Rural Modernity

This paper will examine the Prussian Settlement Commission (1886-1918) and its program of “interior colonization” established by the German Ministry of Agriculture in 1886. Over a thirty-year span, in collaboration with the architectural offices of Paul Fischer, Building Commissioner for East Prussia, the Settlement Commission constructed over 600 of what its executive board of Ministers described as “model villages” along the contested eastern borderlands of the Prussian-Polish Provinces. The Commission was assembled in the wake of several mass expulsions, in 1882 and 1883, of non-citizen agricultural workers who hailed mainly from the Slavic East; its objective was to enforce the decrees of the Settlement Law, an anti-migrant land-use policy of incentivized settlement and forced displacement, whose legal architecture, co-written by Max Weber’s father, introduced new economic weapons into the ethnic struggle taking place in what was dubbed Germany’s “wild East.” This paper contends that the 1886 Settlement Law, which provided an early juridical framework for the state exercise of land seizure by eminent domain, and the Commission’s building program are buried episodes in our histories of modern planning in Central Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The Commission and its border villages—anchored, in Weber’s words, on the “absolute exclusion of the Russian-Polish workers from the German East”—were integrated almost seamlessly into the world of social housing reform by Weber and the Verein für Sozialpolitik, premised on a new politics of race articulated by Weber that took shape within the discourse of internal colonization. In this paper I examine how the Commission’s racial aesthetics, its eugenic interests, and its “vernacular” politics of land, how its model housing and its infrastructures, contoured the aesthetics of the German garden city movement, the modernist housing estates of the interwar years, and the colonial planning culture of Germany’s overseas holdings.


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In 1893, in a paper addressed to his colleagues at the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Max Weber advocated for an expansion of the Prussian Settlement Commission’s program of “internal colonization,” an anti-migrant land-use policy of settlement and forced displacement established by the Ministry of Agriculture in 1886. The program sought to settle German farmers in predominately Polish areas in the eastern provinces of the Empire. “It is not possible,” Weber wrote, “to allow two nations with different bodily constitutions—differently constructed stomachs—to compete freely as workers in the same area.” This paper will examine the planned communities, described as ‘modern village estates,’ built by the Settlement Commission between 1886 and 1924, and their coercive financial structuring in the form of binding tenancy contracts. The villages functioned as a governmental tool that sought to politically and economically regulate both the lives of the settlers, and the Polish and East Slavic migrants they displaced. The settlements were much discussed and adapted by a wide range of planners, from German colonial architects, in the wake of the Berlin Africa Conference of 1885, to advocates of modern housing reform such as Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut, whose settlements, or Siedlungen now number among those protected as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In the modernist “White Cities” of Wagner and his planning colleagues, I argue, we see material traces of the villages and border-politics of the Settlement Commission. The aim of this paper is two-fold: first, to demonstrate the central role that the village as housing colony—a cultural technology managed by social-scientific experts and bound up in forced mortgages—played in regulating the relationship between the body of the laborer, the landscape, and the state. And secondly, to observe how the typology of the village has functioned historically as a flexible mediator of power in the context of state (and supra-state) planning interventions.

Chapter 1 in Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton's CUP volume of essays on, among many other things, the "Long 1930s."

This chapter recovers English regional writers as part of the history of 1930s literature, arguing that they influenced the national imaginary and thus influenced national identity in distinct and measurable ways that perhaps only became clear in the context of World War II. At the center of its inquiry about these writers and 1930s writings are the questions: Who are the writers that make questions about regionalism and ruralism urgent for their admiring (or not so admiring) contemporaries? How do their works relate region to nation, provincial place to publishing center, rural representation to urban readers? And how does a more nuanced understanding of such relations change our construction of the history of 1930s literature? "Beyond Englishness" begins to answer these questions, directing scholarly attention to an almost entirely ignored set of writers whose verbal and visual images, literary styles, and strategies of relating regional to national identity define what could be called the new ruralism of the 1930s: Francis Brett Young who wrote about the West Midlands and Welsh Borderlands in the Mercian novels, including House under the Water (1932); Adrian Bell, who wrote about farming in Suffolk in the trilogy made up of Corduroy (1930), Silver Ley (1913), and The Cherry Tree (1932); A.G. Street who wrote about rural life in Wiltshire in Farmer’s Glory and Strawberry Roan (both 1932); and Flora Thompson who wrote about village life in Oxfordshire in the Candleford trilogy (1939-1943).

Chapter 10 in James Smith's edited Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the 1930s.
Rural literature of Britain is a subgenre of British regional literature and regional literature is a subgenre of national literature. This chapter examines some of the most widely read and most intensely beloved of rural regional novels, lying at the intersection of these three literary traditions: those by H. E. Bates about the Midlands, Winifred Holtby about coastal Yorkshire, Richard Llewellyn about South Wales, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon about the Mearns of Scotland. Novels by these writers contest a southeast England rural ideal sustained by 1930s ‘high-brow’ late modernist novels and ‘low-brow’ mass marketed country propaganda. Instead of the modernist flâneur looking at his reflection in windows or the urban motorist looking at rural scenes selected by guidebooks, rural regional novels adopt the continuous gaze of the worker surveying the land slowly. These workers see land rather than landscape, their vision determined not by aesthetic categories but rather by economic or cultural demands and priorities. Recent theorizations of romantic moderns, the commodified authentic, and rural modernity, discussed at the conclusion of this chapter, invite comparative literary readings of these rural regional characters into the mainstream of critical discourse about twentieth-century British literature and national self-fashioning.

This paper explores the rites and rituals of Ambridge’s cultural landscape through attention to the orchard. The practices of cider-pressing, wassailing, and drinking cider with Joe are all fundamental to village life. However, these traditions should not be seen as uninterrupted or continuous within the long history of Borsetshire. Since 1960, Britain has lost around 2/3rds of its orchards due to economic pressures, the rise of imported fruit, and changes in land use. As sites of community activity, this loss has caused a shift in nature-culture relations and alterations to co-constituted constructions of place (Cloke, Jones, 2000). In 1990, the environmental activist group Common Ground set to ‘create a calendar custom’ through the invention of Apple Day. The new festival’s ambition was to kindle communal and personal expressions about the meaning of nature-culture connections, urging people to interpret and value the rich fabric of the commonplace. Through attention to these contexts, I will read The Archers as a literature of place, reflective of histories of ecological and economic change in rural England, and of those cultural actions that sought to celebrate local distinctiveness and revive the notion of the orchard as a community asset and site of shared local knowledge and meaning.

Chapter Four from the title 'Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention', edited by Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). The chapter explore representations of working and abandoned quarries made in Britain in the opening decades of the twentieth century.