reducing charges on landowners. A successful scheme ensued, managed by a prominent land agent working for one of the largest estate owners, but was marred by disagreement over its finances, scope and benefits.

The period after 1850 is often assumed to have witnessed some amelioration in the operation of the game code. This article highlights the origins of a little-researched statute, the 1862 Poaching Prevention Act, which conversely augmented the existing game laws and, most significantly, bestowed new responsibilities and powers on the police to tackle poachers at a critical point in the development of the new county constabularies. This controversial measure owed much to the particular circumstances of the 1850s and early 1860s when the violence and criminality associated with the activities of poaching gangs in Midland and northern counties threatened both game preservation and the authority of the new police. In these circumstances, an alliance of magistrates, police leaders and parliamentary advocates successfully lobbied for new measures to deal with this specific class of offenders who were increasingly held as representative of a wider urban criminal class.

Thirty-five years have passed since the killing of the South African refugee Jerry Masslo in Villa Literno in 1989 to the death of the Indian labourer Satnam Singh in Latina in 2024, marked by exploitation, violence, and abuses in the Southern Italian countryside. Only a few journalistic reports have documented this situation, and the article aims to fill this historiographical gap with a timely investigation, calling for the start of an international debate on the inhuman working conditions of foreigners in the countryside of developed countries. The article highlights some variables that have remained steady over time: the absence of public policies to regularise agricultural labour, the widespread presence of informal settlements in the countryside with risks to the safety of farm labourers, the low wage levels that violate people’s dignity, the persistent illegality in recruiting labour through ‘caporalato’ (forced labour), deaths at work due to exploitation and climate change. These are elements of critical analysis that call for an in-depth reflection on how to improve the working conditions of labourers in the rural economy today. The contribution of foreigners, as emerges from the quantitative analysis in the article, is irreplaceable for the well-being of developed societies. This is why history has an essential ethical and civic mission in highlighting the conditions of severe exploitation in which they are forced to work.

This article looks at the impact of economic and demographic structures on variations in rural poor relief in early modern Flanders by analysing empirical data at parish level. By combining data on poor relief income and expenses as well as on relief recipients from a survey from 1700 with data on population and land taxes, we demonstrate a close connection between agrarian relations of production and poor relief practices. Together they show how local poor relief practices translated spatially into regional patterns, which in turn were tied into both different agricultural modes of production and distinct social and cultural repertoires of elite representation and distribution.

This article examines the role of nature in Finnish pig production in the first decades of the 1900s by focusing on two distinct types of pigs, namely spring piglets and autumn piglets, who were raised in physical surroundings that changed with the seasons. I will investigate how different seasonal changes, such as temperature variations and availability of natural feeds, impacted the spaces and practices within which piglets were raised. This article also includes the analysis of how humans attempted to substitute for nature at times when natural benefits, such as warm weather or sunlight, were not available. Furthermore, I will analyse how the bodies and experiences of spring and autumn piglets reflected the different sets of circumstances in which they were raised. Broadly, this article examines how an animal production system negotiated its relations to nature and natural phenomena in the early stages of commercialization and modernization.

This article examines international and faith-based rural development from the 1950s to the 1980s, with rural Chile serving as a lens to explore the gendered intersections of these efforts. Rural education promoted rigid family models, separating feminine domestic responsibilities from masculine agrarian productivity. Drawing on archival records from the ILO, the WFP, and the German Catholic NGO Misereor, the article disentangles interactions between the Catholic-infused Instituto de Educacion Rural and international agencies. Despite competition among various players for control, a shared vision of distinct gender roles for men, women, and children prevailed. Neither liberation theology nor international development ideas significantly challenged these models. However, some young women navigated the ambiguities of Catholic education to break from rural domesticity. The violent regime change in 1973 further disrupted these norms, as men and women were increasingly driven into low-paid, seasonal agricultural labour within the expanding agro-industry.

The paper provides a narrative history of Japan’s rural electrification before the mid 1930s, focusing on the interplay among private-owned utilities, local communities, and policy. In joining the revisionist historiography on rural electrification, the paper highlights the important role played by private-owned utilities in electrifying the countryside before the 1930s. Although extending electricity systems to the countryside was uneconomical compared with densely populated cities, the rural market provided business opportunities when private-owned utilities sought to balance load factors and sell surplus power generation capacity. However, as consequence of profit-seeking, the rural communities were charged higher price for electricity, faced inferior supply conditions, and disputed with private-owned utilities over how to electrify the villages. Some communities tried public ownership, but the Japanese government was not always favourable to local initiatives out of ideology and national system considerations. The noninterventionist policy incited social discontent that aired itself in the late 1920s in tariff disputes and, with the onset of the Great Depression, pushed the government to change its policy to subsidisation and eventually to nationalisation. By contextualising rural electrification in Japan’s business, ideological, and regulatory context, this paper re-evaluates private-owned utilities, but also points out its limitation in electrifying the countryside.

Drawing on a 1936 ethnographic enquiry and specialised literature, including magazines on domestic appliances and rural life, this article examines how wood, coal, bottled gas, and electricity coexisted – rather than replaced one another – in rural French households from the 1860s to the 1950s. New fuels and kitchen technologies were layered onto existing practices, which required farm women to juggle multiple energy sources and cooking tools across seasons. Cast-iron stoves and portable cookers, acquired according to economic (wealth, occupation), environmental (deforestation, proximity to mines), and geographic (latitude, altitude) constraints, reduced the need for constant fire monitoring and reshaped domestic labour. They facilitated more complex cooking and freed up time – only for it to be consumed by multitasking across expanded household and agricultural duties. The study challenges linear narratives of technological progress, foregrounds addition over substitution, and asks who truly benefited from these innovations – and at what cost.

This paper is a review of existing sources across disciplines focusing on the topic of female farm ownership. Throughout the centuries, females have been explicitly excluded from owning and prevented from inheriting land. The purpose of this paper is to examine historical customs and rules governing female land ownership in Ireland and to demonstrate how the ‘old’ laws and customs have contributed significantly to the patriarchal system of farm ownership that is still in existence today even though the gender-based laws have disappeared. This paper argues that a contributing factor to the current male-dominated farm ownership figures is the normalisation of patriarchy by way of the old, gendered laws and practices. Although gender discrimination is no longer acceptable in such a direct legal form, the tradition and culture that established and supported such customs can still be seen today, as males account for 87% of Irish farmholders. This research addresses a lacuna in our understanding of women’s unequal position when it comes to the ownership of farms in Ireland.

This article uses a new database of 1,891 probate inventories from rural southern Sweden to investigate the development of rural households’ productive capacity from the late 1600s to the 1860s. Both labourers and farmers improved their material living standards – as measured by the contents of probate inventories – but the labouring households’ ownership of means of production decreased over time. This indicates increasing market involvement and dependency on wage labour. For labourers’ and farmers’ households alike, textile production at home became more important; in the 1860s, half of the labouring households owned spinning wheels and weaving looms, and for farmer households, the shares were even higher. Our study reveals not only the dynamism of the rural pre-industrial Swedish economy but also the unequal nature of this dynamism.

This paper explores the modernisation of rural Southern Italy between 1950 and 1962, focusing on the role of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a public entity created to address the socio-economic divide between the North and South of Italy. The Cassa was central to the restructuring of rural areas, promoting land reclamation, infrastructure development, and the electrification of agricultural regions. The study examines how the ‘agrarian question’ intersected with the broader ‘Southern question’, reflecting persistent economic disparities within Italy. By analysing the early stages (1950–1962) of extraordinary intervention, this article demonstrates that modernisation efforts were aimed not only at reducing regional imbalances but also at addressing structural deficiencies that hindered agricultural productivity. While significant progress was made in modernising rural Southern Italy, this paper argues that the foundational agricultural reforms, although vital, needed to be complemented by broader industrial policies to ensure long-term socio-economic convergence with the more developed North.

Through an in-depth exploration into the Norwich weavers’ riots in 1829 and Swing Riot protests in Swanton Abbott, Norfolk, in January 1831, this article shows urban and rural protests were linked together in multifaceted ways. When these two protests are situated in the context of urban-rural relations, it becomes clear that the participants were part of an active renegotiation of the relationship between city and country brought on because the pressures of industrialization were pushing the two together in ways that many found threatening. Each of those involved had a different vision for what this relationship should look like, as well as a vested interest in ensuring this vision prevailed. By foregrounding how these participants approached the boundaries between urban and rural worlds, this research emphasizes the ways this boundary could be a crucial point of contention in early industrial Britain.

Ruminant livestock farming is predominant in England’s grassland regions, including the south-west of England (SWE). The common farming view that such regions are only good for growing grass amounts to a simplistic ‘traditionality of grasslands’ (TOG) narrative, which may discount the potential of these regions to align food production with diverse, sustainable consumption. We interrogate the assumptions underlying the TOG narrative through the analysis of contemporary and historical agricultural data sources and recent interviews with SWE food producers to reveal an SWE traditionality of mixed farming and diverse food production. By unsettling the TOG narrative, we draw attention to multiple elements intertwining physical limitations of land with powerful but mutable human-made limitations of the wider food system as drivers of land use in the SWE, underscoring the role and responsibility of policymakers to ensure wider dynamics of the food system enable the transition to diverse, sustainable food production in England’s grassland regions.

From its spread in the thirteenth century onwards, short-term leasehold became one of the most common and powerful institutions of land management in Western Europe. Its rise is often strongly connected to the commercialisation of agriculture and short-term profit-seeking, with overexploitation of the soil as a consequence. However, when looking closely at short-term lease contracts of the fourteenth century, these extensive documents often contain a multitude of clauses on the upkeep of the soil, water management, and care for the present fauna and flora. This paper aims to investigate how the management of the soil was regulated through a leasehold in Cambrésis, currently in the north of France, through an in-depth study of the clauses on fertilisation by manure and care for the soil, as recorded in two rather unique fourteenth-century lease ledgers. What can these contracts reveal about contemporary agricultural practices, such as fertilisation? How did the administrators of the Saint-Julien hospital and the collegial chapter of Saint-Géry in Cambrai safeguard the long-term health and value of their leased-out properties in a period of severe crises and rising commercial pressure? Through this research, this paper proposes that short-term leasehold could, in certain conditions, stimulate forms of environmental stewardship.

Most studies of gamekeepers focussed on poaching and the role of the gamekeeper in society or were gamekeeper’s memoirs, but recently, Osborne and Winstanley and the current author have examined gamekeeper numbers in England at the county level, demonstrating variation across location and time, with significant differences between counties. This study undertakes, for the first time, a detailed examination of one county (Norfolk) from 1851 to 1921. Analysis of census returns revealed how the numbers and locations of gamekeepers varied between and within districts over time. Several factors that might influence gamekeeper numbers were examined, and the results suggested that geology, agricultural economics, and fashion were more important influences on numbers than poaching. The major employers of gamekeepers were concentrated in the west of Norfolk, in areas of sandy, acidic soils, where agricultural pressures drove the creation of large estates, readily converted to shooting.

Based on longitudinal micro data from 13 Spanish rural villages between 1800 and 1910, this paper assesses whether discriminatory practices affected fertility and sex-specific mortality in infancy and childhood during economic crises. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand, there is a connection between short-term economic stress, fertility, and sex ratios at baptism: high-price years were followed by a decline in the number of registered baptisms and by an increase in sex ratios at baptism. These results, therefore, suggest that families mortally neglected a significant fraction of their female babies during economic crises. On the other hand, there is a connection between short-term economic stress, mortality, and sex ratios at death. Using death registers further supports this interpretation, since our evidence shows that the female biological advantage was not visible after an economic shock.

This paper examines the rise and fall of cottage nursing, a controversial approach to rural healthcare that was championed across the United Kingdom from the 1880s to the interwar period. Defying the strategies being used to professionalise nursing in urban centres, cottage nursing supporters argued that nurses for the rural poor should be recruited from the lowest social classes, given only the briefest training, and prepared to do both nursing and menial domestic work. Their critics espoused the noble ideal of providing the rural poor with only the best-trained lady district nurses from the apparent moral high ground, persuasively arguing that the ‘little knowledge’ given to cottage nurses was a ‘dangerous thing’ – both for patients and for the nursing profession. And yet, cottage nursing supporters boldly challenged this position, arguing that noble ideals and excellent standards could simultaneously be pursued on behalf of rural patients and at their expense.