Preliminary Programme

The construction of highways and railroads which would cut through and connect the modern towns with a highly-developed infrastructure was part and parcel of the modernist utopia of the Kemalist regime of the 1920s and 30s. In reality, the country which largely relied on the agricultural labour and the taxation revenue extracted from the rural areas was devastated and depopulated in the wake of the war decade (1911-1922). The well-known remark of the founding father of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), suggests that the villagers, who roughly corresponded to the 80 % of the population and half of the national income, were the masters of the nation. In the face of the 1929 Great Depression, however, the eyewitness accounts suggest that hunger was widespread across the country so that there were even villagers who literally ‘grazed’ to save themselves. The road tax which was introduced in the Ottoman Empire but reached new heights in terms of the extent and implementation under the Turkish Republic forced the villagers to construct the roads that they would barely use in their everyday lives: Many of them faced the danger of losing their few livestock, let alone owning a car. The only possessions of them, which could be expropriated by the tax collectors in the absence of payment, were merely consisted of a bed and a couch. This predicament could lead towards a more tragic end: A villager reportedly committed suicide in front of the tax collectors because he was unable to pay the road tax. Moreover, the tax collectors could illegally and arbitrarily extend the length of the road work at the expense of the villagers who could still be imprisoned if their work was deemed ‘unsatisfactory’. Unlike the general portrayal of the regime of the 1930s as a monolithic polity, in this paper, I suggest that the villagers were challenging the taxation policy side by side with their proponents inside the Republican People’s Party and a parliament dominated by it. Instead of giving the agency entirely to the Kemalist government, I see such institutions as the ‘fields of struggle’ in line with the ‘state-in-society’ approach of Joel Migdal, through which many citizens managed to channel their demands, resist, bargain and compromise. Drawing upon an extensive analysis of a large number of primary sources ranged from the local and national newspapers and journals to the parliament minutes and party congress reports, this research shows that the peasants played a role in the reduction of the road tax as well as of its payment in the form of forced physical labour. The resistance put up by them against the taxation policy imposed by the regime can only be understood with a perspective that problematizes the major assumptions in the literature, which take the discourse of the ruling elite for granted and overemphasise the control and authority exercised by the one-party state. (Show less)

This paper will present the findings of a major Leverhulme-funded research project on women's everyday working lives in rural England, 1500-1700. The project, based at the University of Exeter, is being undertaken by Professor Jane Whittle and Dr Mark Hailwood. Our starting point is that approaching the history of women's work with the same methodologies used to study men's work – essentially using wage data and occupational titles - produces limited results. Instead, we have adopted what is often called a 'verb-oriented' approach, inspired by the pioneering work of Sheilagh Ogilvie on early modern Germany and the Gender and Work project at Uppsala University on early modern Sweden. Adapting this methodology to better suit English sources, we have developed a 'task-based' approach that identifies evidence of both women's and men's work activities in various types of sixteenth and seventeenth century legal testimonies, focusing in particular on incidental evidence provided by legal witnesses about the activities they were engaged in at the time of a crime or other legally significant incident. We have consulted approximately 15,000 of these depositions, drawn from three main sources – the church courts, the quarter sessions, and cornoners' reports – across five counties – Cornwall, Devon, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire. This has yielded evidence of 4300 work activities taking place, of which around 30% were undertaken by women. This paper will present a quantitative analysis of these activities, focusing in particular on the gendered division of labour both at the level of broader categories such as 'agriculture', 'commerce' and 'crafts', and at the level of more specific tasks within such categories, such as 'weeding', 'animal slaughter' and 'sheep-shearing'. In particular the paper will argue that women's work in rural England was far more wide ranging than historians have generally assumed, and in particular that 'domestic duties' – especially cooking, cleaning and childcare – accounted for a smaller percentage of women's work activities than economic models of this period allow for. Moreover, it will demonstrate that very few categories of work were gendered entirely male or female, and that agricultural and commercial activities in particular involved considerable numbers of women. The paper will also draw comparisons with similar studies of early modern Germany and Sweden and reflect on the likely causes of differences in the gender division of labour across early modern Europe. (Show less)

In the twenty-first century, land has become a valuable commodity in Zambia. Foreign investors have spent considerable amounts of money on investments in land for agricultural pursuits. Zambia is part of the larger trend of “land grabbing”, which characterises much of Africa and which has caused dispossession and displacement of local populations. But this process cannot be understood without a long-term analysis of the rural political economy of Zambia. Since the colonial era, settler farmers, small-scale peasants, the state and mining capital have all had roles to play in the formation of relations in rural areas. The aim of this paper is therefore to provide an analysis of how land and labour has been used in farming from the first decades of the twentieth century until the 1990s. The central aspects will be the conflict between increasing capitalist farming and traditional peasant, or subsistence, agriculture.
Compared to other settler colonies such as South Africa and Zimbabwe, there were few white farmers in colonial Zambia. However, they still had an impact on society. The colonial authorities gave them some of the best land in the country and cleared land in so called farm blocks, which were areas designated for commercial farming. The indigenous people on the other hand were referred to reserve areas and many became labour migrants, especially in mining.
Settler farmers certainly tried to gain control over the labour of peasants, but were not always successful. Peasants were reluctant to seek employment in farming, partly because they could find higher wages in mining and urban industries, partly because they still had some access to land. The importance of family-based subsistence agriculture was evident when unemployment spread in urban sectors of the economy in the 1970s and especially the 1980s, when the number of “unpaid family workers” increased drastically and made up half the people involved in agriculture. In the same way that migrant labour had been an “escape-route” for many peasants in the early twentieth century, family based agriculture became a rescue for those who were unemployed in the 1980s. This process can be referred to as a reversed proletarianisation, meaning that people largely abandoned wage labour as a means of livelihood. When foreign investors became interested in Zambia in the 1990s, they thus found a context where a large supply of cheap labour was available in the family members of the small-scale peasants. This can explain why a great deal of investments following have been aimed at production based on various tenancy arrangements, where small-scale peasants have access to land. (Show less)

The image of Bossy the Cow has a long history in the iconography of rural America, an integral part of the life of the hard-working small family farmer, who alone, or with a family member or hired hand, cared for and milked their beloved animal. Freely roaming the fields, Bossy and the yeoman family farmer have shared occupied a place in American nostalgia since the times of colonial English America and embedded in the writings of Thomas Jefferson.
Unfortunately, the image is severely flawed, which I will demonstrate in the case of New Mexico, where the first cows to occupy the current United States of America resided. Dairying in New Mexico began with the Mexican vaquero tradition in the sixteenth century, rooted earlier in Spain, from whence the earliest cows came to the Americas. As dairying became an industry, it was not through the efforts of independent farmers, but instead on agricultural experiment stations that redesigned the cow and dairying operations; on state agencies, which established and enforced standards; and on corporations whose advertising made milk a necessity and a mainstay in the American diet, and whose investments gained control of the industry. Since the middle of the twentieth century, small family dairy cattle raising has been displaced by massive scale corporate industrial operations. The dairy industry, once a bastion of the small farmer, has become a massive, international factory operation. The dairy farmer and hired hand have been replaced by the wage earning Mexican immigrant proletarian working in huge operations, squeezed between the boss and the cow.
Meanwhile the iconography of the small family farmer, which has long justified a practice of agricultural exceptionalism, is sustained by corporate advertising and political pressure in order to sell more milk, expand operations, evade regulations, and exclude workers from rights that workers in other industries have gained. (Show less)