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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.