Dr James Bullock

Head of Population and Conservation Ecology
NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
CEH Dorset
Winfrith Technology Centre
Dorchester
Dorset
DT2 8ZD
UK

Telephone (Direct): +44 (0) 1305 213591
Telephone (Switchboard): +44 (0) 1305 213500
Mobile: +44 (0) 7801 639496
Facsimile: +44 (0) 1305 213600
Email: [log in to unmask]


>>> B Linsley <[log in to unmask]> 16/05/06 20:33 >>>
Rethinking the rural: land and the nation in the 1920s and 1930s

An Interwar Rural History Research Group International Conference

Call for papers 

The 1920s and 1930s were a key period in the emergence of new relationships 
between land and the nation. The agricultural depression – one of the first 
truly global economic events – provoked different reactions in different 
countries, but everywhere it influenced shifts in attitudes towards the 
rural sector, and in the place of the countryside within national 
economies. Alongside the economic travails of farming in many countries, 
this was also a period of interesting reconfigurations in the relationship 
between landscape and national identity, and reformulations of the meanings 
and significance attached to folk culture and rural society. New demands on 
land use for resources such as building land, water, wood and minerals, 
radically altered agricultural landscapes in the interests of 
urbanisation/suburbanisation, industrialisation, and 
transport/communications infrastructure, pressures which led to increasing 
state involvement in rural life and often to a sense of the countryside as 
something under threat from modernity. 

Over the past five years, the Interwar Rural History Research Group, an 
informal interdisciplinary group of scholars in the UK, has focused 
attention on the history of a period which had been relatively neglected by 
rural historians. Conferences organised by the IRHRG in 2002 and 2004 
provided opportunities to question some of the prevailing assumptions about 
the interwar years: about the experience of agricultural depression and 
about the problems faced by rural communities and the rural environment 
itself. The 2004 conference encouraged a comparative element to the 
discussion, looking beyond a close focus on the history of rural England. 
The current call for papers hopes to open up this discussion further in the 
context of an international conference, exploring the international 
dimensions to many of these domestic experiences and offering a forum to 
compare and contrast particular national histories. Political ideologies 
during this period often drew explicit connections between the nation and 
the land. The conference will pose the question of whether histories of the 
rural nation must be bound by national peculiarity, or whether it is 
possible to establish new research agendas based on comparative study and 
international perspectives.

The range of issues embraced by 'land and the nation' goes to the heart of 
many of the central aspects of economics, politics and culture in the 1920s 
and 1930s.  Contributors are encouraged to put forward proposals that 
reflect their own research interests in this area, and which engage with 
the broad themes of the conference. Amongst the questions that the 
conference is likely to address are:
• Is it adequate to characterise the 1920s and 1930s as an era of 
agricultural depression? What were the actual experiences? How were 
particular sectors / particular countries able to buck the global trends?
• What was the impact of, and what influenced literary and visual 
representations of the countryside in the period? What role did they play, 
for example, in establishing agricultural depression as a dominant trope? 
• How important were rural landscapes within national identities and 
political rhetorics? Did such politicised images have any connection to 
the 'real' countryside?
• How did contrasting experiences, memories and commemoration of the 
First World War affect the place of landscape within the national psyche?
• How varied were notions of what constituted the rural idyll? What 
influenced the different forms which this might take (from the tame, 
settled landscape, to the wilderness and the sublime)? How far, and how 
effectively were these ideals challenged?
• How effective were political organisations in promoting the 
interests of rural people? How distinctive was politics in the country from 
in the town?
• How did governments in different countries react to falling world 
food prices? What different forms did government intervention take, and how 
successful was that intervention? 
• What accounts for the varying success with which agriculture and 
the rural nation were mobilised as political issues in different countries?
• How did different countries experience the growth of domestic 
tourism and the development of the countryside as a pleasure ground for the 
town?
• How did preservationist and environmentalist movements develop? 
Were these as non-political as they often claimed to be? Were such 
movements necessarily nostalgic?

The  conference will be held at Royal Holloway, University of London, 
Egham, UK, from 4 – 6 January, 2007.  It is sponsored by the British 
Agricultural History Society. Keynote speakers include Dr Jan Bieleman 
(University of Wageningen), Professor David Danbom (North Dakota State 
University), Professor Kate Darian-Smith (University of Melbourne) and 
Professor Alun Howkins (University of Sussex)

Potential contributors are asked to send an abstract of c.300 words to 
[log in to unmask] by 1 June 2006.

See also our website at http://www.irhrg.org.uk

Dr Caitlin Adams, Witan Hall college, Reading
Dr Paul Brassley, University of Plymouth
Dr Jeremy Burchardt, University of Reading
Dr Keith Grieves, Kingston University
Dr Clare Griffiths, University of Sheffield
Dr Anne Meredith
Professor Keith Snell, University of Leicester
Dr Lynne Thompson
Professor Mick Wallis, University of Leeds

* Apologies for cross-posting *


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