Rural restructung: Global processes and their responses

Book Reviews their gains would more than cover the additional rentcharge which landlords installing underdrained would levy, underdraining proceeded on the basis of mutual benefit. This only broke down as falling prices for cereals reduced the possibility of achieving an adequate rate of return on the drainage of arable. The enhanced output associated with the drainage of pasture was never sufficient to provide an adequate return on capital. All-in-all, this is a book which tells a fascinating tale, altholagh not always, it has to be said, in a way which readily communicates its fascination. There are times when one feels that the text would have been better served had its editors adopted a more interventionist stance. In other-respects, Dr Phillips has been more fortunate. The plausibility of his estimates and of the argument which is based upon them is unlikely to be challenged. The negligible interest of smaller estates in adopting loan capital gives some reassurance that surviving estate records, inevitably more informative about larger than about smaller properties, provide a valid insight into the distribution of privately funded drainage activity. The suggested four-to-one ratio of private to loan-funded drainage looks like a sound working hypothesis, given that it derives detailed empirical support from three contrasting counties. Above all, Dr Phillips is fortunate in having embarked on this study at a time before pressures for quick completion began to dissuade Ph.D. students from long-term and wide-ranging programmes of data collection. The book is a testimony to the enduring virtues of the old-style doctorate. JOHN R. WALTON

University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, U.K. Rural Restructuring: Global Processes and Their Responses, Terry Marsden, Philip Lowe and Sarah Whatmore (cds), ix + 197 pp., 1990, David Fulton, London

This is an ambitious and interesting edited volume of seven papers on rural responses to global processes of change in the advanced capitalist economies. It seeks to attract a transdisciplinary audience concerned with international comparative research on rural change. The initial two papers, among the most interesting in the volume, set the context. A lengthy introduction by the editors reviews the development of theory in rural sociology and related fields and concludes that the new rural sociology has dispelled the 'autarky' of theoretical isolation but risks 'bifurcation'. Out of the controversies of the 1970s developed two separate strands of thought about rural areas. The agrarian political economy strand has focused on the question of agricultural exceptionalism: why has agriculture not developed like industry? An emerging food production chain perspective looks to the entire food chain rather than the farm for the integration of agriculture and industry. The second strand derives from a largely separate body of literature from urban and regional studies and focuses on the progressive restructuring of rurality under a declining Fordist industrial hegemony. This approach questions the importance of the rural-urban dichotomy and the need for a separate social theory of rural areas. The editors claim we need to reverse the centrifugal tendencies of these two strands to synthesize the vertical integration of the food system with the

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horizontal disintegration and recombination of spatial structure. Mormont, in 'Who is Rural? or, How to be Rural: Towards a Sociology of the Rural', takes an innovative and much welcome approach to the question of the relevance of the rural-urban dichotomy. Instead of arguing directly the futility of the rural category, Mormont asks instead under what historical circumstances did the concept of the rural develop? His thesis is that the distinctiveness of rurality was viable only for the short period between the wars when the upheaval of modernization encouraged people to see themselves in a broader context that emphasized the similarities rather than the differences between rural areas. He concludes that the rural is a category that is reconstructed by each society, and it is this social construction which defines the object of rural studies. Chapters 2-4 approach the question of restructuring from the standpoint of agrarian policy and the food chain. They examine relationships between restructuring in global commodity markets and national agrarian policy. In the 1980s the contradictions inherent in the agrarian strategies of the advanced capitalist nations, oriented to increased output and supportive price subsidies for farmers, reached crisis proportions. Different states responded contingently to similar structural forces depending on the historical development of national agrarian politics and on national position in international commodity markets. Commins, in

'Restructuring Agriculture in Advanced Societies: Transformation, Crisis and Responses', identifies two policy orientations for dealing with crisis: deregulation to market management and continued protection that recognizes other social contributions of farmers and agriculture. The EC is moving towards greater dualism: a highly efficient farm sector producing most of the food coexisting with increasingly numerous holdings legitimized by other roles. In Sweden, as described by Martin Peterson in 'Paradig-

matic Shift in Agriculture: Global Effects and the Swedish Response', post-war farm policy was based on a social compromise whereby farm support for the Social Democrats' social policies was exchanged for supportive regulation of internal food prices and farm incomes. The system seemed immune to change until a deregulation movement, representing a paradigmatic shift, developed in the mid 1980s. Geoffrey Lawrence, in 'Agricultural

Restructuring and Rural Social Change in Australia', describes the aggressive deregulatory steps Australia is taking to cope with progressive marginalization and deindustrialization. The decision has been made, quite consciously and using orthodox comparative advantage theory, that Australia will fit into the new global economy as a raw material supplier closely integrated with transnational corporations. As a result, Australia is becoming increasingly reliant on large-scale, mechanized, chemically dependent, vertically integrated agricultural production. Chapters 5-7 examine rural restructuring through largely nonagrarian mechanisms. Summers, Horton and Gringeri, in 'Rural Labour-Market Changes in the United States', review trends in nonagricultural rural employment. They argue that to understand these trends mainstream theoretical work on labour markets must be incorporated. The authors briefly survey the relevant theoretical field, from more traditional demand-based theory to institutionoriented theories such as segmented labour markets, but they do not provide any of the called for links between theory and observation. Cloke and Thrift's contribution on "Class and Change in Rural Britain" is notable for its

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B o o k Reviews

poststructural approach to the definition of class and for its interweaving of base and superstructure in the development of class consciousness. The paper asks whether class still matters in rural Britain. It does, but traditional definitions of class based on labour relations or property are no longer adequate. The changing facets of capital relations have led to a widespread and highly complex reorganization of production and consumption so that existing static descriptions of class divisions have been strained to the breaking point, lntraclass conflict, in particular, becomes increasingly important. Their analysis of conflicts among fractions of the service class reveals fault lines along public/private, gender, life cycle, consumption practice, and type of locality that provide the basis for conflict among various and divergent groups. In

'Household, Consumption and Livelihood: Ideologies and Issues in Rural Research', Redclift and Whatmore argue that the new political economy of rural areas focuses too closely around institutions and relations of capitalist production. Processes of reproduction may seem elusive but provide insights that are central to understanding how the economic system works. The significance of such potential perceptual shifts lies in the deep contradictions evident in rural policy debates framed by increasingly unrealistic ideologies presupposing women's nuturing domestic role and a bourgeois social order. The success of the volume as a whole in meeting the goals laid out by the editors depends on the extent to which these last two groups of papers move in the direction of a new synthesis and a reconstruction of the rural problematic. All of the papers contribute to a more theoretically informed perspective on the rural under restructuring. They all link, to a greater or lesser degree, global processes and change in rural areas. But the shape of a new synthesis that combines the perspectives of the literatures on agrarian political economy and regional restructuring remains elusive. More probably cannot be expected in an edited volume from diverse contributors. R E B E C C A S. ROBERTS

The University of Iowa, U.S.A. Global Forest Resources, Alexander S. Mather, x + 341 pp., 1990, Bellhaven Press, London, £29.50 hb The fate of the world's forests is one of the major and recurrent themes in the new environmental awareness that has developed since the start of the 1980s. It must be said, however, that our knowledge of the world's forest resources is often poor. In particular, the constant modification and conversion of the tropical forests make it very difficult indeed to make any reasonably scientific assessment of the state of the resource and the rate at which it is being depleted. Alexander Mather's decision to try to produce a comprehensive volume on the forest resources of the world is to be welcomed. It was not an easy task, but it must be said that he has achieved a great deal and produced a book of considerable value. The book begins with consideration of the resource base, including some discussion on forest types and then considers the historical perspectives on resource use. This is followed by a section on the extent and distribution of the resource and here many statistics are presented which constantly need checking in the mind as different sources produce different estimates. Control, management and

use of the resource is discussed and there follows a section on the forest resource and the environment which, although not written by a specialist in this particular field, is sound and sensible. It can be used to identify major effects and is in no sense sensationalist. Finally, the case of tropical forests is considered in more detail and the role of people in relation to forests is discussed. There is a good bibliography. There are few criticisms of the book. Such a text is hardly likely to be a bundle of fun to read and some sections are dry. It is difficult to see how this could have been altered, however, and the book is generally well written. Maybe a few more illustrations might have improved the text, but these are minor points and should not detract from the overall impression which is that this book is a sound and most valuable addition to the literature. DON H A R D I N G

School of Agricultural and Forest Sciences, University College of North Wales, Bangor The Countryside of Medieval England, Grenville Astill and Annie Grant (eds), xi + 282 pp., 1988, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, £35

This is a book of good intention. It starts from a forgivable premise which has tempted many scholars working in the wide field of medieval rural society: this assumes that if only we could all get together, each from our own disciplines, the sum of our various contributions would be greater than our parts. Such an idea goes under the banner of multidisciplinarity, and for a while at least it seemed to be what landscape studies offered. This book illustrates in its diversity some of the strengths of that approach, but also some of its fundamental weaknesses. In overall structure this book is a collection of eight thematic essays, sandwiched between two overviews offered by the editors. Essentially it is written from the two disciplinary standpoints of the economic historian and the archaeologist, but the balance is curious. For example, Dyer gives a cogent view of the economic historian's basic data and their intrinsic problems, but there is nothing coherent in a similar vein from any of the archaeologists. Why? The problematics of the material text are at least as great as those of the documentary. The answer lies, I think, in the desire of the archaeologists to subsume their texts within the objectives and strategies of economic history, and in doing so are reluctant to face the very serious intrinsic difficulties involved. So in this book there has been a clear attempt to unify the contributions around a core idea of describing the resources of the medieval rural economy and analysing them in terms of the efficiency, spatial variation and temporal dynamics of their exploitation. This is economic history. All the authors have worked hard, each in their own way and each starting out from their own kind of data, to provide information contributing towards an understanding of these issues, and at the end the editors have done their best to draw the threads together. What is revealed in terms of efficiency is a depressing view of the Middle Ages when technology failed to overcome a socially structured weakness of economic motivation in which resources and skills were in the hands of the peasants while profits were in the hands of the lords. As a consequence resources were