This paper explores the urban-type reconstruction of Soviet rural non-agricultural settlements during the Cold War, focusing on timber production workers’ settlements in the Republic of Karelia of the north-west Soviet Union. It expands current debates on late-Soviet mass housing by incorporating a rural perspective, examining how residents responded to architectural and planning decisions designed to urbanize their environments. Drawing on architectural blueprints, archival records, oral history interviews, and participant observation, the study argues that the design of workers’ settlements reflected both state planning ambitions and the lived practices of their inhabitants. It asks why residents of rural settlements remained dissatisfied with urbanized lifestyles imposed through new design solutions and how their efforts to preserve subsistence farming revealed grassroots resistance. The analysis situates this resistance within the broader tension between two contradictory post-war Soviet policies: one promoting agricultural self-sufficiency through migrant labour benefits and the other pursuing urbanization for rural and semi-rural areas. By tracing changes in settlement design from the 1940s to the 1960s, the paper shows how evolving planning policies reshaped everyday life and exposed the limits of Soviet modernization in transforming rural identities.

This paper investigates modernisation policies for agricultural production and human reproduction in postwar Taiwan and their internal contradictions. The main actor was the Sino-American Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction (JCRR). The first half of the paper discusses how the JCRR allied with American experts to overcome military opposition to family planning by highlighting the economic burden of population growth. The second half of the paper studies how, as population control gained wider support in the 1960s, the JCRR embedded family planning in the extension network while, ironically, facing the challenge of rural exodus induced by its own policy. By 1980, Taiwan’s family planning programme was declared a success, but rural decline cast a shadow over its food security. By scrutinising the synergy and contradiction between the two policies, this paper illustrates the ambivalent legacies of modernisation and the entangled politics of land, food, and population.

This paper analyses one of the early and probably underestimated institutional lenders in northern Europe, the Church, using Sweden as a case study. Lending escalated from the 1770s onwards, making the church the dominant institutional lender in the mid-18th century. As other institutional lenders became stronger, lending declined. The success of church funds was a result of their strong local presence, being controlled by parishioners and overwhelmingly used by them, certainly by freehold farmers and local officials, and in the second half of the nineteenth century also by the landless. Even townspeople can be found among the borrowers. However, in previous studies of borrowing based on probate inventories, loans from the church have been scarce, leading to the conclusion that the church played a minor role as a lender. By combining probate inventories and church accounts, we can show that the church was an important lender in certain areas, but that most loans were medium-term and taken early in the life cycle, and therefore rarely visible in probate inventories, which were predominantly made after middle-aged or old people.

Grain mills were central to early modern communities. Yet, we know little about their economic and political roles due to a lack of source material. Before the eighteenth century, mills were not directly implicated in the wider politics of grain marketing and provisioning. When mills became integrated into the wholesale market, they were rarely the object of riot or abuse during subsistence crises. This article argues, through a case study of mills in Bovey Tracey, Devon, that litigation, particularly Court of Exchequer records, can reveal significant information about the operation and business of early modern mills. Of particular significance are disputes over the monopolistic custom of the ‘suit of mill’, which illuminate the politics that governed much of the industry and offer new insights into social and economic relations surrounding the purchase and processing of grain. Such insights further question the timeline and development of free market views in grain provisioning.

The study examines the agricultural transformation of Almería (1950-1989), emphasizing its emergence as Europe’s “market garden.” Key factors include state-driven irrigation projects, innovations like soil mulching, greenhouses, and drip irrigation, which boosted productivity and reduced farm sizes. While state intervention was modest, private initiatives and credit institutions accelerated the expansion of intensive, export-oriented agriculture. This shift reshaped land tenure, increasing smallholdings and diminishing traditional large estates, fundamentally altering the region’s agrarian structure.

Focusing on Iberian rye, we explain how social opinion about crops can influence botanical scholars’ studies and breeding engineers’ research. Rye was an essential plant in some agricultural systems of the Iberian Peninsula for centuries because of its resistance. However, despite rye’s superiority over other cereals in adverse environments, its inferior position compared to wheat regarding food preferences helps to explain a lower consumption and an overall adverse social reputation. The early botanical investigation that formed the basis of later scientific research reflected this appreciation. Thus, with such weak foundations, given the lack of interest, when Iberian rye engineering began to develop in the 20th century, it looked abroad to find varieties of agronomic interest, barely studying native landraces. Analysing this phenomenon is a significant step towards drawing attention to a multifunctional plant adapted to the territory, which can offer solutions to present food and environmental challenges.

The article explores how the Coto Donana was understood, protected, and shaped as a national park and nature reserve between the early 1950s and late 1980s. In doing so, the article pays attention to the different valuations that were given to the region over the course of the twentieth century and the distinct cultures of landscape which were formed. The strongest contrast was between the reserving of the region as an elite sporting landscape evident in Chapman’s writings and its re-imagining and re-configuring within ecological science and conservation practice as a nature reserve. In exploring this shaping of the Coto Donana as a changing landscape, my account draws on and seeks to extend the work on cultures of landscape to understand the competing ways of knowing, managing, representing, and valuing the natural environment, as well as the different forms of conduct and pleasure associated with contrasting uses of the land.

This article analyses the conflicting relationship between botany and the rural economy in a period of great scientific, technical, and economic change. It takes as an example the Po Valley in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a laboratory for experiments on acclimatization of new plant species, particularly the potato among other products. Against this backdrop, political authorities and scientific institutions interacted with landowners, farmers, and other representatives of the rural world, sometimes successfully and other times with many difficulties. Source materials include institutional documentation and correspondence, supported by a new interpretation of pertinent scientific and economic texts.