Preface
The following short text is a petition to the heir to the Duchy of Sutherland, Lord Stafford. It was sent by a young boy with tuberculosis living in extreme poverty with his disabled father in Brora, on the far Northeast coast of Scotland.
Noble Sir I am writing your lordship to inform you of my condition I have nobody to look after me my sister went away before your letter came they were saying your lordship was to have me sent away I am writing your lordship to have pity on a poor helpless lad like me who can not do anything to help himself in the goodness of his heart send me to a sanatorium and God would guide you in your work in the future. I humbly beg pardon for this letter I do hope your lordship will send me away soon.Footnote 1
This child’s petition communicates the grinding nature of rural poverty and the self-abasement that seeking charitable aid can involve. It was written in 1910, but it might have been written in 1810 or 1710, and if for a moment, we picture Lord Stafford as a twenty-first-century landlord or NHS gatekeeper, this plea for assistance might have been penned much more recently. Indeed, the 2020 Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation reveals contemporary Brora as amongst the 20% most deprived areas in Scotland, a place riven with inequalities of health and wealth where poorer families are reliant on charitable relief to get by. Rural Britain is inscribed with successive forms of exploitation. That choice many rural residents continue to be forced to make between heating or eating is a living legacy of much longer histories of exploitation, dispossession and violence.Footnote 2
Introduction: Rural inequalities do not rest in the past
This essay originated in a series of conversations between two academic historians (Julie-Marie Strange and Annie Tindley), which started from curiosity about each other’s research: what, if anything, did Strange, an historian of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century working class, and Tindley, a historian of the development and management of landed estates in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, have in common? Once they started to talk, they found it bizarre that their research worlds had been so hermetically sealed from each other. They were both preoccupied by questions of class and both perplexed by blind spots in their respective fields. Strange had begun a Leverhulme-funded project asking where class had gone in the scholarship of nineteenth-century Britain and why historians’ conceptions of class are so grounded in homogeneously white, heterosexual male, urban and industrial contexts.Footnote 3 Tindley had begun working through the histories and contemporary legacies of neo/techno-feudalism, neo-paternalism and how landed power was reinscribing itself into the rural context. What would happen, they wondered, if they began to work together to think more broadly about, first, what histories of class look like in a rural context and, secondly, whether working in a more holistic way, across their fields, might generate new historical perspectives on the shape, longevity, and persistence of rural inequalities in Britain.
To explore these questions further, Strange and Tindley convened two workshops. The first was with humanities academics working on rural poverty and rural modernity across diverse periods and places across Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) and Ireland. The second was with representatives from rural communities (including village halls, social enterprises, community welfare organisations, and food banks) and heritage organisations (archives, landscape and estate conservation) in the Northeast of England.Footnote 4 Listening to the conversations that unfolded in these workshops, what was striking is the extent to which rural communities continue to grapple with challenges similar to those faced two hundred years ago: a paucity of decent, affordable housing; outmigration and depopulation; low-paid, exploitative work and underemployment; limited or curtailed access to health, welfare and social care; and affordable fuel, food, transport and other life-preserving infrastructures and resources. In short, many of the features of contemporary rural inequalities described by participants resonated profoundly with the social conditions endured by rural working classes in previous eras.
There is a long-standing tradition of statistical collection around the ‘rural condition’, first established in the late eighteenth century, that continues today.Footnote 5 Yet, a strong point of consensus across these workshops is that while plenty of macro-level data on rural inequalities (past and present) exists, there is too little research evidence on the granularity and diversity of lived experiences of rurality (past or present). Indeed, participants discussed their frustration with top-down ‘data-driven’ approaches and argued that the work of practitioners in recording and tracking the emotional, cultural, and social consequences of rural inequalities was sidestepped by policymakers. Workshop participants talked about the ways in which rural inequalities are framed by government (local and national) as ‘too difficult to solve’ and how experiences of hardship are often dismissed as ‘a lifestyle choice’. In short, the problems collectively identified in these two workshops centred on the limits of big data and the ways archive-based histories and social science methods often fail to capture either the granularity of rural experience in place or address how historic rural inequalities in place shape present social conditions.
Undoubtedly, there is a well-established scholarship on the history of rural inequalities in Britain from the medieval to the present, with familiar themes of feudalism, enclosure, clearances, famine, vagabondage, poverty, the poor law, and depopulation.Footnote 6 As this article is not a literature review, what follows is indicative rather than comprehensive, as we are primarily focused on outlining future directions. While methods for recovering the histories of those ‘dispossessed of agency and deprived of an historical voice’ have become increasingly ‘sophisticated and interdisciplinary’, most histories of the rural sit within an established framework of national legislation, regional institutional and welfare structures, and centre concepts like paternalism or ‘the family’.Footnote 7 It is only relatively recently that historians of rural Britain have begun to think more critically about colonialism, and while interdisciplinary interest in ‘rural modernity’ is growing, this research has not permeated historical research questions.Footnote 8 At the same time, social-scientific research on contemporary rural inequalities often takes place in an ‘ahistorical vacuum’. While in social policy contexts, rural inequalities remain stubbornly invisible or misrepresented, and initiatives ostensibly aimed at ‘levelling up’ and/or alleviating inequalities of wealth and health remain overwhelmingly orientated towards urban settings.Footnote 9 The central question that emerged from these two workshops is what methods we might use to produce more granular, diverse, place-based histories of the rural that surface the spectrum of violences and injustices that take place around resource and rights distributions.Footnote 10 To address this question, Strange and Tindley ran a third and pivotal workshop with academics from different disciplines and practitioners, including poets, creative arts practitioners, and a drystone waller, that focused on methods for historicising rural inequalities in or across Britain in ways that might produce more experientially grounded knowledge about rural lives.
What follows is a series of three problems and methodological provocations that emerged from this final workshop. In the spirit of collaboration, this essay ranges across disciplines, genres, voices, and perspectives, as it scopes creative and collaborative methods that might disrupt the assumptions that underpin our understandings of the rural past, uncover the ‘slow violence’ of rural inequalities in place, and foreground the multivarious ways in which histories of inequality have shaped and continue to shape unequal access to resources in the present.Footnote 11 This generates a kind of devastation which occurs ‘gradually and out of sight’ and is both incremental and accretive, ecological and social.Footnote 12 Nixon also frames slow violence as an official landscape, driven by short-termism and extractive thinking, superimposed onto a vernacular, affective landscape, creating refugees in place and time.Footnote 13 These problems and provocations are not intended as definitive or exhaustive but reflect an effort to think about how we might undertake historically focused research on rural inequalities in more interdisciplinary and inclusive ways. To these ends, we have resisted the urge to ‘tidy up’ the essay too much, embracing a messier collaborative way of thinking and writing about history, inequalities and the rural: an undisciplined history. With eight colleagues from different disciplinary backgrounds contributing, this article has been both fruitful and challenging. We do not necessarily agree on everything, and we do not expect our readers will either. The instinct can be to feel defensive and engage, without meaning to, in zero-sum thinking. But our essay is the challenge of engaging in dialogue across difference: in time, experience, concepts, method, and perspective. Such dialogue is necessary if we are to move research forward in productive and collaborative ways.
Problem 1: The missing class analysis of Rural Britain
Much of the history of rural Britain has been shaped by an implicit – and sometimes explicit – bifurcation between urban, peri-urban and rural, industrial and agricultural, modern and premodern, even where scholars recognise that the threshold between these spaces or concepts was and remains fluid.Footnote 14 Most obviously, the urban-centred focus in histories of class is largely taken for granted. Indeed, almost everything we understand about structural inequalities of class derives from urban perspectives. To be sure, there is an established scholarship on rural protest and methodism, often a proxy for ‘class’, in the early to mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 15 These works, contributed largely by (white, male) left-wing historians, emerged from a particular moment in the genealogy of social history that sought to claim the dignity and rights of the rural worker and make explicit the tyranny of enclosure.Footnote 16 Scholarship on rural experiences of poverty, displacement and exploitation tended to situate rural class struggles as a prelude to industrialisation or measure these conflicts against the assumed norms of the urban as the locus for modern class formation, even while raising queries about the usefulness of ‘class’ as a category of analysis in a rural context characterised by coerced deference, relative isolation and the vulnerability of workers, and persistent patterns of paternalism.Footnote 17 These works were landmark texts, and, while acknowledging their importance as such, it is also vital to note that they were very much of their time and place. ‘Class’ as a category has not remained static, while historians such as Dipesh Chakrabarty long ago highlighted the limits of British models of social history.Footnote 18 The profile of those doing the research has expanded to include more females and those who grew up working class, although, as we note below, there remain notable absences of representation.Footnote 19 In the context of ongoing exclusions, then, there is reason to query the constant return to landmark texts, to revisit whether and how ‘class’ remains a useful category of analysis for thinking about multiple inequalities, and to develop intersectional analyses in meaningful ways.Footnote 20
In the methods workshop, Strange, Tindley and Imogen Tyler, working broadly at the interface of sociology and history, were perplexed by the absence of the rural in histories of social class and the limits of the ‘classic’ social history paradigm when methods, approaches and understanding of the manifold exclusions from the archive (and academy) have developed so much since. There is a twofold perpetuation danger. First, that we remain bound by the priorities of scholars working mostly in the 1980s or before. This is not to dismiss the importance of those scholars’ work but to recognise that they worked with multiple blindspots (deliberate or otherwise), specific methodologies and manuscript archives, and within particular political contexts.Footnote 21 Secondly and more subtly, there is a danger of unthinkingly perpetuating Friedrich Engels’s unhelpful 1840s characterisation of village labourers’ ‘idyllic simplicity’ and deference that rendered them ‘incapable of self-representation, incapable of political consciousness, incapable of protest’; an ‘unthinking’ and even ‘non-human’ precursor to the historical ‘drama[s] of class formation’.Footnote 22 When the rural working class does figure, it is too often as a foil/other to the homogenously white urban male worker. Feminist historians have drawn attention to the ways in which histories of the British working class foreground urban male workers, marginalising the working lives of women (and children), whether labouring in paid and unpaid capacities within private homes, factories or fields.Footnote 23 The exclusion of the rural working classes, men, women and children as historical actors underscores why research on rural inequalities ‘requires a willingness to subject the very idea of the working class to historical scrutiny’.Footnote 24 It is also a reminder, as Dante Philp Matthew argues in a recent account of the history of farmworkers’ struggles, that the lives of rural workers still remain largely hidden.Footnote 25
The absence of a class-focused analysis of rural inequalities is arguably a barrier to understanding how social hierarchies and attendant forms of injustice have shaped lived experiences of rurality.Footnote 26 If the changing constitution of class-based inequalities in rural settings has been broadly overlooked, then inequalities of gender, race and ethnicity, disability, sexuality and religion as they manifest in rural contexts are even more neglected.Footnote 27 These gaps in understanding continue to have material consequences in the present. Rural communities typically receive proportionally fewer resources, social policy initiatives overlook rural constituencies, and the visibility of urban need (often taken as self-evident) too often eclipses the demands of people and places perceived as peripheral.
Twenty years ago, Paul Milbourne argued for more research ‘concerned with the productions, representations, materialities and experiences’ of poverty, welfare and social exclusion in rural Britain.Footnote 28 Yet the ‘deep rooted, widely shared, and still powerful discourses of an idyllic and unchanging countryside’ continue to feed silence around the realities of rural hardship and discrimination.Footnote 29 Gaps and silences in our understanding of working-class rural lives have, if anything, accelerated in the past twenty years with the burgeoning and wildly popular nature writing genre.Footnote 30 Entangled with contemporary policy debates around nature restoration and re-wilding, new ‘pastoral imaginaries’ often swamp the voices, experiences and perspectives of working-class rural residents, whose concerns about depopulation, poverty, deteriorating service and infrastructure provisions are marginalised within (historically familiar) storylines in which the rural appears as ‘wild’ and empty of people.Footnote 31
The absence of a class analysis of rural Britain is also apparent at the other extreme of the socio-economic spectrum, with limited research on wealth inequalities and its rural impacts (including land hoarding and carbon banking practices), pressing social, political and cultural problems.Footnote 32 The landed estate with its presumption of heteronormative lineage has also long occupied a pivotal position in conceptions of the rural, from its function as a metonym for wealth, feudalism and deference to its work as a symbol of stability (a civilised nexus in a rude/primitive space; the stubborn persistence of wealth inequalities) or decline (the fall of the country house and, supposedly, their owners).Footnote 33 These binaries play out in popular media, cultural fantasy and social policy.
The Covid-19 pandemic briefly brought rural poverty into sharper relief, even whilst it was accompanied by a new wave of rural gentrification as middle- and upper-class metropolitans fled towns and cities to take up residence in the countryside. The rush of public commentary which accompanied pandemic rural in-migration underscored the ways in which the rural has also been depicted as a healing space, a theme since at least the nineteenth century when charities viewed rural holidays as a remedy for urban child poverty and more recently manifest in (overwhelmingly female-authored) memoirs of nature and rurality as spaces of emotional and physical recovery.Footnote 34 This healing thematic is in tension with the material impacts of Brexit on agricultural economies and the ongoing post-pandemic ‘cost of living’ crisis that continues to cut deeply in rural communities where living costs are already significantly higher.Footnote 35
Standard accounts of the making and continual remaking of the British working class are not only urban but distinctly nationalist, masking the wider context of British colonialism within which a new capitalist society unfolded within the British Isles. As the British Empire collapsed in the mid-twentieth century, representations of the countryside as an unchanging arcadia were harnessed to political and cultural propaganda that sought to tell a new nativist nationalist story about Britain, about ‘British people’, and about ‘the British way of life’ that diminished and/or omitted the peoples and places of Empire. As Imogen Tyler has argued, the ‘timeless’ and ‘unchanging’ English rural village with its imagined bucolic hierarchy of homogeneously white and mostly Protestant aristocratic gentry landowners, middle-class vicars, retired professionals, well-to-do farmers, shopkeepers, agricultural labourers and domestic servants was a central imaginary resource in the post-colonial reconstitution of Britain as an Island nation state.Footnote 36 In the 1980s, the Thatcherite rural heritage boom marketed the English countryside and ‘its architectural icons – churches, abbeys, villages, cottages and manor homes’ to metropolitan middle classes as spaces of refuge from the race-class conflict of multi-ethnic urban towns and cities.Footnote 37 Uncoupling the ‘countryside’ (evocative in specific ways, distinct from the ‘rural’) from the national, whether British or English or Welsh and so on, uncouples it from more recent trends too. By the 2010s, the gentrification of the countryside had been accompanied by a massive accumulation of land by increasingly global corporate interests, and as small, independent farms struggled to break even, a consolidation of farms by remote landlords.Footnote 38
A changing repertoire of ‘happy, healthy and problem-free images of rural life safely nestling within both a close social community and a contiguous natural environment’ have not only been harnessed by the political right but are ever-present in left politics, where the rural serves as a site of phantasmic fantasies of pre-capitalist, co-operative and solidaristic forms of social organisation.Footnote 39 As Neil Chakraborti and Jon Garland argue, these ‘representations of rurality have been allowed to dominate popular discourse unchallenged by critical social scientific enquiry.’Footnote 40 Even the emergence of animal and environmental histories, finely tuned to the importance of the colonial in shaping the natural world, tends to overlook class as a category of analysis.Footnote 41 Environmental history concerns have focused on methodological innovation and the breaking down of traditional periodisation, but policy debates remain as impervious to their insights as those surrounding inequalities.Footnote 42 Rural modernity studies offer different perspectives again, with excellent examples of how by grounding analysis in specific places and times, the granular and experiential can be maintained, while they are often flattened out and generalised in the policy context. Developing literature around neo/techno-feudalism and its rural and environmental impacts can also help conceptually reframe class and its expressions in contemporary Britain.Footnote 43 Might more collaborative place-based histories of the rural challenge the silence around working-class experiences of rurality?Footnote 44
Provocation 1: Dig where you stand: Challenging archival injustice by expanding collaboration
In the 1970s, the Labour movement in Sweden encouraged working-class people to undertake historical research in their workplaces (or former workplaces). Combining both ‘histories from below’ and oral history approaches, the ‘Dig Where you Stand’ movement was grounded in a political commitment to the democratisation of knowledge production and in a belief that the critical recovery of ‘historically excluded and devalued histories’ of labour was a constituent element of social change. Sven Lindqvist’s Gräv där du star [Dig Where You Stand] (1978) served as both a manifesto and a toolkit for the movement. As Andrew Flinn and Astrid Von Rosen detail in their rich introduction to the first English translation of Dig Where you Stand (2023), it is estimated that more than ten thousand ‘Dig Where You Stand’ study groups were established in Nordic countries: ‘By the late 1970s it seems […] ‘everyone was digging’ for their history’.Footnote 45
Back in Britain, Raphael Samuel was arguing in ‘Local and Oral History’ (1976) for the importance of ‘living testimonies’ in place-based historical research.Footnote 46 Less radical than Lindqvist, Samuel was not proposing that working-class people take the place of professional historians and become agents and writers of their own (labour) histories, but he argued for collaborative approaches that would allow for an exploration of class relations ‘at the point of production rather than by their distant echo’.Footnote 47 In particular, he made a case for the use of ‘oral evidence’ in historical research and its potential to ‘redefine what local history can be about’.Footnote 48 Foregrounding ‘the real life experience of people themselves, both domestically and at work’, he stated, would enable historians to navigate ‘the silences and deficiency’ of official documents and written records – allowing ‘the dead to speak to the living and the living to the dead’.Footnote 49 What is also striking, when reading Lindqvist’s and Samuel’s contributions fifty years on, is their nuanced place-based understandings of class as a diverse, dynamic, and changing social formation and their commitment to the possibilities of history as a reparative practice when guided by under-voiced communities. While oral history proliferated in the 1980s and after, bringing working-class and women’s histories into view (‘from below’), a division emerged between local community initiatives and academic projects.Footnote 50 This was in spite of the pioneering and vital work undertaken by some universities via their extramural and continuing education departments.Footnote 51 When reflecting on future directions for historically informed research on rural inequalities, the Dig Where You Stand movement and Samuel’s encouragement for place-based histories anchored in ‘living’ testimonies present a model for forms of participative research on rural inequalities.
The Dig Where You Stand approach has taken root in urban locations. In Sheffield, for example, a ‘Dig Where you Stand’ project led by archivists, practitioners and community researchers, is self-described as an ‘archival justice movement’. This project has placed emphasis on race-class histories in the twentieth century, addressing and challenging mainstream narratives about the form and impact of migration into Britain.Footnote 52 The Sheffield project was inspired by Sadiya Hartman’s work with ‘critical fabulation’. Hartman demonstrates the power of using creative approaches to address the marginalisation, distortion and erasure of Black and other people of colour in the archives. She highlights the responsibilities and limitations of doing this work, giving voice to the pain of never being able to fully reconcile the past.Footnote 53
The MayDay Rooms archive, based in London, collects material on ‘social struggles, radical art and acts of resistance from the 1960s to the present’ on the understanding that social change is most effective when ‘marginalised and oppressed groups get to know – and tell – their own histories ‘from below’’. Here, archive creation is a practice that ‘challenge[s] the widespread assault on collective memory’ and makes visible the ‘counter narratives of historical inevitability and political pessimism with living proof that many struggles continue’.Footnote 54 The approach offers the possibility, too, for much greater engagement with the overwhelmingly invisible minority experiences of race and ethnicity in contemporary rural communities where, for instance, issues of loneliness, language extraction and home sickness are typically amplified.Footnote 55 Rather than seeking to impose categories onto communities, microhistories that are meaningfully co-created, centre intersectionality and are contingent on place can examine whether categories like ‘class’ can be constituted to frame and seek redress for current inequalities (and if not, what other framework/s do we need)? ‘Digging for history’ offers methodologies for undertaking microhistories of rural places with (not for or about) rural communities in contemporary Britain.
Digging methods also pay specific attention to places to challenge hegemonic depictions of rural homogeneity (metropolitan depictions of the ‘unmodern rural’ which mask inequalities), generate richer understandings of the living legacies and intersectional experiences of rural inequalities today, and explain the particularities (topographical, environmental, economic and so on) of rural places. In our workshop, Ben Garlick made the point tangible with reference to the correspondence of northeast Scottish author Nan Shepherd, today a celebrated author of rural, mountainous places.Footnote 56 Shepherd’s novels, produced in the context of a Scottish literary renaissance in the 1920s and 30s, offer place-portraits of rural Aberdeenshire that embed a complexity of perspectives and experiences as they eschew the twee tropes of a previous ‘kailyard’ tradition. In taking the regional rural landscape as an aperture onto broader processes or philosophical questions, Shepherd demonstrates the potency of small stories of rural landscapes that convey ‘epistemic shifts on personal and intimate terms’.Footnote 57 Part of what makes Shepherd’s rural scenes so alive is her use of Doric (the Scots dialect of the northeast), which served to locate her characters in a particular version of rural Scotland. Aside from internecine arguments within the Scots literary scene over how and which kind of Scots should be championed as the basis for a national cultural revival, Shepherd’s letters illuminate the challenge of getting work published with a London-based publisher who feared dialect would ‘badly limit sales’.Footnote 58 Shepherd’s use of Scots was an attempt to expand the possible ways in which her places and people were represented.Footnote 59
To produce actionable knowledge, research on the histories of rural inequalities needs to be collaborative, it should be anchored in living testimonies and focused on hitherto hidden ‘excluded or devalued histories’. It should nurture a public historical consciousness and equip people ‘to do the liberatory work of researching and writing histories themselves’.Footnote 60 As Andrew Flinn and Astrid von Rosen put it, start by ‘looking out from one’s local setting to the world’ and end ‘with a vision of the future’.Footnote 61 Making histories with people – not for them – generates more inclusive and globally connected histories of local places (urban, peripheral or rural places), and can deepen wider public understandings of the legacies of these histories in the present, better equipping communities with the ability to recognise, face and fight ongoing oppression.
Problem 2: Land as property
New imperial histories have brought ‘race’ and slavery home, situating metropole and colony within the same analytic frame, ‘following the money’, and exhuming connected histories of peoples and places that had previously been suppressed, marginalised or disavowed.Footnote 62 New attention, such as Corrine Fowler’s work on the colonial countryside, has been given to the impact of imperial expansion on rural places within the metropole, and particularly to the ways in which mercantile classes and gentry ploughed wealth accrued from Atlantic slavery, the Caribbean plantation system and British imperial expansion in East Asia into the enclosure of land and the building of country estates.Footnote 63 The country house and its landed estate remain an object of cultural and political obsession because it is both a site of heritage and nostalgia and a site of visible imperial power in the landscape, as it was intended to be by their original architects. Attention has begun to be paid to the relationship between British colonial expansion overseas, elite-led land enclosures within the British Isles, and the proto-industrialisation of rural places.Footnote 64 This is a vital perspective, as it highlights this process was about practices, about circuits of knowledge and its exchange. As Carl Griffin and other scholars have explored, rural places were subject to forms of ‘internal colonisation’, with rural populations subject to new forms of government and social control and new classed and racialised hierarchies of ‘person value’.Footnote 65
The landed estate is the subject and object of colonisation: the space where the circular practices of imperialism are visible, rehearsed and refined and where estate practices become laboratories for tactics employed in imperial territories, at times on properties belonging to the same owner. Colonial capitalism commodified land and work in the British countryside, generating new forms of social classification, that gave rise to class conflicts within rural places. The arsenal of strategies employed by rural workers to weather and resist the capitalisation of land and work needs to be more fully incorporated within new colonial and global historiographies of the British countryside. Beyond this, we need much more integrated histories that see the colonial and (rural) metropole as deeply entangled.Footnote 66 As Vron Ware demonstrates, this requires making new connected histories of rural places, histories that trouble the binarism of rural-urban and metropole-colony, and that foreground processes of eviction, displacement, movement and migration (internal and international).Footnote 67 James Boyce has delivered a deeply nuanced example of just this kind of approach, demonstrating for the Fens how imperial capital was not only enacted practically but also through a set of ideologies that both reinscribed existing and introduced new structures of inequalities of wealth, politics and labour.Footnote 68
Provocation 2: Following the money, following the people
Connected histories make visible what we often take for granted. Wealth, for instance, was typically ploughed into land, but why and, pointedly, why does this continue to remain the case? The wealthy were seeking to secure dynastic and intergenerational wealth, and land was the safest (if not the most lucrative) vehicle to do so, legally and financially. This was as true for the dukes of Westminster as it is for Amazon, now the largest corporate landowner in the world.Footnote 69 The landed estate has historically provided the cultural capital necessary to convert the vast wealth generated across this period into visible and palatable assets. But if land is money (capital), it is also theft through the process of enclosure. Where does the wealth come from to ‘assetize’ land?Footnote 70 What happens to land assets over time? Where is the money made from land invested? How do different systems and practices of land management exacerbate inequalities of enclosure and assetisation? Who is exploited by and who profits from these practices? By thinking historically about these questions, we can make connections between seemingly innocuous industries.
Britain’s national rural economies are not typically directly associated with the enslavement of people in the British colonial world, but Sheep to Sugar – Welsh Wool and Slavery (2019), led by community researcher Liz Millman, is an example of a project which adopted a ‘digging methodology’ in a rural context to surface these connections.Footnote 71 Inspired by Chris Evan’s Slave Wales (2010), Brethyn Cymraig/Sheep to Sugar brought together community research volunteers, families from local farming communities, academics and heritage organisations in Mid and North Wales to research the spinning and weaving industry in Wales (1650–1850) and the links between ‘Welsh plains’ production and colonial plantation slavery in the Caribbean and North America. What is admirable about this project is how it held the lives of impoverished rural working classes in Montgomeryshire and Merionethshire, the lives of enslaved plantation workers, and the living legacies of these histories (including the endurance of racism and poverty in rural Wales) within the same analytic frame. As Chris Evans writes, ‘Welsh plains were used to clothe some of the most savagely exploited human beings of the age, those who carded, spun and wove wool in the mountain parishes … were themselves subject to cumulative social and economic degradation. The rural population had turned to woollen production in a desperate effort to meet the increased rental demands of an avaricious landlord class.’Footnote 72 A follow-on project, Woven Histories of Welsh Wool and Slavery, led by Charlotte Hammond at Cardiff University, in collaboration with Learning Links International, the Black Heritage Walks Network and students from further education colleges, produced a series of creative responses to the historical findings that connect their own lived experiences to the past in ways that trouble elite and hegemonic representational politics of Welsh rurality.Footnote 73 This example creatively demonstrates an approach which allows for a robust exploration of the global financial complexities underpinning rural inequalities today, through participatory methods which aim to challenge those same inequalities and avoid reinscribing new ones.
Following the money has the potential to expand and nuance how we think of categories like the rural and class. Although land enclosure and other reorganisations by landowners were a long-standing and British-wide process across the early modern and modern periods, the Clearances of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Scotland became the most (in)famous illustrations of the rampant power of landowners in Europe then and since.Footnote 74 Clearance acts as a portmanteau word to cover a set of tumultuous and acrimonious enclosures and evictions as landowners pivoted towards the emerging industrial and imperial economy, reorganising their estates away from high numbers of subsistence farmers to small numbers of commercially focused sheep farming tenants.Footnote 75 The wool and meat generated was sent south to service the booming textile mills of Yorkshire, and cleared populations were relocated to the coastlines and expected to undertake commercial fishing, some of the proceeds of which were salted, barrelled and exported to feed enslaved workforces in the West Indies. A significant but perhaps less well understood aspect of the continuation of landed power in Britain was neo-paternalistic ecologies adapting and developing from the early nineteenth century.Footnote 76 Paternalism as both an idea and a practice saw a remarkable revival in Scotland (and Britain more broadly) from the early nineteenth century, in spite – or perhaps because of – the rapid economic changes taking place. This brand of paternalism rejected state involvement in the workings of local and regional society, expecting that key responsibilities for social services such as education, healthcare, employment and emergency help in times of need would rest with the landowner, in exchange for being largely unfettered in their actions and policies and receiving from their tenantry and workforces absolute loyalty and obedience.Footnote 77 Paternalism had long been part of British society, evidenced across multiple sets of social relations, including the state.Footnote 78
We can draw a direct link between these political and cultural evolutions to contemporary techno-feudalism as one form (or a sub-category) of neo-feudalism, which has focused on the growth and power of multinational technology corporations (and their CEOs), such as Apple, Oracle, Alphabet (owners of Google), Amazon, OpenAI, or Meta.Footnote 79 Varoufakis suggests that under techno-feudalism, the means of control seen in earlier feudal systems shift away from the landownership class towards those who construct and own data and digital infrastructure, with data, subscription services, or access being defined as rent in this model.Footnote 80 In some cases, access to digital platforms is required for economic participation (e.g., a homemaker or retailer using Amazon Web Services to host their digital shop), with this access being revocable by the owners. Consequentially, a new class of society is growing at a remarkable rate: that of ‘the precariat class’, where precarious working arrangements do not provide workers with certain rights such as healthcare, sick pay or access to worker unions.Footnote 81 Specifically, one under-studied and under-theorised aspect of this new phenomenon is how ‘rural’ the system is, requiring ever-increasing amounts of land to operate. This material and energy dimension cannot be ignored or overlooked by the ‘digital economy’, but it is often obscured in policy proposals for the growth of the digital economy from state and market actors. There remains a lack of theoretical and empirical knowledge surrounding the footprint of technology corporations’ control and (increasingly) ownership of land/infrastructure and the ensuing socio-environmental effects.Footnote 82
Problem 3: Queer ruralities and matters of scale
While scholars working in disciplines beyond history have made some strides in studying queer ruralities, queer histories remain dominated by the urban.Footnote 83 Metanarratives of migration from smaller towns or country settings into large cities abound, reflecting a common experience for many people seeking employment opportunities in post-Second World War Britain. In queer histories, however, cities presented new employment opportunities but, also, offered access to larger and increasingly visible queer networks and economies. As non-urban settings became increasingly rigid in their heterosexism (a departure from a period in which Helen Smith, looking at Northern working-class communities, suggests that queer relationships were largely accepted), cities also provided more anonymity, allowing for sexual exploration and identity formation.Footnote 84 Even here, however, obscurity was not guaranteed, with Black gay men recalling much less ability to traverse queer London anonymously due to a racist queer leisure scene and greater proximity to biological family networks than their white counterparts.Footnote 85 Revisionist work by historians such as Matt Cook and Alison Oram has extended queer histories ‘beyond London’, while Jason Okundaye has traced the formation of a Black British gay community, but their work remains fundamentally urban.Footnote 86 The question remains, therefore, where is the rural in queer histories? The research thus far is sparse but highlights potential avenues. In her biography of Patrick Nelson (196–1963), Gemma Romain explores the experiences of a Black queer migrant from Jamaica who, for a brief period in the 1930s, worked as a valet in an aristocratic Welsh country house. Reflecting on the difficulty of reconstructing experience in the absence of archives, Romain nevertheless maps out a context for understanding how the interplay of Nelson’s multiple identities in rural Wales might have shaped his emotional life. Importantly, Romain highlights domestic service as a potential space for queer ruralities.Footnote 87
In the methods workshop, George Severs suggested another way of answering this question is to look at HIV/AIDS as an aperture. True, this is another aspect of recent queer history dominated by urban settings: HIV/AIDS epidemiology demonstrates that the virus was and is concentrated in urban settings. Yet people lived with HIV in rural settings across the UK, and while many travelled to nearby towns and cities for treatment, this was not the exclusive direction of travel. Activists and sexual health medics recall travelling into the countryside to give sexual health advice sessions.Footnote 88 As scholars respond to recent calls for an expansion of research into the experiences of people with HIV/AIDS, thinking specifically about HIV/AIDS in rural contexts, with all the conditions’ associations of urban threat and queerness, is essential if we want to think about what it meant – and means – to be queer in rural contexts. This is not to suggest that addressing gaps in understanding is simply appending the rural to urban research. Rather, it is to flag the absence of the rural in research into queer experience and, more specifically, to ask what new insights queering the rural or constituting the rural from a queer centre would generate.
Researching ‘the rural’ can, itself, sometimes feel like a call to go elsewhere, taken up by researchers navigating questions of difference and division in going beyond ‘go to’ places and people. But there are things that stick and things that stop us in our movements in-between, back and forth; someone’s difference is another’s sameness, someone’s fieldwork is another’s home. The methods workshop surfaced these opportunities, attempts and barriers, as participants became misplaced, including through research topics, locations, disciplinary and public-practice orientations. Part of this misplacement is a question of scale – of mattering, of counting enough, of being visible and recognisable, of getting into the room and onto the page. We need to take care of the place. During the workshop, sociologist Yvette Taylor noticed that her long-term research on working-class queers, which draws on empirical research from all constituent parts of the UK, was often incorrectly described as ‘Scottish’. Was her ‘Scottishness’ – as accent, embodiment, and nationality – becoming her data, and was the reduction from UK to Scotland a compliment or carelessness? Thinking about our implicatedness in place-making, including in the disciplinary places we exist in (or in-between), means complicating ways of occupying place and the normative measures of being in, from, and of a place. It also means resisting the idea of an always-travelling researcher, able to reach out or do outreach – as many professionalised (urbanised) LGBTQ + services now offer – across regional or country contexts. Arguably Scotland now occupies a somewhat confused place in politicised imaginings, often positioned as different from England: this can be felt as a reduction, as small, wee, or local specificity, rather than generalisability.Footnote 89 In scaling up – in data, analysis, and potentially ourselves – we can feel both a seduction of and resistance to big claims, or big data, as impactful, rigorous, or generalisable. Scotland, and its constituent parts, are not homogenous, and in scaling to place, we can think about how ‘wee’ places can speak back to and through big places. Including, for example, the ‘wee’ places of gender or queer studies, as rendered ‘sub-disciplinary’ to Big Theory and Disciplines. Likewise, to curtail the storying of ‘wee’ places via the language or dialect of the people residing within those places risks both excluding versions of the rural and imposing a framework of understanding that is incompatible with, or inadequate to, such a task. Here, for instance, we might ask, as others have done, in contexts including environmental crises and the advancing of decolonial or indigenous scholarship, whether terms like ‘rural’ or ‘landscape’ are appropriate labels from which to begin a story at all. Footnote 90 We cannot assume such terms translate smoothly or are understood in the same way. Indeed, such terms may serve to insert, if unwittingly, tales about certain places told within a preexisting schema, defined largely from without those places, and, once again, reinforce both academic and social hierarchies. In which case, perhaps one departure point for stories of rural environments and landscapes that seek to resist or dismantle inequality might be: ‘What words work for you?’
Provocation 3: Queering the archive
If a class analysis is missing from much of the scholarship on rural lives, this is amplified by the apparent lack of data on intersectionality. This says more about historic hierarchies of interest (or validity) than an absence of experience. As James Deetz argued, while ‘the written document has its proper and important place’, it is imperative that sometimes we ‘set aside our perusal of diaries, court records, and inventories, and listen to another voice.’Footnote 91 Alf Ellis’s contribution in the workshop pointed us to the manifold unofficial, queer, uncatalogued or non-text-based archives that have their own stories to tell. Freed from the traditional acquisition and appraisal methodologies (or violences) that shape and classify official archives, the personal, household or family archive, perhaps insulating a draughty attic, can take us closer to the granularity of life – the wee, the private, the lived. The life-writing found in recipe books, gardening notebooks, scrapbooks and shopping lists, as well as the biographical curations found in these collections, change the questions we can ask of the rural past. Finding handkerchiefs sharing the space of a drawer with land deeds, the unofficial archive draws our eye from the textual to the material to consider them in concert. What happens when we take this materiality further, taking the fabric of the rural (its geology, multi-species, material and industrial traces as well as the human population) as integral parts of a shared story, rather than its whole?
A more holistic approach to ‘archives’ of the rural past and present challenges our temporal modes and methodologies requires a different kind of attention with a different sense of scale and orientation. What, for example, would it look like to allow rural temporalities to shape our work, with their involutionary, recursive natures that defy simple progression narratives? Existing beyond acts of cataloguing, listing, indexing, describing, narrating provenance, determining acquisition criteria, and administering access, the unofficial, uncatalogued, or queer archive brings an unruliness that refutes our need to discipline the past. Our article ends with a poem capturing a walking methodology as an example of this; sometimes, meandering will lead to a dead end or be obstructed by brambles. But the charting and tracing of these paths contributes to a richer map.Footnote 92 Foraging the landscape also demands we are alive to the potentially extractive processes or risk of re-traumatisation that shapes our task.
Current research landscapes demand a measurable answer to the question, ‘What did you find?’, with the ‘where’ always implicated in that ‘what’ and ‘who?’ After the Methods workshop, Yvette Taylor travelled to Inverness to deliver a Queer Social Justice pop-up workshop as part of the Highland Pride calendar events. While a city, Inverness positions itself as a ‘Gateway’ to the rural Highlands: it may be that researchers are forever seeking gateway spaces, opening out to other audiences, communities and ideas, reliant too on infrastructure, access, and routes in. An interviewee, living in a remote rural location and travelling to the ‘gateway’ city, cautioned her against a likely ‘wasted journey’ when she couldn’t guarantee that anyone would turn up, aware of the array of possible factors that could make queer presence and participation, and mediated via a ‘big city’ researcher, unviable. In conducting over 250+ interviews with working-class queers across the UK between 2001 and 2012, in different urban, suburban, and rural locations, Taylor faced some wasted journeys. These wasted journeys are not about the number of interviewees: she retains the ‘+’ in thinking about participants and the group and individual conversations, non-shows, emails, and texts that didn’t make it to a formal interview, as still mattering. Instead, the ‘wasted journey’ is in failing to grasp the connections between people and places and, as not mattering, or in being complicit in reproducing deficit accounts or deficit data. There are ways research fails to show up, including inside and outside of academia, as places and people are rendered nothing or nowhere, and rural realities might be particularly susceptible to this. The go-to urban, white, masculinised, heteronormative subject is more easily imagined as ‘working class’ than trans and queer of colour participants living in the Highlands. Yet, the surprised question, ‘Where did you find them?’ when highlighting such groups, reveals a disconnect and the work still to do, where certain people and places do not easily map onto or become seen in disciplines, knowledge or publics. This is not necessarily about finding more of ‘them’ to texture our go-tos with added difference. Researchers can usefully pause on the question of whether to gather more data and from where. Sometimes this might mean staying put and seeking other kinds of ‘gateways’. In provincialising ideas of diversity, different ruralities become visible, as with the queerer stories about the Highlands, which are potentially open to a globalised imagining of queer worlds.
Towards a conclusion
As we hope we’ve shown, despite the deep challenges and very real impact that the gaps, silences and violences sustained by policy and academic research worlds can have on rural Britain, there are different and productive approaches being developed in exciting collaborations across disciplines. These have the potential and capacity to change the way we think about inequalities and the rural, historically and for the future. Some are far from new: the digging methodology has been explored globally across the last five decades, encouraging communities of place and interest to take control over the understanding of their pasts and scholars to radically extend what they typically regard as collaborations. Others are newer: the modern period is replete with studies of poverty, its causes and cures, but very little attempt has been made (until recently) to integrate this with analyses of wealth and ongoing processes of land and resource enclosure. The recent (re)emergence of rural ethnography has highlighted the potential for integrating the personal, political and sociological with nods to the past as an explanatory framework, and we might do well to think about making our stake in research explicit.Footnote 93 Combining approaches breaks down long-standing narratives about rural poverty and suggests future directions for rural communities, organisations and potentially policymakers. Extremes of wealth are and have been a critical challenge to rural social well-being, cohesion and opportunity, and more attention needs to be paid to its workings and effects. In doing so, we must guard against a homogenising or flattening effect and keep to the fore the multitudinous and nuanced range of identities found in the rural, which are often ignored or understood as entirely urban: queer identities, the nuances of language, of place, region, nationality and of course, those of gender and class.
What we learnt from the workshops is that as scholars, in order to do this, we need to think differently about research in several fundamental ways, both as researchers whose focus is typically on British nations and as potential collaborators with colleagues beyond Britain. Once trained in our disciplinary methodologies, we need to seek out new and different approaches, taking a much wider view of how and why research is ‘done’, while sharing our own expertise. We consistently struggled against the impulse to ‘tidy up’ the variegated approach and multivalent voices of this essay into something neater. We went through different written versions of this piece as we tried to pull something coherent together without losing the sense that we are a group made up of individual experiences and priorities. Our reviewers communicated their sympathy with our aims, but they, too, couldn’t entirely avoid asking us to tidy it up. We haven’t. Although difficult in the academic professional context, we’re arguing that we must become more comfortable with difference and learn to lean into the cacophony. We need space and time to allow ideas, approaches, and projects to fail in their original intentions and reimagine this ‘failure’ or ‘waste’ in fundamentally different ways, as part of the slow and iterative nature of deep work, of unpacking lost and suppressed histories and voices, and of surfacing the continuing dynamics and inequities of wealth and poverty, power and oppression.
We conclude with a poem, contributed by workshop participant Clare Whistler, on walking as a research method that embraces the synergy between wondering and wandering.
Acknowledgements
We thank Carl Griffin and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and acknowledge the Seedcorn Grant from Durham University that funded the three ‘Rural Inequalities’ workshops.
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