Landed Elite Research Articles

Exploring changes in gamekeeper numbers in England (1851–1921)

Abstract The gamekeeper played an important role in the development of modern gamebird shooting but has been peripheral in many analyses of the sport, which have tended to focus on the poacher, the landed elite, or the game laws. This study places the gamekeeper in a central position and, for a selection of counties, provides a detailed examination and comparison of changes in gamekeeper numbers between 1851 and 1921. The influence on gamekeeper numbers of population changes, estate area, landowner numbers and poaching prosecutions were also examined. Significant differences were found between the counties in gamekeeper numbers, and the magnitude and timing of changes in these. Average estate area varied greatly with no direct link to the area of the county, or to the number of gamekeepers on an estate. The type of quarry and interest of the landowner were important in determining the number of gamekeepers employed. In some counties, there may have been a link between the level of poaching and gamekeeper numbers, but there were significant differences between the counties. The results indicated a complex, regionally nuanced, picture in which factors such as the location, primary quarry and poaching pressure, as well as the interests of the landowner and the depth of his pockets, determined gamekeeper numbers.

ИСТОРИЧЕСКАЯ СПЕЦИФИКА ПОЛИТИКО-ПРАВОВОГО ПОЛЯ КОЛОНИАЛЬНОЙ ВИРГИНИИ

The article is devoted to the study of the historical features of the formation and development of an original model of legal relations that developed in Virginia during the colonial period. The existing source base makes it possible to correlate the legal interests of some of the most important participants in local socio-political processes, such as the official authorities of the colony, the local landed elite, and broad sections of North American society. The analysis of the formation of the judicial system in the colonial possessions of Great Britain reveals the specifics of individual colonies, among which the legal practices of Virginia rightfully occupied a special place, since they were a direct reflection of the political compromise between the most prominent groups of influence, such as the governor’s entourage, local land elites and the political nation of the colony. The inclusion of the legal system of colonial Virginia in a kind of system of checks and balances, which had an important impact on establishing a balance between the various branches of government, is particularly noteworthy. At the same time, the historical experience of Virginia clearly demonstrates how the needs of the colonial economy determined the development of local law and the political system.

Collaborating elite of Kalabagh and patterns of control in colonial Punjab, 1849–1939

ABSTRACT This article discusses the local dynamics of control by the rural elite in colonial Punjab over agricultural land, the informal credit market and labour supply. I argue, the landed elite in collaboration with bureaucratic patronage, developed linkages between indigenous institutions and imperial ideology, controlled and manipulated the means of power and wealth. This led to a one-dimensional flow of capital and profit, towards elite and state, causing a serious check on social mobility and economic development. In a local study of a rural town, Kalabagh, in the north-west of Pakistani Punjab, the article brings forward an understudied aspect of colonial policies which followed a different trajectory from the rest of the Punjab. The colonial state, instead of development, maintained the structure of society under feudal setup. Rais, the ruling elite of the town, as colonial collaborator, managed the moneylending system in his estate and trapped the wage labourers in complex debt bondage, perpetuating jajmani type relationship in the twentieth century. At one level this arrangement invigorated hierarchical differentiation and dispossession of rural proletariat, at another level, the social differentiation acted as an instrument to mobilize the community for collective action towards nationalist discourse.

Auctions and the Making of the Nabob in Late Eighteenth-Century Calcutta and London

AbstractThis article examines the meanings and controversies surrounding sales by public auction in British colonial Calcutta and in London during the last decades of the eighteenth century. For Britons living in Calcutta's European sector, auctions were essential for acquiring imported European items that granted a sense of gentility and Britishness abroad. Public sales in Calcutta provided Britons with goods that instilled the fantasy of living in a British geography in India. However, by the last quarter of the century, ‘sales by hammer’ throughout the colonial world carried association with corruption, cruelty, and orientalization in the metropolitan imagination. In Britain, textual and visual accounts circulated of Europeans transforming into debauched ‘nabobs’, of the horrors of American slave auctions, and of the British East India Company's use of public sales to defraud and abuse prominent Indians. For some metropolitan observers, sales by hammer were a deceitful means of seizing property and status from the traditional landed elite of India and Britain. British critics feared that colonial auction practices could become common in Britain and could lead to the upending of social hierarchization and the normalization of slavery in the metropolis.

An Inheritance that Cannot Be Stolen: Schooling, Kinship, and Personhood in Post-1945 Central Philippines

AbstractThis article seeks a deeper understanding of inheritance by examining how kinship and personhood propel, and are altered by, schooling. It foregrounds kinship's and personhood's transformative and historical dimensions with an eye to their complexity and unevenness. The post-1945 generation in the central Philippines considers schooling (edukasyon) as their inheritance from their parents, who had few or no educational credentials themselves. This view reflects edukasyon’s increased value after the war, how people both judge and emulate the old landed elite, and the ongoing salience and elaboration of hierarchical parent-child ties. Alongside this view, children are recognized as completing, redeeming, and compensating for their parents. Attainment of edukasyon is seen to require not only personal striving but also solidarity and sacrifices among siblings. Yet, edukasyon also fosters autonomy and at times severs kinship ties. Finally, as an inheritance, edukasyon both depends upon and generates inequality, with long-term intergenerational implications.

Challenging the landed elite in contemporary Pakistani politics

Since independence in 1947, highly politicised kinship practices have shaped the country from rural agricultural villages to the highest legislative and executive branches of government and the military. Ideal models of patrilineal affiliation have defined and guided patterns of factional loyalties. Although my earlier work has principally focused on village networks and politics, the same patterns of factional alliances can be seen at national levels to shed light on the activities of party politics. The mechanisms adopted by the traditional landed elite, far from being challenged, are integral to the strategic success of non-landed elites in securing the top, public, elected positions of power. So, rather than suggesting landed elites have become irrelevant, I argue the source of wealth is ultimately less relevant than the broader socio-economic shard class and familial interests of a minority elite bound together through marriage.

Fareeha Zafar. Canals, Colonies and Class: British Policy in the Punjab 1880- 1940. Lahore, Pakistan: Lahore School of Economics. 2017. xxii + 317 pages. Price not given.

Fareeha Zafar’s book Canals, Colonies and Class: British Policy in the Punjab 1880-1940 is essentially an edited reproduction of her PhD thesis, The Impact of Canal Construction on the Rural Structures of the Punjab: The Canal Colony Districts, 1880 To 1940. The thesis was completed about 35 years ago at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London (now SOAS, the University of London). She studies the British colonisation process in the Punjab and its effect on the local environment, the production patterns, and social relations, understanding that despite several similar studies on the region, no serious effort had been made to synthesise these issues the way she does in this book. However, in the form of a new book, the synthesis does not add much value as it reiterates the British colonisers’ well-known strategies, namely irrigation development as a tool to settle disarmed forces and nomads and, thereby, strengthening a class of local landed elite to maintain their power in the colonies, their revenue-seeking policies, indebtedness of the landed class and alike. Nevertheless, considering the timing of the original contribution, the book, if read together with the contributions such as Khuhro (1978/1999) and Cheesman (1997), provides a relatively rich description of geographers’ analyses of the British policies, their intentions, and their effects.

The Perversion of Land Reform by Landed Elites: Power, Inequality and Development in Colombia

Over two centuries, Colombia transferred vast quantities of land, equivalent to the entire UK landmass, mainly to landless peasants. And yet Colombia retains one of the highest concentrations of land ownership in the world. Why? We show that land reform’s effects are highly bimodal. Most of Colombia’s 1100+ municipalities lack a landed elite. Here, rural properties grew larger, land inequality fell, and development improved. But where land is concentrated in the hands of a rural elite, distributed land was diverted to bigger farms, resulting in fewer small and more large farms, greater land dispersion, and lower levels of development. We show that these effects – positive and negative – flow through political participation, competition, and policy-making. Landed elites use patron-client ties to distort local and national politics to their benefit. Land reform’s secondary effects, on the distribution of power, are more important than its primary effects on the distribution of land.

Ecclesiastical Divorce in the 19th Century: Implications and the Status of Women

Ecclesiastical Divorce in the 19th Century: Implications and the Status of Women Akhila Yechuri N ineteenth-century Mexico was an extremely Catholic society, and the common doctrine surrounding marital unions was that they were divine, and that those whom God united through marriage should not be parted. Divorces were rare, and only occurred in especially trying circumstances. I will be examining a divorce case filed on March 24th, 1839 in Mexico City. Dona Hilaria, the petitioner, was seeking a divorce from her husband, Felix Morales, insisting that “[t]his hellish [marriage] has become unbearable for me and I’m unable to carry on without risk to my safety.” 1 The only option available for women like Dona Hilaria, who were caught in abusive and loveless marriages, was to file for an ecclesiastical divorce, which was akin to legal separation. 2 In this paper, I will closely analyze Dona Hilaria’s petition to answer the following questions: what were the promises and drawbacks of ecclesiastical divorce, and what arguments did Dona Hilaria draw on to make her claims? Moreover, what does this petition tell us about the status of women in the early nineteenth century, just decades after Mexico’s Independence? Postcolonial Mexico was a time of great political instability. Mexico was still a young nation, and was facing inequities that it was not fully equipped to confront. The inequities were evident during the revolution and led to ideological tensions, as there were largely different agendas amongst the plebeian and elite rebels. Some indicate that the struggle for independence was less “a two-way struggle than a three-way conflict amongst the Mexican masses, the elite creole directorate... and the colonial regime.” 3 In the transition from colony to nation, the landed elite wanted to ensure their interests. Although politicians did proclaim large, sweeping reforms, much remained unchanged. Factional fighting amongst conservatives and liberals further impeded any social progress for women. Additionally, when creating a new legal code after independence, colonial laws were simply reviewed. This led to a large amount of written law that was “centuries old, [but] largely accepted in the 19th century.” 4 Many laws surrounding the legal rights of women depended on the woman’s purity, and characterized women according to their supposedly innate weakness Women were in many regards second-class citizens subject to the control of men. By virtue of their gender, women “relinquished sovereignty over most of [their] legal transactions, property, earnings, and even their domestic activities.” 5 They were not afforded autonomy or legal rights, and this ultimately left most women no choice but to comply with the wishes of the men in their lives. Dona Hilaria’s case occurred less than 20 years following independence. During this time, which saw tumultuous shifts in power, a newly conservative Santa Anna was in power. Social conservatives wanted to preserve Catholicism as the state religion and to maintain hierarchies from colonial times. Therefore, Dona Hilaria had to go through divorce while being scrutinized to archaic colonial laws. Marriage, like most Mexican societal institutions of the time, was patriarchal in nature. Men’s role was as providers. To accurately sum up power relations, one man stated, “it was the Pamela S. Murray, Women and Gender in Modern Latin America (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 50. Silvia M. Arrom, “Marital Relations and Divorce,” in The Women of Mexico City, 1790-1857(Stanford University Press, 1985), 208. Eric Van Young,Agrarian Rebellion and Defense of Community: Meaning and Collective Violence in Late Colonial and Independence-Era Mexico (Oxford University Press, 1993), 249. Arrom,”Legal Status”, 54. Ibid., 65.

Linkage between Rural Voters and Politicians: Effects on Rice Policies in the Philippines and Thailand

AbstractThis article explains how linkages between politicians and rural voters affected the design of agricultural policies, using rice in two countries as examples. In the Philippines, colonial history bolstered an oligarchy of landed elite politicians, whose power was restored after the dictatorship of Marcos ended in 1986. Their practice of patronage brought corruption that led to dwindling rice productivity and increasing import dependence while displacing the political necessity to offer price support to farmers. In Thailand, sociopolitical development was more centralized, with new electoral rules introduced in 1997 to weaken locally confined patronage arrangements. Mass parties competing on a policy platform were favoured instead, resulting in increasing, but eventually, excessive subsidies for rice farmers. Although voter–politician linkages resulted in different rice policies in the two countries, recent instability in the world rice market showed that strategies with greater sustainability considerations are needed in addressing domestic income disparities and global food insecurity.

Plantation: Modern-Vernacular Housing and Settlement in Ottoman Palestine, 1858-1918

The Palestinian vernacular is a key site for evaluating the messy dynamics between modern and vernacular architecture, suggesting a need for the re-conceptualization of the social and political implications of “vernacular” and its uses in historiography. This article explores the relationship between vernacular and modern dwelling environments by conducting close architectural analysis of certain key examples in Palestine following the Ottoman land modernization of 1858. The modernization of land ownership, cultivation, and registration produced a new built environment of wealth extraction and peasant dispossession that I identify here as “plantation.” Focusing inquiry on Acre and Jaffa’s plantation landscape, I examine rural mansions together with “back of the big house” worker dwellings and agricultural structures, which were all part and parcel of this landscape of extraction. I examine the architectural history of the Mazra’a and Hammed plantations and identify two housing forms as alterations of Palestine’s traditional-vernacular architecture: serf hut and landlord mansion. I show that plantation dwellings, created from the 1860s onwards, involved a change to construction methods and building materials found on-site or imported, and resulted in single-standing structures in campus settlement layout, where mud huts and multi-room mansions distinguished serfs from landlords. The plantation decomposition of the courtyard house typology produced a modern-vernacular built environment, calling into question the Manichean divide between “modern” and “vernacular” as two distinct and opposing frameworks. Pointing to the plantation as a modern vernacular—rather than aboriginal—typology, this article identifies the plantation as the materialization of the fragmentation of Palestinian society by modernity, a dynamic producing two opposing Palestinian national archetypes: a landed elite nationalism aiming to replace the Ottoman Empire, and a movement for land reform for dispossessed local peasants.

Unseeing Chinatown: Universal Zoning, Planning Abstraction and Space of Difference

AbstractThe article investigates the technical rationality behind Bangkok's recent land use zoning plans. It does so through the example of Chinatown. The plans, intended to promote urban sustainability, introduce zoning techniques such as (1) land use subcategorization to hierarchize urban districts, and (2) density zoning to encourage intensive development around transit stations. The case of Chinatown foregrounds the discussion in this article, which then, in turn, explores the two zoning techniques. I argue that both techniques are formulated through a functionalist rationality, and thus omit place‐specific conditions of land, such as local practices, histories and land tenure. Worse yet, the landed elite uses them to justify displacement and eviction. The article theorizes Chinatown as a space of difference, pointing to particularities that are unseen and thus at risk of being unmade by what is often passed off as technical expertise.

Plantation: Modern-Vernacular Housing and Settlement in Ottoman Palestine, 1858-1918

The Palestinian vernacular is a key site for evaluating the messy dynamics between modern and vernacular architecture, suggesting a need for the re-conceptualization of the social and political implications of “vernacular” and its uses in historiography. This article explores the relationship between vernacular and modern dwelling environments by conducting close architectural analysis of certain key examples in Palestine following the Ottoman land modernization of 1858. The modernization of land ownership, cultivation, and registration produced a new built environment of wealth extraction and peasant dispossession that I identify here as “plantation.” Focusing inquiry on Acre and Jaffa’s plantation landscape, I examine rural mansions together with “back of the big house” worker dwellings and agricultural structures, which were all part and parcel of this landscape of extraction. I examine the architectural history of the Mazra’a and Hammed plantations and identify two housing forms as alterations of Palestine’s traditional-vernacular architecture: serf hut and landlord mansion. I show that plantation dwellings, created from the 1860s onwards, involved a change to construction methods and building materials found on-site or imported, and resulted in single-standing structures in campus settlement layout, where mud huts and multi-room mansions distinguished serfs from landlords. The plantation decomposition of the courtyard house typology produced a modern-vernacular built environment, calling into question the Manichean divide between “modern” and “vernacular” as two distinct and opposing frameworks. Pointing to the plantation as a modern vernacular—rather than aboriginal—typology, this article identifies the plantation as the materialization of the fragmentation of Palestinian society by modernity, a dynamic producing two opposing Palestinian national archetypes: a landed elite nationalism aiming to replace the Ottoman Empire, and a movement for land reform for dispossessed local peasants.

Incomplete democracies in the Asia-Pacific: evidence from Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. Edited by Giovanna Maria Dora Dore, Jae H. Ku and Karl D. Jackson.

Democracy is an ongoing process that proceeds in fits and starts, and involves much more than elections or free speech. It is refreshing to find a book that assumes that democracies, particularly east Asian ones, are fraught with complexity, popular impatience and backsliding. Young democracies are particularly prone to poorly institutionalized norms and longing for the order of recently abandoned autocracies. As the book under review went to print, Thailand underwent its second coup d'état within a decade, and it is not clear when it will emerge from military rule. Based on extensive survey work by Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in four Asian countries (Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and South Korea), the volume's chapters give readers an unmatched, albeit slightly uneven, overview of the region's recent democratic progress. It is recommended to both Asia scholars and students of democratization. Giovanna Dore and Karl Jackson find surprising convergences in the four cases. Voting in elections is how most people in the four countries define democracy, and civil society groups tend to be ‘fluid, personal, and hierarchical rather than stable, ideological, and egalitarian’ (p. 3). Most people have not participated in party activities, and popular political views alternate between authoritarian and democratic. Populist or charismatic leaders have much appeal, and they can relatively easily overcome the ephemeral chaff of everyday politics. Likewise, elites can shape political events to follow a conventional democratic road. Accordingly, each of the four countries has trod a slightly different path: Korea as a fast-developing nation that quickly democratized; Indonesia as a stunning success story given its start-stop-start pattern of political development since the Suharto government stepped down; the Philippines as the oldest south-east Asian republic that, ironically, kept the colonial landed elite in power; and Thailand as a state oscillating between heavy-handed military regimes and feckless civilian rule.

Book Review: Ireland in the World Order: A History of Uneven Development, by Maurice Coakley

Maurice Coakley Ireland in the World Order: A History of Uneven Development, Pluto Press: London, 2012; 256 pp: 0745331254, 20 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Maurice Coakley presents an ambitious 'world system' interpretation of Irish history from the 12th century onwards. The central thesis of the book is that Ireland's underdevelopment can only be understood through a comparative historical framework, and that the history of uneven development illuminates why some countries progress and others decline. The work itself, however, fails to sustain the authors claim (p. vii) to 'present an alternative' to 'the dominant interpretation of Irish history'. Despite this shortcoming, the use of a 'world system' perspective is welcome, as is the comparative approach, and the author is strong when on the terrain of Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson. However, Coakley takes an eclectic approach to theory and history. This is reflected by the number of comparisons utilised here: there is seemingly no geographic or theoretical similarity that cannot be employed to prove his thesis. Ultimately, the book posits a number of interesting questions, but the most innovative thesis--that 'literisation', or the spread of literacy, is a valid indicator of market, commercial and, eventually, industrial development--remains unproven. Due to the eclectic approach, and significant omissions from the relevant historiography examined, this book can only be recommended to the specialist reader, rather than a general audience. Ireland in the World Order begins with Coakley polemically taking aim at Irish professional historians. They (p. vii) are accused of avoiding analysis of the British--Irish structural relationship as a point of 'methodological principle'. It is never explained, however, who these historians are, what their writings consist of, nor why their understanding of history may have contributed to some form of 'Stockholm syndrome' amongst the Irish intellectual and political elite (p. viii). The Introduction (pp. 1-5) offers a whirlwind theoretical tour through the Scottish Enlightenment, Marx, Gramsci, modernisation theory, Wallerstein, Arrighi and Brenner. Coakley then proceeds to set up the theoretical and historical problem when he states that Ireland in the 19th-century (p. 5), due to its proximate nature to the home of the new modern world order, 'came to display all the classic features of underdevelopment: immiseration, overpopulation, famine, revolt'. This problematic sets the stage for Coakley's central research question (pp. 1,5): why did Ireland develop 'unevenly', and what legacy has it left to the present? Chapter 1 (pp. 6-80) takes us from medieval Ireland, the Anglo-Norman invasion, the demographic crisis of the 14th century, the Reformation and state formation in the 16th-century through to the 1640s. Chapter 2 (pp. 81-136) essentially covers a 'long eighteenth century' perspective, and again, the reader is offered a whirlwind tour through the complex tale of the Anglo-Irish landed elite, agrarian resistance movements from the early 1760s onwards, the 'Patriots', the United Irishmen, the Famine, and the Land League up to the end of the 19th century. Chapter 3 (pp. 137-88) makes use of a 'long twentieth century' perspective, in which Coakley delineates the changing position of Ireland (north and south from 1922 onwards) in the global capitalist order. The final chapter (pp. 189-211) concludes by retracing the analysis and finishing with a diagnosis of the present ills of Irish society. Here, Coakley posits an interesting thesis about the correlation between literacy, commercialisation, law and, ultimately, industrialisation in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland; but by the end of the book, the claim remains unproven. More worryingly, there are a number of sins of omission in the book, and the presentation is not to the standard it is legitimate to expect of a book retailing at 19. …

The Philippines. Global Filipinos: Migrants' lives in the virtual village By Deirdre McKay Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Pp. 247. Notes, Bibliography, Index.

The Philippines Global Filipinos: Migrants' lives in the virtual village By DEIRDRE MCKAY Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Pp. 247. Notes, Bibliography, Index. In the early twenty-first century, Filipino migrants working overseas comprised the third-largest group of migrant labourers in the world. This global phenomenon has impacted the lives and livelihoods of Filipinos across the Philippine archipelago including indigenous villagers in rural areas in the northern Philippines. How do villagers, both those who migrate to work overseas and those who stay behind, view and interpret migration? How do villagers feel and think about themselves in the world? In Global Filipinos, Deirdre McKay tackles these questions in a multi-sited ethnographic case study of the lives of the villagers of Haliap in Ifugao province, many of whom migrate across the Philippines and overseas. Diverging from previous ethnographic studies of Filipino international migration that have focused on the Philippine government's labour export programme and institutions like the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, McKay persuasively argues for the enduring significance of villagers' relationships and their desires for economic security and dignity as central features of late twentieth and early twenty-first century international labour migration. McKay's fieldwork took place in the 1990s and 2000s, a period of dramatic change in the municipality of Asipulo, where Haliap is located. By the end of the 1990s, Haliap respondents characterised those villages with many workers abroad as 'developed' and 'progressive' places. Progress was made visible by patterns of consumption --most notably new houses outfitted with modern appliances, and specific brands of clothing, such as Merrell shoes--enabled by the remittances sent by workers overseas. It also involved the increasing use of specific technologies such as cell phones, which resulted in the development of two cellular networks in Asipulo by 2002. Perhaps the most dramatic change was that overseas employment created a new category of elite persons in Haliap. Those villagers who had worked overseas became Haliap's 'new kadangyans', a term that referred to the old landed elite. While the chronological focus of the book is the late twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries, McKay emphasises that migration is not a new phenomenon for Haliap villagers. 'Villagers led mobile lives, even before overseas migration really took off (p. 4). They engaged in migration within the region to cope with a local shortage of irrigated paddy fields. Parental migration was a common practice that enabled their eldest children to inherit the family's most fertile fields. However, by the late twentieth century, overseas migration offered new and exciting opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. Earnings abroad transformed some Haliap villagers into a new class of persons who built modern homes, bought new cars, and could afford professional education for their children. These changes also wrought several downsides: villagers' perceptions of the limitless wealth of overseas workers; overseas workers' excessive borrowing that fuelled these misperceptions; and the resultant misunderstandings that created tensions among family and neighbours. …

The Reputation of William Cullen (1710 – 1790): Family, Politics, and the Biography of an ‘Ornate Physician’

Recent work by medical historians has demonstrated how John Thomson and his sons wrote their biography of William Cullen in the light of nineteenth-century medical concerns, though that biography remained silent on Cullen's personal life. A deliberate decision was made by John Thomson and the Cullen family to obscure the painful aftermath of Cullen's death. In spite of his distinction and his substantial income from books, teaching, and consultations, Cullen died virtually bankrupt, leaving his daughters without financial support. In March 1791, a case was brought in the Court of Session against William Cullen's eldest son, Robert by the rest of the family, for the return of money due by him to their father's estate, as a result of debts held jointly. The case was finally unravelled, and William Cullen's debts paid, only after Robert's death in 1810. These financial conflicts were accompanied by fundamental social and political differences between the two sides of the family. This history reveals different aspects of William Cullen's own later years. On the one hand, he was ambitious to join a landed elite whose patronage he valued and sought for his family, and within whose polite lifestyle a culture of debt was accepted. Yet he also respected professionalism, domesticity and frugality. Future biographies of this major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment will require the integration of his personal, social and political context with his medical ideas and achievements.

Man's estate: landed gentry masculinities, c.1660-c.1900

Introduction: The Landed Elite and Male Gender Identities over the Longue Duree 1. The World of Learning: Schooling and Training Academies 2. Entering into the World: University and Apprenticeships 3. Seeing the World: The Grand Tour and Other Travels 4. Settled in the World: Marriage, Fatherhood, and the Reproduction of Male Identities Conclusion: Normative Reproduction and Change over Time Bibliography

Law and the Brontës by Ian Ward (review)

Reviewed by: Law and the Brontës by Ian Ward Kellie Holzer (bio) Law and the Brontës by Ian Ward; pp. 195. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. $76.50 cloth. Novels by the Brontë sisters are not typically considered standard texts in the forty-year-old interdisciplinary field of law and literature. Ian Ward’s new book corrects this oversight. Jurisprudence, he argues, can be discerned “below the surface” of much of the Brontë oeuvre (4). Even though they do not explicitly engage with law, novels by the Brontës function as important supplements to the project of feminist jurisprudence committed to recovering female voices silenced by the patriarchal legal system. [End Page 237] More specifically, Ward observes, the Brontës’ novels provide an opportunity to examine relations between gender and the law, inviting readers to exercise judgment on matters of concern to mid-Victorian women, such as spousal abuse, child custody and the status of single mothers, divorce and matrimonial property law, illegitimacy, the incarceration of certified lunatics, and even the regulation of pornography. In the Brontës’ novels, formal law is ever elusive, and that is another reason these texts are so valuable for feminist legal history and theory. Law remains subterranean in these novels because it is virtually absent from the lives of people marginalized in, or excluded from, Victorian society: the insane, the simple-minded, the illegitimate, criminals, foreigners, and women. According to Ward, law is an “ordinary failure” for these people (140). Ward’s background as a legal scholar contributes considerably to one of the book’s central claims: that Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall testify to the ways in which law facilitated patriarchal dominance in the mid-Victorian era. For instance, when discussing Helen Huntingdon’s circumstances in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Ward cites precedent-setting legal cases to illustrate the ways that English law consistently failed women. English law did not protect wives from marital cruelty (Evans v. Evans, 1790; Dysart v. Dysart, 1847), nor did it assist such women in leaving abusive spouses (even after the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, as Ward points out). And finally, with regard to child custody, the law showed marked preference for fathers (Eyre v. Countess of Shaftesbury, 1722; De Manneville v. De Manneville, 1804; and several others). Like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Wuthering Heights is concerned with the limits of law and justice. Ward notes that Emily’s novel revolves around the question of Heathcliff’s origins and “the brutal marginalization of a category of persons, which was constructed by social prejudice and confirmed by legal prescription” (52). This chapter surveys legal provisions for bastardy, revisiting the Poor Laws of 1733, 1834, and 1844 to substantiate its claim that it is his legal dispossession due to illegitimacy that prompts Heathcliff’s violent revenge. Following a complex explanation of how Heathcliff gains control over the Linton and Earnshaw estates, Ward concludes that English property law, “written to help men like Heathcliff consolidate estates,” abets his criminal behaviour (61). In his discussion of Jane Eyre, Ward focuses on the law’s failure to adequately address non-criminal lunacy as it is displayed in Rochester’s extra-legal solution to incarcerate his mad spouse in the attic. The inefficacy of the law vis-à-vis the insane has recently been covered in Christine Krueger’s Reading for the Law (2010) in an argument about the gendering of legal agency in the development of equal treatment procedures. Ward’s emphasis differs, in that he sees the catastrophic consequences of Bertha’s incarceration as Charlotte’s intervention into ongoing debates about the efficacy of home-confinement of insane relatives. Neither common law nor civil jurisdiction rescues Bertha; courts were historically reluctant to intervene in cases of asylum brutality and wrongful [End Page 238] confinement, and they refused to intervene in cases of domestic abuse of wives certified insane. In the final two chapters, Ward takes up Shirley and Villette, respectively. Shirley, he argues, is imbued with a Burkean sense of the proper governance of a familial national polity through paternalistic charity, and an indictment of failed magistracies—those of the local landed elite...

Drainage on the Grand Prairie: the birth of a hydraulic society on the Midwestern frontier

The Grand Prairie of east central Illinois was notorious for a marshy environment that prevented dense agricultural settlement until late in the nineteenth century. While recent historical–geographical scholarship has focused on innovations in drainage technology, drainage-related laws and institutions, and the ecological impacts of wetland reclamation, it has largely failed to account for the persistence of agrarian structure, and its key component, land tenure, on the Grand Prairie. Late-nineteenth-century reclamation efforts were not quite so transformative as previously believed. The same landed elite that dominated in the pre-drainage era quickly emerged atop a system of public drainage that held the key to the region’s economic future. In this paper, we extend Karl Wittfogel and Donald Worster’s theorizations about ‘hydraulic civilizations’ from the realm of irrigation to that of drainage. While drainage was indeed important in shaping the history of east central Illinois, we argue that a distinctive social order in east central Illinois emerged from, and was shaped by, an older agrarian structure that had developed in response to marshy, unpredictable conditions before drainage began in the late 1800s. The beneficiaries of the old order did not yield power easily, and instead skillfully capitalized on the new opportunities presented by drainage enterprises, to create a ‘hydraulic society’ on the prairie. The new order continued to rely on the exploitation of tenant farmers even as the landscape itself was transformed into the intensely managed and highly productive Corn Belt of today.