'The People's Farm.' English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840

Water, Wood and Wild Animal Populations: Seeing the Spread of Rinderpest through the Physical Environment in Bechuanaland, 1896

“…110 MacNab also reported that large numbers of hartebeest and gemsbok grazed near the Molopo River in 1896. 111 While the banning of wild animal hunts in the south and east of the territory (where there was virtually no population) made conservation sense, bans applied to regions where healthy numbers survived made none. By implementing hunting bans in the north and northwest, the government not only demonstrated a callousness towards locals who had trouble securing food at the time, they were also allowing for the growth of an animal population that could harbour and potentially spread rinderpest to local cattle herds.…”

Agriculture, food and land: Struggles for UK post-Brexit agri-food justice

“…For Polanyi (1944), efforts to render land a (fictitious) commodity will continuously generate forceful forms of resistance or "counter-movements". In this context, it is perhaps helpful to outline that there is a long (but often overlooked) tradition of working-class agrarianism in the UK, ranging from the insurgent communal agrarian practices of the Diggers and the Levellers 3 to the revolutionary thought of Thomas Spence at the height of English Radicalism, encapsulated with the rallying cry of 'The Land is the People's Farm' (Hill 1972;Chase 2010).…”

“…More specifically, it reignites longstanding questions of what is land for, who decides and what is its relationship to food systems. This requires land to be explicitly understood as what it always has been -a relational site for political contestation and alternative (food) futures (Hill 1972;Chase 2010). Our research demonstrates, however, that heterogenous land histories are often overlooked, forgotten or ignored within Brexit-related discussions and food movement praxis, which signals the need to politicise alternative food and land futures, and nurture agri-food justice that addresses underlying systems of oppression.…”

“…CLTs are "democratic, non-profit organisations that own and develop land for the benefit of the community" (see https://www.communitylandtrusts.org.uk/about-clts/what-is-a-community-land-Finally, returning to the quotation that opened this paper, if land justice is to become the 'unifying' strategic force that Holt-Gimenéz and Williams (2017) emphasise as being vital for engendering inclusive and transformative social and ecological change, then we affirm that (food) movements, practitioners and policy actors must develop opportunities for collective learning, progressive alliance building and translocal strategies that challenge spatiotemporal injustices and unequal power relations at the land-food system nexus. In this sense, we can learn a great deal from (overlooked) historical expressions of working-class agrarianism (Hill 1972;Chase 2010) and the array of contemporary land-based struggles for change unfolding internationally which are advocating for equity across the axes of difference and working towards sustainable land relations under the auspices of food sovereignty (such as La Via Campesina). This will require the development of participative, reflexive and intersectional agri-food praxis in the UK, based on international solidarity and translocal dialogue that engages with land justice across academic, policy and social movement contexts.…”