News
Call for Sessions: Rural History 2025
Proposals for sessions at the biennial conference of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO) are due by 30 September 2024.
Call for Papers: BAHS Spring Conference 2025
Call for Papers: Historical Perspectives on Rural Economies, Societies, Landscapes and Environment
BAHS Spring Conference 2025 will be in Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, 24-25 April
The Spring conference of the British Agricultural History will take place on 24th and 25th April 2025 in the lovely surroundings of the Guildhall, Bury St. Edmund’s (Thursday 24th April) and the Food Museum, Stowmarket (Friday 25th April).
Australia bans live sheep exports: A precedent from Agricultural History Review
In May, the federal Australian government announced its intention to ban live sheep exports by 2028. As Alan Renwick reported for The Conversation, Australia’s ban followed UK and New Zealand bans in 2023. The historical precedents are many and varied.
LIBRAL adds 15 volumes, spanning c.1800-1944
Elections have badly impeded LIBRAL over the past couple of months, but good to say the scanner’s assistant was happily re-elected. Here, before the second
Spike Gibbs and Steve Hindle win Thirsk Prize 2024
Like last year, two books stood out. The first, Spike Gibbs’ ‘Lordship, State Formation and Local Authority in late Medieval and Early Modern England’ (Cambridge University Press), is a book that the panel agreed will shape the historiography for many years to come. The second, Steve Hindle’s ‘The Social Topography of a Rural Community: Scenes from a Labouring Life’ (Oxford University Press), is a wonderful, illuminating microhistory of one early modern Warwickshire community.
Events and Calls for Papers
Calls for Papers
Calls for Sessions close for Rural History 2025, to be held 9 to 12 September in Coimbra, Portugal.
More News
Publications
For more, please see our dedicated list of books on agricultural and rural history.
Family Farmers, Land Reforms and Political Action: An Alternative Economic History of Interwar Europe, by James Simpson, is now available from Palgrave Studies in Economic History.
Gary Willis’s new blog post for the On History blog at the Institute for Historical Research, ‘The National vs. The Local, Amenity vs. Employment and Housing: The Case of the ‘Sunderland’ Seaplane Assembly Factory, Calgarth, Windermere, the Lake District’, examines an intense contest over land use in 1940s Britain.
A new article by José Luis Martínez-González, ‘Assessing agricultural adaptation to changing climatic conditions during the English agricultural revolution (1645–1740)’, has been published in Cliometrica and is open access. It particularly examines the role of nitrogen-fixing plants, improved cultivation techniques, and seed enhancements in response to climatic fluctuations between approximately 1645 and 1715, followed by a warmer phase until 1740.
Mary Fraser’s book, The British Police and Home Food Production in the Great War: Police as Ploughmen, is now available from Springer.
Agriculture, Economy and Society in Early Modern Scotland, edited by Harriet Cornell, Julian Goodare, and Alan R. MacDonald, is now available from Boydell & Brewer.
Landscape History Volume 45, Issue 1 (2024) is now available.
Paperbacks of the 2022 Thirsk Prize winner The Real Agricultural Revolution: The Transformation of English Farming, 1939-1985, by Paul Brassley, Michael Winter, Matt Lobley, and David Harvey, are available now from Boydell & Brewer.
Publications
Rural History Today, Issue 46 (January 2024)
Issue 46 carries articles on the diaries of Violet Dickinson; oral history and environmental land management; rural resistance to land dispossession in the Western Isles; and county magazines.
Rural History Today, Issue 45 (July 2023)
This issue features an article by Christopher Dyer on medieval peasants’ contributions to the countryside; Elizabeth Pimblett on women’s roles in the story of cider; Tony Pratt on the British cattle census of 1866; and Paul Warde on land valuation and surveying in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland.
How peasants made the rural landscape
Peasants were not rich or powerful, but they had a capacity, often when operating together in a community, to make decisions and change the world around them. The peasant contribution to the medieval countryside has emerged gradually in the thinking of historians and archaeologists.
Rural History Today, Issue 44 (February 2023)
The February 2023 edition of Rural History Today leads with an article by BAHS President Professor Nicola Verdon on Ruth Uzzell, a trailblazing campaigner and the second woman to serve on the Executive Committee of the National Union of Agricultural Workers, elected in 1922. Ian Godwin contributes an article on Seale-Hayne College in Devon; Penny Lawrence on early twentieth-century British calf clubs; Marc Collinson, Shaun Evans, Matthew Rowland, Mari Wiliam, and Catrin Williams on the Bodorgan Estate in the south-west of Anglesey and the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates (ISWE) at Bangor University; and Angus J.L. Winchester on common land in Britain.
