A revision of all the species of the genus Thopeutica described or cited from the island of Mindanao (Philippines) is presented. Four species are described as new: T. (s. str.) cassolai sp. nov., T. (s. str.) intermedia sp. nov., T. (s. str.) maindai sp. nov. and Wiesner, 1992 syn. nov., and T. (s. str.) davaoensis Cassola & Ward, 2004 = T. (s. str.) anichtchenkoi Wiesner, 2015 syn. nov. In total, 12 species are confirmed for the fauna of this island; the previous citations of 4 other species from Mindanao are discussed and considered erroneous. A key to the species is provided. Color photographs of the habitus, the main diagnostic characters, and the variability of all species are presented.
An excellent insight into the agrarian economy and society of the extreme western end of the Sussex Coastal Plain at the beginning of the eighteenth century can be obtained through examining the extensive documents associated with a case brought before the Exchequer Court in 1709-10 by William Stanley, the Bishop of Chichester's lessee of Cakeham farm in West Wittering, against his former bailiff Thomas Pilsworth. The action has yielded an exceptional number of linked documents which offer an unrivalled view of farming as seen by people from the local community as well as allowing some evaluation of the merits of the case.
The present article considers the bio-ecological crisis of the 1310s in England and Wales from the perspective of livestock health and disease, both enzootic and epizootic. It shows that the short-term anomaly of the same decade created a shortage of fodder, which, in turn, compromised the well-being of local herds and flocks, exposing them to various pathogens and culminating in epizootic disease. Importantly, it is argued that the impact of the crisis was, in some instances, passed through a generation of animal cohorts, whereby the survivors of earlier crises would develop into weaker animals and pass their genes to their offspring. A close analysis of the available sources reveals a complex chain of interconnected and intergenerational crises of the early fourteenth century, between the disaster of 1314-17 and the Black Death of 1348-50, affecting both animals and humans. This stresses the importance of epigenetics as a major factor in the bio-ecological crisis of the fourteenth century and calls into further interdisciplinary exploration of this hitherto unstudied phenomenon.
Lapicixius yixianensis sp. nov., the second species of this genus, is described and illustrated on the basis of an almost complete specimen from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, China. This new representative of the extinct hemipteran family Lalacidae increases the taxonomic diversity of the group during the Cretaceous. The affinities of the new fossil with described lalacid planthoppers and the validity of Lalacidae are discussed.
Advances in manuring underpinned agricultural improvement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1900 standardized farming methods had been widely adopted. Regional practices did persist, however. One such was using raw fish as a field dressing. This study reveals that the practice was already widespread around the north Atlantic littoral by c.1750. The use of fish as manure, and the quantities of fish caught for this purpose, increased significantly over the next 150 years. In tracing the history of 'fishing' fields, new light is shone on the economic and agrarian imperatives and knowledge exchange that drove agricultural improvement during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; on the tensions that could be engendered when different parties competed for the same resource; and on the emerging sense of anxiety over the environmental consequences of more intensive farming and fishing practices that began to be voiced towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Corn exchanges proliferated in nineteenth-century Britain, with very few opened before or since. Little studied previously, a primary concern here is to define and identify them to produce something close to a comprehensive listing, by date and place. Interpretatively, a means of categorizing them is proposed before exploring contemporary rationales for building corn exchanges in such numbers. Yet though many buildings still survive, by 1900 many exchanges had experienced a significant decline in the corn trade and were being put to other uses. Corn exchanges flourished at a particular conjuncture in Victorian Britain whose conditions were supplanted from the 1860s.
Following the recent discovery that the ancestors of 'Hebridean' sheep actually came from St Kilda, this is an updated summary of their history. It includes new information about the first exports of St Kildas, and explains that the Windermere St Kildas, ancestors of all four surviving nineteenthcentury flocks in England, were also directly exported from the archipelago. The name change to 'Hebridean' (c.1905) was instigated by the MacLeod family, who insisted that St Kilda's only truly primeval sheep were the Soays (which they owned). However, most owners continued to call their sheep 'St Kildas' until the late twentieth century. The St Kilda archipelago thus witnessed the successive introduction of three races of pre-modern sheep-Soays, then Borerays, then St Kildas. Recognition of this sequence may assist future genetic research and improve our understanding of the history of Northern short-tails; however, the very different histories of the three races will need to be taken into account.
This article explores the early origins of the modern commercial animal feed industry. It evolved from the feeding experiments of a farmer who discovered the significant benefits of feeding oilseed with cereals, and an agricultural merchant who marketed a cattle medicine. The scientific understanding of animal physiology and nutrition was at an early stage, and the development of a feed recipe that closely matched the nutrient requirements of cattle and increased the supply of meat and dairy products at a lower cost, constituted a significant breakthrough. The high demand for oilseed cake generated competition between oilseed crushers resulting in adulterated oilcake. The involvement and reactions of the agricultural institutes and societies to the new feeds and adulterated oilcake are explored. These new feed products were exploited by several entrepreneurs, who collectively founded the modern animal feed industry in the 1850s.
This article investigates changes in attitudes towards land consolidation with multifunctional concerns (in mind), at the end of the twentieth century, in northeast Belgium. While previous research discusses the development of regulations for land reform, influenced by European agricultural policy and socioeconomic changes, it fails to grasp what such changes meant on the ground and for those involved in negotiating consolidation. We therefore analyse and compare the working mechanisms of two land consolidations in the 1980s-2000s, adopting a local perspective, and gain insights into policy dynamics between local parties. We found that negotiated decisions changed as relations between agriculture and other rural actors and functions of the countryside profoundly altered. Consequently, more consideration was given, in both studied cases, to recreation and the ecological protection and improvement of flood-plain environments, a cause strongly advocated by local nature associations whose influence grew steadily.
What was the role of cottagers in the agrarian economy of sixteenth-century Sweden? Drawing from a range of sources, such as cadastres and wealth taxation lists, the article finds that most cottagers paid land rents in small sums of money; that the majority of most cottagers' wealth consisted of only one-two cows; that most cottagers did not hold any arable land, having to buy or earn grain as an in-kind wage; and that many cottagers worked within their local community in agriculture, construction, and transportation, as well as made a living through spinning, woodcraft production, and from forest resources, such as tar and charcoal. The main argument of the article is however that the most important function that cottagers filled in their local society was as wage workers, a labour reserve which was called on by their village neighbours during the peak times of the agricultural year as well as for continuous and recurring work tasks.
Testamentary and court documents indicate substantial change in the pastoral management of north-east Scotland after the late 1500s. Although sheep have been recognized previously as important to the economic wealth of the region during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the evidence presented here suggests a continuing importance from the earliest court records of the late 1400s and through the 1500s, until cattle and grain production gained in significance during the course of the 1600s. By the eighteenth century, the region was renowned for its beef and grain production. The stocking levels revealed by the court records may also be used to shed light upon contemporary arable practices in the region and to suggest the importance of topography and soils in determining late medieval agricultural practices.
This paper contributes to the empirical question of the labour organization and gender division of labour in a semi-landless rural group during the second half of the nineteenth century, a period characterized by developing agrarian capitalism. Thereby, we also add to the broader question of the role of gender division of labour in economic transformation. Through a triangulation of sources-crofters' contracts, work lists and ethnographic questionnaires, we found that men performed a much higher number of corv & eacute;e days per year compared to women. Moreover, we found that many core agricultural tasks were done by both men and women. The labour organization, on the other hand, was clearly gendered-the role as a crofter in the sense of doing corv & eacute;e labour for a landowner was primarily a male experience, while the role as a crofter in the sense of working one's own small plot of land was to a larger extent a female experience.
This article presents a new dataset of wages of agricultural and unskilled workers in England between 1480 and 1680. Evidence is drawn from 14 year-long samples of wage accounts from rural gentry households in twelve different locations. Together these accounts record over 20,000 workdays paid by the day, 29.3 per cent of which were undertaken by women. The great majority of the work recorded was agricultural. Women's work was highly seasonal, concentrated in three types of tasks: weeding, haymaking, and the grain harvest. It was surprisingly common for women and men to receive the same daily wage for the same tasks and modal wages for women and men often overlapped. However, men achieved higher average (mean) wages and worked more consistently throughout the year. The gender pay gap for day wages was 38.5 per cent, lower than that suggested by existing wage series, but the gender pay gap in annual earnings was much higher. Women's participation in casual agricultural wage labour declined significantly over time.
Our understanding of several important aspects of farm service in the nineteenth century remains limited. What share of servants lived in? How important were payments in kind? How well did servants fulfil their contractual obligations? To answer these and related questions this article explores a large body of new evidence specifically dedicated to farm servants: registers from two north Wiltshire hiring fairs, documenting 11,000 hiring agreements from 1837 to 1860. The fairs were introduced to facilitate the hiring of dairymaids, and declined when the collapse of cheese-making made them vulnerable to the fair abolition campaign. Farmers hired almost all their servants at their major local fair, while servants used it for less than a third of their job moves. The article shows how a creative use of a traditional institution supported progressive agriculture; adaptation to its needs required flexibility in terms of employment, but the incidence of non-residential service was limited numerically and selective by gender.
While the role of the home farm on great agricultural estates has been recognized by historians, few have examined it in especial detail. Surviving records for the home farm at the Duke of Wellington's Stratfield Saye estate in Hampshire reveal that it went through a lengthy period of renewal and redirection in the wake of the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, shifting away from dependence on arable farming to focus on livestock breeding. A financially successful period was disrupted by the Great War and the need to meet Government regulations for increased arable output. It weathered the post-war financial slump by reinventing itself as a dairy producer. These changes, overseen by an experienced and innovative land agent, enabled home farm to sustain itself as a farming business, helped by other sources of income from letting grazing rights and haulage services. During the inter war period it performed better in financial terms than home farms on nearby estates, where not all survived as estate businesses.
This paper reanimates the debate over the consequences of parliamentary enclosure in eighteenthcentury England by analysing a personal memoir of the south Warwickshire village of Warmington. Written by a yeoman farmer in the early years of the nineteenth century, this anonymous 'Short history' focuses on the 1777 enclosure award, discussing in detail the relationship between the yardlands farmed by the freeholders before the enclosure and the allotments allocated to them afterwards, and describes its impact on the landscape and on the labour relations transacted within it. More specifically this paper identifies the author of the 'Short history', analyses his reading of the impact of agrarian change, and argues that his account offers an invaluable perspective on parliamentary enclosure, not least because it represents the views of a well-compensated yardlander who was nevertheless highly sensitive to the wider social and cultural consequences of the redefinition of property rights.
When the National Economic Development Council (NEDC) and its administrative office (NEDO) were established, farmers were concerned that agriculture was not directly represented. NEDO needed policy information and data on the sector. Initially this came from government (the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food: MAFF), a meeting with agricultural economists, and a so-called joint committee, orchestrated by the National Farmers' Union (NFU), into which farm workers' unions and landowners had some input. This was not the tripartite body envisaged for other sectors, bringing together employers, workers and the sector's sponsoring department, which NEDO could attend. Neither MAFF nor the NFU favoured the formation of an Economic Development Committee (EDC) for the agricultural industry for fear that this would weaken in the annual review of agriculture: i) the NFU's privileged access to government, and ii) MAFF's negotiating stance. With the change of government in 1964, MAFF's position began to shift, but it was not until November 1965 that the NFU could be persuaded. It then took a further year before a chairperson could be appointed. When the EDC met for the first time it decided that one of its first tasks would be to study 'the role of agriculture, with particular reference to import saving.' Its report published in June 1968 ( Agriculture's import saving role) raised expectations in the farming community, and some concern internationally and within MAFF. Despite the NFU's earlier reservations, it had secured support for its protectionist policies. Moreover, the minister said it was 'one of the most important reports ever produced on British agriculture.'
A link between marriage seasonality and the broad patterns of agriculture across early modern England was identified in the 1980s by Kussmaul. Subsequently, though, little use appears to have been made of the methodology she developed. This paper revisits her approach by means of a case study using parish registers of the majority of early modern Surrey. Its findings are twofold. First the robustness of Kussmaul's methodology is supported, both by consideration of its sensitivity to changes in its criteria for differentiating between arable and pastoral areas and by comparison of its findings for contiguous parishes on similar soils. Second the sub-regional study area's responses to shifting economic conditions is explored using marriage seasonality to identify spatial and temporal patterns of agriculture across the area between the late sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. The results suggest a move from locally-based farming to a greater market focus, a shift which in much of Surrey appears to have started in the early seventeenth century. Of particular interest is the identification of a marked shift from a pastoral to an arable emphasis on the light soils in the west of the county between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, a response, it is suggested, to a combination of shifts in the profitability of different types of farming and changes in transport increasing the area's ability to move its produce to markets. The results of the two parts of the study suggest Kussmaul's approach could valuably and readily (given the, by now, widespread availability of digitized parish registers) be replicated to explore agricultural change as represented by husbandry type on a county-by-county basis across much of early modern England.
In nineteenth-century India the British encountered a bovine culture radically different from their own and an established network of bovine knowledge and management. Building upon this, while also importing their own ideas of agricultural improvement, colonial administrators and veterinarians sought to divide Indian cattle into recognizable breeds and to promote better feeding and breeding (including cross-breeding with other local or imported breeds), by means of cattle shows and state-run cattle farms. A further part of the making of the modern cow involved an increasingly scientific approach to livestock management and the intensified commodification and commercialization of cattle and their products, including the establishment of modern dairying. The article examines how the British sought to implement schemes of bovine improvement, the extent of Indian agency in these projects, and how the regime responded by the inter-war years to the growing crisis of Indian cattle.
Agricultural transformation within the Ottoman Empire has been a topic of enduring fascination among historians, resulting in a substantial body of scholarly work. The '& ccedil;iftlik debate', which once dominated Ottoman historiography and remains a pertinent subject in contemporary discussions, has given rise to a wealth of literature to understand Ottoman agricultural change. This literature explored the aspects of change in land ownership and regime, production relations, market-oriented character of the production in these & ccedil;iftliks, vak & imath;f & ccedil;iftliks and power relations concerning their management, and the power relations of the & ccedil;iftlik-holders with the central imperial elites. Nevertheless, there persists a need to bridge gaps in our comprehension of agricultural change by adopting fresh perspectives on the matter. In this article, we revisit the '& ccedil;iftlik debate' by shedding light on the role played by natural factors, particularly the significance of swamps and floods, in the genesis and spread of & ccedil;iftliks by positioning sheep and sheep farming at the core of our investigation. This study contends that a comprehensive understanding of Ottoman agricultural transformation necessitates an examination of the intricate interplay between swamps and floods, the topographical features of Mihali & ccedil;, burgeoning demand for sheep, the tax farming system and the relations it creates, the indebtedness relations, and the policies and interests of the state.
