bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reservations and Acquisitions of Public Lands
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers lands under the “public domain.” These were lands acquired from state cessions, foreign governments, and Indian tribes. When the U.S. government acted to keep ownership of those lands, it did so by what came to be known as “reservations” or, sometimes, “withdrawals.” The terminology reflected the general understanding in public land policy before the Civil War that the “public domain” was available for divestment unless and until lands were “reserved” or “withdrawn.” Lands that the United States later came to own by donation or purchase, which would simply be known as “acquired” lands, were not considered part of the public domain and were not subject to divestment laws unless Congress specifically directed it. Reservations and acquisitions made before the Civil War were also much smaller than ones made later, but they show how, practically from the nation's beginning, Congress found it appropriate to hold some lands in public ownership in order to serve specific objectives. Those objectives changed as the nation's territory and population increased and its economy and culture evolved.
Public Land Policy in Confusion in the Period Before the Civil War
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers the various challenges to public land policy during the pre-Civil War era. It considers problems such as mining claims—which were separate from land claims—as well as conflicting or unclear claims upon public lands. These include issues such as conflicting or yet to be ratified land titles and government permits, Native American claims to public land, as well as the growing national divide over the issue of slavery. These are explored within the backdrop of a national gold fever, which brought with it quasi-governmental institutions which regulated the use of public land. The chapter explores these in depth and considers how the inevitable disputes which arose under these circumstances were resolved or even exacerbated.
Pillaging Public Lands for Wood, Grass, and Minerals
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers the exploitation of public land. As the nation recovered from the devastation wrought by the Civil War, and Euro-American influence spread across the continent, many of the resources of the lands that remained in public ownership were plundered to fuel an industrializing economy. Some profited handsomely, but many, including Native Americans confined to reservations or otherwise shunted aside, did not. As this happened, a movement arose to put limits on largely unchecked exploitation. By the century's last decade, it would be powerful enough to persuade Congress to act. In particular, the chapter takes a look at the effects of exploiting resources such as wood, grass, and minerals from public land.
Efforts Launched to Protect Public Forest Land
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter concerns public land protection and conservation. Protecting woodlands became a dominant theme of the backlash against the wholesale exploitation of public lands. The idea was given a powerful push in 1864 with the publication of a book titled Man and Nature, or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, written by George Perkins Marsh. Marsh's work married scientific inquiry with public policy. In fact, he became highly influential in public land policy and helped to invigorate the American conservation movement. The chapter also takes a look at the debates surrounding forest preservation during this time, as well as proposals to protect publicly owned forests in California.
Wildlife Protection Enters the Policy Universe
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter turns to wildlife protection. Until the late 1860s, no federal laws addressed wildlife, on or off public lands. But a diverse group of advocates for wildlife protection began to make its presence felt. Besides sport hunters and anglers largely drawn from the more comfortable classes, it included scientific collectors and naturalists, some who simply loved nature, and some concerned with animal welfare, such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. These disparate groups did not always see eye to eye, for lumbering could improve habitat for some species prized by sportsmen, and some anglers preferred introduced species to native fish stocks. But there was enough overlap in their interests for them often to work together for wildlife protection in what could be described as “an unlikely combination of bleeding hearts and gunners.”
Parks, Forests, and Public Land Policy in the McKinley Administration
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter takes a look at public land developments during the administration of President William McKinley. During this time, Congress and the executive continued to wrestle with what to allow in reserves. A good illustration came with the establishment of Mount Rainier National Park in 1899, the only national park established during the McKinley administration. The Mount Rainier park legislation was the first example of layering reservations or designations of public land on top of one another, a technique that became more and more common over the years. Designations proliferated to include things such as national monuments, wildlife refuges, recreation areas, conservation areas, and wilderness areas. Labels could be cumulative; for example, a forest reserve could become a national park and then a wilderness area. As a result of such actions, many areas of public lands have a complex history, and several layers of management guidance, with new layers usually (though not always) providing additional legal protections, accreting over time like geological strata. When a forest reserve was made a national park, for example, sport hunting was prohibited.
Theodore Roosevelt, Public Lands, and the Reclamation Act
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores the public land policies enacted during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt grasped many of the opportunities presented to him and left a huge imprint on national public land policy. During his seven-plus years in office, the amount of public land permanently reserved in national ownership more than tripled, and he set in motion or accelerated policy changes that led to much more being reserved in the decades to come. Roosevelt even broke new ground by driving the development of a public-lands-based energy policy. Additionally, the chapter focuses on the Reclamation Act of 1902, which helped justify the creation of more forest reserves; total reserve acreage tripled in the first seven years following its enactment.
Forest Reserves Expand in Roosevelt’s First Term
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses Theodore Roosevelt's efforts to expand forest reserves during his first term. It takes a look at his vigorous championing of public land policy reforms. He had called on Congress to transfer responsibility for the forest reserves to the Agriculture Department soon after taking office, but it took more than three years for Congress to act. Meanwhile, Gifford Pinchot's case to transfer the forest reserves to the Agriculture Department got a critical boost when reports began to surface in late 1902 of widespread abuses of divestment laws under the General Land Office's administration in Oregon and California. Subsequent events here eventually paid off with the establishment of the Transfer Act.
Making New Forest Reserves
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter focuses on the tensions between Congress and Theodore Roosevelt as the latter continued to use his authority to put many more millions of acres of public lands, a good many of which were being grazed by domestic livestock, into forest reserves, where the grazing would be regulated for the first time. Moving lands into forest reserves limited the opportunities for speculators and others who sought to abuse divestment laws, especially once Congress repealed the notorious “in lieu” exchange provision of the Organic Act in March 1905. It also made it more difficult to homestead and privatize public lands. Since the early 1890s, bills had occasionally been introduced to curb the president's authority to create new forest reserves, but none had made headway. Now, as Roosevelt continued to expand the forest reserves, stirrings of discontent were heard on Capitol Hill, particularly in the Senate.
The National Park System’s Early Years
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter traces early developments in the national park system, focusing in particular on Stephen Mather's tenure as National Park Service director. He had attempted to build a political constituency for the system. The primary way to do that, he believed, was to get people into the parks, which meant not only publicizing them but also building the infrastructure to facilitate visitation. For that, Mather needed congressional funding, because the parks, unlike the national forests, were never expected to bring in revenue through sale of resources like grass and timber. Additionally, the chapter also takes a look at some parks established during this period. The strong public support that led to the Organic Act for the National Park Service had also led Congress to designate several new parks.
The Forest and Park Services Compete and Cooperate
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter recounts the competition between the Park Service and the Forest Service for support among the general public and on Capitol Hill. This arose in multiple contexts and could sometimes descend into petty bickering. The Forest Service, which had been managing national forests for barely a decade when Congress created the National Park Service, viewed the new agency as a serious threat to its hegemony over public land reservations. Yet the two agencies managed to fashion some common policies that fostered cooperation between them. Nowhere was that vacillation between competition and cooperation more apparent than in the area of recreation, which flourished in both systems.
The End of the Progressive Era
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter focuses on the end of an important period of policy making which began in 1890 and gave lasting shape to the nation's public lands. This also ended for several decades the intense congressional engagement in reforming public land policies, leaving the executive branch as the primary engine of policy development until the 1960s. Although Congress produced a steady stream of legislation on public lands over that time, only a handful of laws had a fundamental impact. Additionally, the chapter examines the Teapot Dome scandal. Although it had little impact on public land policy overall, it did make public land administration a favorite subject for press scrutiny and occasionally led Interior Department officials to express frustration with the multiple layers of review installed to reduce opportunities for fraud.
Debating the Future of Unreserved Public Lands
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses the future of the remaining unreserved public lands. The pace of privatization steadily dwindled throughout the 1920s. During that same period, numerous dryland farmers and small ranching enterprises went bust, victims of low commodity prices, drought, or both. Some of their land was acquired by larger operators, but a good deal of it was eventually reacquired by the United States. These lands thus became the focus of numerous conflicting interests, such as homesteading, mining, livestock grazing, and even outdoor recreation. The chapter looks into the debates surrounding these unreserved public lands. It also deals with the Garfield Committee, a gathering organized for the purpose of the conservation and administration of unreserved public lands.
National Parks in the New Deal
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter discusses national park developments during the New Deal era. During this time, Franklin Roosevelt was a strong and vocal supporter of national parks. He looked for opportunities to add land to the system. He had been in office scarcely three months when, exercising authority that Congress had recently given him to reorganize the executive branch, he signed an executive order that paved the way for the Park Service to take responsibility for fifteen national monuments formerly overseen by the Forest Service, along with military parks, cemeteries, and other federal areas. It was a significant expansion of the park system. Altogether, Roosevelt signed legislation establishing four new national parks, proclaimed eleven new national monuments, oversaw the enlargement of many existing parks and monuments, and took numerous other steps that enlarged the vision of how public land ownership could protect the nation's natural and cultural heritage and make it accessible to all.
A System of Wildlife Refuges Begins to Emerge
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines the beginnings of what would eventually become a genuine national system of wildlife refuges. J. Clark Salyer II, a Missourian who had been a professor of biology, was its primary architect in its formative years. In the first two years, four dozen new refuges, which covered about 1.5 million acres of land, were established. By the time Salyer retired, in 1961, nearly 29 million acres were in national wildlife refuges. Not to be outdone, FDR established more than 150 areas on public lands in thirty-six states specifically to protect wildlife. He had one other important impact on public land wildlife policy. In 1939, using the reorganization authority that Congress had renewed a few months earlier, he transferred the Bureau of Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries from the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, respectively, to the Department of the Interior. A year later, the two bureaus were combined to form the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The FWS has administered the national wildlife refuges ever since.
Grazing and Logging the Public Lands in the Postwar Era
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers the U.S. government's efforts to address various public land issues in the years after World War II. It takes a look at the troubled beginnings of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), meant to manage the greatest amount of public land at the time and also supervise livestock grazing. At practically the same time that the BLM came into being, Congress was enacting the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Although it applied to agencies across the executive branch, it would have significant impact on decision making by agencies overseeing public land, especially by inviting federal courts to give more scrutiny to those decisions. However, during this period livestock operators persisted in bolstering their legal hold on public rangelands. There was also the rapid expansion in timber harvesting and road building. Meanwhile, recreational use of the national forests grew dramatically.
Making the Modern Bureau of Land Management
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter traces the developments leading to the formation of the modern Bureau of Land Management (BLM) across multiple presidencies. At the time, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations enthusiastically supported revamping how the BLM was to manage the public lands under its care. Here, the chapter introduces the Public Land Law Review Commission (PLLRC), which studies and recommends reforms in the nation's laws dealing with public lands (other than military lands and those in the national park system). It also takes a look at the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, or FLPMA, which incorporated many of the PLLRC's recommendations. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act began with a policy declaration once again reaffirming that public lands managed by the BLM “be retained in Federal ownership,” except under very narrow circumstances. It directed that BLM-managed public lands be managed on a “multiple use” and “sustained yield” basis. The 1979 “sagebrush rebellion” and subsequent developments in the West are also covered.
Mineral and Energy Development in the Modern Era
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter describes mineral and energy developments in the modern era. It discusses the repeal of the Mining Law of 1872 before turning to the coal boom and bust on public lands, spurred by an energy crisis in 1973. The chapter also takes a look at how immense deposits of oil shale on public lands in western Colorado, eastern Utah, and southern Wyoming gave rise to one of the most peculiar sagas in public land history. Offshore and onshore energy resources involving public lands, including submerged ones, are also discussed. The chapter concludes by exploring hydropower and renewable energy resource development in public lands.
Public Lands Today
Authors: Leshy John D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter describes present-day developments in public lands. It shows how distinctions among the four public land agencies are continuing to blur. Since 1960, Congress has enacted many laws that determine what uses are allowable on public lands without regard for the agency managing them. The chapter then turns toward environmental restoration in public lands—a constant concern for all public land agencies—as well as the redistribution of public land authority among the branches of government. Another important development in the modern era has been the increasing link between efforts to protect and restore natural values on public lands, and initiatives aimed at consolidating fragmented landholdings.
Ancient DNA
Authors: Jones Elizabeth D.
Published: September 2022

Ancient DNA research—the recovery of genetic material from long-dead organisms—is a discipline that developed from science fiction into a reality between the 1980s and today. Drawing on scientific, historical, and archival material, as well as original interviews with more than fifty researchers worldwide, the book explores the field's formation and explains its relationship with the media by examining its close connection to de-extinction, the science and technology of resurrecting extinct species. The book reveals how the search for DNA from fossils flourished under the influence of intense press and public interest, particularly as this new line of research coincided with the book and movie Jurassic Park. This is the first account to trace the historical and sociological interplay between science and celebrity in the rise of this new research field. In the process, the book argues that ancient DNA research is more than a public-facing science: it is a celebrity science.
Imposing Limits
Authors: Jones Elizabeth D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter assesses how, by the end of the 1990s, contamination concerns as they related to ancient DNA authenticity placed the practice's credibility on the line. The issue of contamination was illustrated most clearly, and most publicly, through those same research papers claiming to have extracted and sequenced multimillion-year-old DNA. The overturning of these research results had devastating consequences for the community's reputation. In response to this, some scientists sought to impose limits by defining criteria to minimize contamination in the lab and by redirecting research toward more promising avenues of study on less geologically ancient specimens that would be more likely to preserve DNA and have preserved enough of it to be used for meaningful analyses. Tomas Lindahl and Svante Pääbo were chief proponents of this conservative movement from the onset. After nearly two decades of research into the long-term preservation of DNA from ancient remains, it was clear that the field faced severe technological limitations, resulting in community division and widespread skepticism in its potential to deliver on initial promises.
Celebrity as Identity
Authors: Jones Elizabeth D.
Published: September 2022

This chapter identifies the two ways in which celebrity had a hand in ancient DNA's formation from the 1980s to today. First, popular interest helped to shape the practice of science by influencing the questions researchers asked, the funding they received, and the way they framed their research when communicating to wider popular and political audiences about its significance. Second, press and public recognition helped to define the search for DNA from fossils as a discipline in its own right. In the absence of an overarching theoretical framework and of consistent financial or institutional support, popular attention gave the field and the scientists within it a sort of status. However, the introduction of next-generation sequencing (NGS) at the turn of the century changed the situation for the community. NGS offered an opportunity to overcome some of its most persistent technological challenges, namely the lack of data and problem of contamination.
Russian Identity Between Empire and Nation
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: September 2022

President Vladimir Putin’s assertion that Russia retained a historically and culturally rooted responsibility to protect Ukrainian citizens in Crimea and Donbas was consistent with a long history of Russian rulers shaping the borders of communal identity for strategic ends. The struggle for Ukraine (and Belarus) is the clearest manifestation of the dichotomy between cultural-national and imperial conceptions of Russian identity—between the mostly Orthodox East Slavic core centered on the medieval commonwealth of Kyivan Rus (Kievskaya Rus’) and the wider imperial formation known as Russia (Rossiya). More extensively than Eurasia’s other postimperial states, though, Russia also asserts a claim on the loyalties of populations living outside its borders. Putin’s call to support not just Russians but also “Russian-speakers and compatriots” abroad suggests identification with a truly imperial nation whose geographic and cultural boundaries are themselves fuzzy, shifting along lines drawn by the state.
Russia’s Borderlands and the Territorialization of Identity
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: September 2022

Russia’s imperial legacy also shapes Moscow’s interactions with the roughly 19 percent of its population that does not identify as ethnically Russian. Much of this population is concentrated in ethnic republics created by the USSR that dot Russia’s eastern and southern peripheries. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, these ethnic republics, above all in the North Caucasus, have experienced struggles between demands for local autonomy and the Kremlin’s interest in strengthening the “power vertical.” Russia held onto the North Caucasus thanks to two brutal wars in Chechnya and, more recently, a turn to consciously imperial forms of rule, where local notables—most prominently Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov—act as Russian vassals. Kadyrov’s brutality, coupled with his infusion of Islamic (and pre-Islamic) elements to Chechen politics, is the starkest example of Moscow’s continued reliance on the “politics of difference” in its postimperial borderlands.
Those Who Call Themselves Turks
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: September 2022

The founders of the Turkish Republic viewed the Ottoman Empire’s diversity as a source of weakness that contributed to its demise. They established in its place a new state centered on a Turkish nation, whose origins and traditions they sought in an idealized pre-Ottoman and, sometimes, pre-Islamic past. That nation was confined to people living within the borders ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne. Its members were required to subsume alternate identities and embrace Turkish language and culture. This state-focused, culturally Turkish identity was part of a deliberate, defensive strategy to guard the new Republic against the nexus of communal mobilization and foreign intervention that led to the Ottoman Empire’s demise. Drawing on Ottoman nostalgia that lingered among the Islamist and nationalist opposition throughout the Republican era, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) embraces a narrative of continuity between the empire and the Republic. The AKP emphasizes the Ottoman Empire’s Islamic identity, and maintains a less extensive interest in the fate of Turkic-speakers dispersed across Eurasia from the Balkans to East Turkestan (Xinjiang).
Iran’s Borderlands
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: September 2022

Nation- and state-building in Iran required downplaying ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity, a process that sparked sometimes violent resistance. Areas with large minority populations, including Khuzestan, Azerbaijan, Baluchistan, Kurdistan, and the Turkmen region of Türkmen Sahra (Torkamansahra), all experienced uprisings at moments of political weakness at the center, notably when Allied forces occupied the country and deposed the German-leaning Reza Shah (1925–41) at the beginning of World War II, and again at the end of the war when Soviet occupation forces helped sustain short-lived Azeri and Kurdish statelets in northern Iran. Resistance to assimilation later encouraged many non-Persians to support the 1979 revolution and fed a resurgence of unrest around Iran’s frontiers in its aftermath. The Islamic Republic would nonetheless maintain much of the Pahlavis’ Persian-centrism, even as the embrace of sectarianism further alienated non-Shi’ite Baluch, Kurds, Turkmen, and other minorities. Incapable of implementing a genuine “politics of and lacking the resources to transform and integrate its periphery, the Islamic Republic administers its borderlands with securitized neglect.
Greater Iran ( Iranzamin ) and Iran’s Imperial Imagination
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: September 2022

Belief in the existence of a Greater Iran (Iranshahr or Iranzamin), which includes not only Mesopotamia but also the Caucasus and much of Central and South Asia, is often linked to nostalgia for the pre-Islamic age, and is used as a justification for Iran’s claims to regional-power status.
Only in the mid-nineteenth century, with the expansion of Russian and British power into the center of Eurasia, were Iranian claims decisively terminated. The erosion of Iranian influence in these regions in the century and a half following the end of the Safavid dynasty shifted Iran’s center of gravity from central Eurasia toward the Persian Gulf and the Levant, which remain the focal point for the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy today. Many Iranian intellectuals nevertheless consider the territories on the Eurasian mainland comprising Iran’s old empires part of Tehran’s natural sphere of influence. Perhaps most important, the loss of Iran’s imperial hinterlands feeds the Islamic Republic’s narrative of victimization. The 1979 Islamic Revolution, with its combination of millenarianism, grievance, and appeals to thousands of years of Iranian greatness, is thus difficult to imagine absent the trauma accompanying Iran’s loss of empire.
Civilization and Imperial Identity in China
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: September 2022

From the Eastern Zhou era (776–225 B.C.E.), the most important marker dividing the Sinitic realm (anachronistically, “China”) from the rest of the world was Confucian culture. The major dilemma facing imperial rulers lay in reconciling the aspiration for Confucian-inflected unity with the reality of ruling over peoples from outside the Confucian cultural realm. The Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty, was unsurpassed in its ability to establish stable administration over territories from Central Asia to the Pacific, adopting different strategies for ruling in the Confucian realm and mostly nomadic Inner Asia. Both the Republic of China (ROC), and the post-1949 People’s Republic of China (PRC) struggled to reconcile claims to the territorial legacy of the Qing with aspirations to transform this vast realm into something like a nation-state. Both acknowledged the existence of a composite nation, termed zhonghua minzu (roughly, “people of the central civilization”) made up of multiple populations but nevertheless “speaking” Mandarin Chinese. Especially since 1989, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has remained committed to the idea from the Confucian tradition of Chinese culture as the pinnacle of civilization, which the state is responsible for spreading to less enlightened peoples.
Sinocentrism and the Geopolitics of Tianxia
Authors: Mankoff Jeffrey
Published: September 2022

China’s Inner Asian periphery borders territories in neighboring Russia, Mongolia, and Central Asia lost during the final decades of Qing rule, and toward which the PRC maintains a still-ambivalent relationship. Beijing has resolved its border disputes with Russia and its Central Asian neighbors, but longstanding fears of Chinese expansionism have grown more acute since the announcement of the BRI, by which Beijing aspires to reshape the economic, political, and potentially, military balance. China’s neighbors worry the BRI could help consolidate a regional order that is more Sinocentric, with recipient states compelled to adopt much of China’s own security paradigm. Among the ideas invoked to support Beijing’s aspirations is the concept of “Great Unity [datong],” first discussed in the Confucian Book of Rites, with its emphasis on a single ruler for “all under the sky [tianxia] as one Family, and . . . all the Middle states [zhongguo] as one man.” Such ideas imply that Chinese preeminence throughout the historical tianxia—essentially the then-known world radiating out from northern China—was benign, and that Beijing’s contemporary aspiration to create what Xi Jinping calls a “Community of Common Destiny” is similarly based on a desire for “win-win” outcomes.
Sharing Family Lives between Private and Public Worlds
Authors: Corfield Penelope J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter investigates Georgians' shared daily experiences, focusing on Georgian home life. It details the status of the Georgian domicile, noting that their sturdy houses were better warmed than in earlier eras (though not universally), and were seen as places to enjoy and decorate in personal style. The chapter also emphasizes that living areas were becoming ever more separated from workplaces, as old-style domestic industries slowly disappeared. The Georgians were cultivating the concept of a stable family sanctum, to be displayed, at least in part, to others, yet simultaneously defended as personal space. The chapter then jumps to analyse the legal convention and the emotional focus on the nuclear family. Most Georgian households contained no more than one conjugal unit of parents plus children. It also considers the changing status of men, a sizeable number of Georgian households, and household variety.
Gaining Literacy and Numeracy
Authors: Corfield Penelope J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter assesses the shift from mass illiteracy to collective literacy and numeracy in the Georgian era. It argues that the numbers of both men and women who were literate and numerate decisively overtook the numbers of the illiterate and innumerate—which happened without state prompting. The chapter also peeks at how printed books began to wield a new cultural hegemony in Britain with the ending of rigorous press censorship. The power of writing and print culture was becoming steadily more predominant. The eighteenth century was a brilliant period in British poetry. The chapter underlines that the older oral traditions of verse were transformed into print, and older oral traditions of storytelling were transmuted into the birth of the novel. Georgians were simultaneously galvanised by the mixing of new creativity and traditional know-how via spreading literacy and numeracy.
Negotiating Political Power ‘Indoors’
Authors: Corfield Penelope J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter delves into the Georgian political world, noting that it relied crucially upon negotiation. The chapter emphasizes that many Georgians were deeply hostile to ideological conflict and civil strife. They did not want a return to the bloodshed of the mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. Given its pluralist networks, the chapter defines the Georgian political world as one of an emergent constitutionalism. It argues that it was not an absolutist ancien regime on a par with Spain or France. It had an army but was not a militarised state on a par with eighteenth-century Prussia. It was ruled by an oligarchy, meaning the rule of the few, but this oligarchy was broad-based and economically diversified. The chapter looks at the prevalent culture of individual ‘rights’, claimed by a wide sector of the adult male population, including (in England) the right to participate in the jury system. It then considers a tradition of political due process and ‘reason’.
Participating in Public Life ‘Out of Doors’
Authors: Corfield Penelope J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter begins by defining Georgians' ‘out of doors’ opinions as views of the wider public. It describes how public debates transformed through the combined impact of the end of the press licensing laws, the burgeoning of print culture, and the spread of literacy. ‘Free speech’ was becoming a cultural talisman, albeit subject to the laws of libel. The chapter also looks at how newspapers began to appear in some numbers. Their contents included snippets of local, national, and international news. It then analyses the influence of the press from the 1730s onwards, when sharp-eared journalists began to publish parliamentary reports. The chapter concludes by considering the limitations of press power. Newspapers were not controlling powers but, rather, as the chapter notes, soundingboards in the great echo-chamber of public debate.
Encountering the World and Its People
Authors: Corfield Penelope J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter emphasizes that the deeds and misdeeds of the Georgians overseas demonstrate how history emerges from the sum of big trends and many individual decisions. It describes the structural forces at work (notably technological power imbalances) and the complex actions and interactions between many different peoples. As the chapter highlights, Britons were to an extent prepared for overseas adventures by their imaginative travel literature. It then proceeds to recount one exotic arrival who gained fame in 1704 as the self-styled first native of Formosa (today Taiwan) to visit Britain—George Psalmanazar. The chapter stresses that discovering the diversity of global experience was a source of endless interest. It then elaborates on the role of Britain in the wider world—and the relationships of its people to ‘others’.
Georgian Deeds and Misdeeds
Authors: Corfield Penelope J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter investigates specific Georgian legacies, which gain extra resonance when viewed through the unfolding of time. It argues that retrospective assessments of the past should be undertaken with calm and, as far as possible, without error. The chapter also highlights that some historical events cast exceptionally long shadows, hence, it is just that they be assessed not only at the time they happened but also in the light of longer experience. The chapter stresses that one implication of Britain's development in the long eighteenth century was that its deeds and misdeeds were being enacted on a global stage, shared by a multitude of part-cooperating and part-competing interests worldwide. It then examines how and why inhumane policies in the past were implemented, as a means of attempting to prevent their equivalents in both the present and future.
The Long Land War
Authors: Guldi Jo
Published: September 2022

This book offers the definitive account of the rise and fall of land rights around the world over the last 150 years. The book tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered “land reform” policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until U.S.-led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974. It provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, the book works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.
Introduction
Authors: Guldi Jo
Published: September 2022

This chapter provides a background on a tradition of thought, tactic, strategy, and paradox that forms the long story of occupancy rights in the past. It explores the occupancy rights that appeared in urban areas and rural ones alike that are propagated through a variety of techniques, such as rent strikes, squats, national policies, and international mapping programs. It also discusses the genealogy of those techniques and how those techniques altered the idea of property as the right to exclude. The chapter looks at contemporary debates about productivity, farm size, technology, democracy, and poverty, confirming what can be said about the long trail of displaced persons and bureaucrats who worked toward an end to a culture of displacement. It reviews an intellectual history of movements, both elite and common, that contemplated the tools for securing freedom from displacement.
Something Like a Global Government of Land
Authors: Guldi Jo
Published: September 2022

This chapter recounts the gathering of officers of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome to contemplate their role on a global scale. Their challenge was to help peasants in developing nations farm economically and thereby maintain control over their own land. It considers the movement of FAO from Quebec to Rome as a symbol of its founders' desires to serve the decolonizing nations of the world. The chapter discusses how advocates of redistribution at the FAO labored through the 1950s to create an international organization largely concerned with land and invested with an unprecedented power to advise governments around the world and with the authority to construct grand plans. The FAO was given the Latin motto Fiat Panis or “Let There Be Bread,” being charged with the explicit mission of defending and feeding peasants around the world.
Can Land Redistribution Scale with Population?
Authors: Guldi Jo
Published: September 2022

This chapter reviews economic systems and strategies that would create wealth for racial majorities, such as the agrarian models embraced by Ireland and Mexico. Postwar social scientists influenced by Doreen Warriner frequently assumed that post-colonial nations would choose the agrarian model, emphasizing the redistribution of land. The chapter discusses appropriate technology, which featured an intellectual set of ideas about how and why small-scale technology should play a key role on small farms across the developing world. It clarifies how appropriate technology was identified with the idea of the small farmer in the post-colonial world. The farmer's relationship to land as an owner was created by mid-century redistribution programs like the ones designed in India, which worked in direct contrast with the formulae for economic development promoted by many U.S. economists that promoted technological investment.
The Peasant’s Calculator
Authors: Guldi Jo
Published: September 2022

This chapter describes technology, which was central to many ideas about a world marked by occupancy. Technology was a key element that explained how post-colonial countries might simultaneously redistribute their land and build a solid economic future. The chapter explains how some visionaries imagined peasants as potential micro-industrialists, manufacturing buckets and hoes for their neighbors. It looks at Indian ideas about small-scale technology and its role in supporting peasants that eventually inspired UN projects for the distribution of hoes, maps, and bibliographies. The ultimate evolution of that vision might be best symbolized by the Curta, a handheld calculator that would plug the Indian peasant into global networks of information about price, opportunity, and credit and help them to bid on prices.
A Neoliberal Rebellion in Britain
Authors: Guldi Jo
Published: September 2022

This chapter describes a new set of writers from developed nations that challenged government bureaucracy with a new vision of market efficiency in the 1940s and 1950s. These writers, which were later dubbed “neoliberal” for their adherence to propositions about capitalism derived from eighteenth-century classical liberal thought, viewed proposals for government rent regulation and land redistribution as heresy. The chapter looks at historical research that has concentrated extensively on the twentieth-century impact of neoliberalism on ideas in the university, in social policy, and in law. It defines neoliberal as the twentieth-century movement that endorsed market competition as the basis for political decision making. After the 1970s, the most visible impact of neoliberal ideas was on housing and land policy.
Merchants
Authors: Smith Edmond
Published: September 2022

In the century following Elizabeth I's rise to the throne, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants launched ventures across the globe. Through the efforts of these “mere merchants,” England developed from a peripheral power on the fringes of Europe to a country at the center of a global commercial web, with interests stretching from Virginia to Ahmadabad and Arkhangelsk to Benin. This book traces the lives of English merchants from their earliest steps into business to the heights of their successes. The book unpicks their behavior, relationships, and experiences, from exporting wool to Russia, importing exotic luxuries from India, and building plantations in America. It reveals that the origins of “global” Britain are found in the stories of these men whose livelihoods depended on their skills, entrepreneurship, and ability to work together to compete in cutthroat international markets. As a community, their efforts would come to revolutionize Britain's relationship with the world.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Edmond
Published: September 2022

This chapter introduces the concept of merchants. Following 1550, English trade blossomed as thousands of merchants participated in international ventures. Thus, entry to the ranks of England's merchant community was carefully controlled and restricted to maintain standards. Then, the restrictions became the catalysts for English merchants to adapt a large range of innovative business models to operate overseas. The overlapping interests of merchants sparked the global expansion of England's commerce. The chapter uses the experiences of English merchant William Turner, who had been caught in a series of uncertainties like changing weather, shifting market conditions, and navigating diverse jurisdictions that were part of the everyday life of early modern merchants.
Many Bodies Corporate
Authors: Smith Edmond
Published: September 2022

This chapter looks into corporations. Corporations functioned as communities, with trust, reputation and good relationships essential for their success. Commercial ventures into new markets served as a means for English merchants to experiment with the institutional models as they established trade with people outside the industry. The chapter explores how new merchants could join the industry through proof, letters, contracts, and recommendations. It also emphasises the importance of maintaining a social network in an effort to practise effective business. Additionally, a governor would lead corporations and be trusted to understand their commercial and political duties on behalf of the generality.
Tracing Transformation in Turbulent Times
Authors: Hoosain Khan Gabriel , Barnes Nina , Alves Sianne
Published: September 2022

We live in a South Africa defined by deep inequalities. The post-apartheid promise of free and quality education is met by the realities of lasting disparities related to race, gender, socioeconomic class and disability, among other factors. The University of Cape Town (UCT) has initiated two interdependent processes to chart and track transformation, inclusion and diversity during these turbulent times. First, the university has set up an Inclusivity Survey, using a validated scale to understand staff experiences in relation to inclusion. Secondly, the university has identified and piloted a set of Transformation Benchmarks inspired by a higher education barometer for transformation in South Africa and global diversity and inclusion standards, which encourages transformation agents to take concrete actions to further transformation. Both these processes, first implemented in 2019, experimented with new ways of tracing the shape of transformation, inclusion and diversity at UCT. The paper will explore the opportunities and limitations these structured approaches to transformation offer to higher education institutions. For example, while structured approaches are useful, some argue that these reduce the complexity of social struggles (like those against racism) to simple box-ticking exercises. In unpacking these issues, the paper seeks to ask: how can we better monitor, evaluate and track progress in an increasingly turbulent world?
Housing histories, housing options
Authors: Peace Sheila
Published: September 2022

Chapter Six provides a bridge between the circumstances of a majority of older people in Britain who live in age-integrated housing as part of an intergenerational community many wishing to ‘stay put’ and those who have made a move to age-related settings – to specialised housing or a care home. Here different scenarios are given from empirical research undertaken by the author and colleagues and issues raised regarding decision-making over whether, or not, to move are debated. The concept of ‘option recognition’ in terms of making choices over dwelling and lifestyle in later life highlights the inequalities that exist in terms of availability, access and information; and the diversity of choice available for people across living environments. To conclude the meaning of home in mainstream housing is introduced through issues raised in Chapters 5 and 6 building on the rural/urban lens.
Care home living: a form of long-term care
Authors: Peace Sheila
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers long term care (LTC) in UK care homes (residential and nursing); the living/working environment, and approaches to person/relationship-centred care. Seen as necessary and chosen by some residents, this communal living is avoided by others despite increasing vulnerability at end of life. A historical account of care home development demonstrates increasing privatisation of provision, on-going financial tensions, and regulation reflecting continuing concern over quality of care. Providers vary from family concerns to large corporate businesses, and details are given of current residents, staff and financial arrangements. Specific attention is paid to the built environment particularly dementia-friendly design issues. A review of care home research underpins discussion of the meaning of home through the lens of the care home, the last micro-environment considered, a regulated and perhaps more restricted way of living. The gradual acceptance of more communal environments is posed as another view on ageing and place