Last conference: International Conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK, from 4 - 6 January, 2007.
Organised by the Interwar Rural History Research Group
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)
For more details of the conference contact enquiries@irhrg.org.uk
If you would like to contribute to the conference click here.
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
Lynne Thompson, University of Exeter
Professor Mick Wallis, University of Leeds
