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Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 explores what literate British people understood by the word 'Europe' in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Was Europe unified by shared religious heritage? Where were the edges of Europe? Was Europe primarily a commercial network or were there common political practices too? Was Britain itself a European country?While intellectual history is concerned predominantly with prominent thinkers, Paul Stock traces the history of ideas in non-elite contexts, offering a detailed analysis of nearly 350 geographical reference works, textbooks, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, which were widely read by literate Britons of all classes, and can reveal the formative ideas about Europe circulating in Britain: ideas about religion; the natural environment; race and other theories of human difference; the state; borders; the identification of the 'centre' and 'edges' of Europe; commerce and empire; and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change.--

This article explores the association between racial thought and the idea of Europe in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. It begins by noting the complexities surrounding the word "race" in this period, before considering whether—and on what grounds—contemporary race thinkers identify a "European race" or "races". This reveals important ambiguities and correlations between anatomical, genealogical and cultural understandings of human difference. The essay then discusses how some of these ideas find expression in British encyclopedias, histories and geographical books. In this way, it shows how racial ideas are disseminated, not just in dedicated volumes on anatomy and biological classification, but also in general works which purport to summarize and transmit contemporary received knowledge. The article draws upon entries on "Europe" in every British encyclopedia completed between 1771 and 1830, as well as named source texts for those articles, tracing how the word "Europe" was used and what racial connotations it carried. Some entries imply that "European" is either a separate race entirely, or a subcategory of a single human race. Others, however, reject the idea of a distinctive European people to identify competing racial groups in Europe. These complexities reveal increasing interest in the delineation of European identities, an interest which emerges partly from long-standing eighteenth-century debates about the categorization and comprehension of human difference. In addition, they show the diffusion of (contending) racial ideas in non-specialist media, foreshadowing the growing prominence of racial thought in the later nineteenth century.

This article explores how major British Romantic writers perceived Napoleon in the early nineteenth century: the ideas they associated with him and the images they used to depict him. I argue that these perceptions have relatively little to do with the politics of the various writers, or with the chronology of Napoleon's career. Instead, interest in Bonaparte is driven by aesthetic and philosophical concerns: especially the question of whether Napoleon is an ordinary man 'within' history, or a semi-allegorical personage -a representative of some ideology or concept (like Liberty or Heroism). I also discuss how Napoleon is appended to the Romantic problem of the 'overreacher', who fails due to his glorious success, and who thus blurs the boundaries between triumph and failure. Lastly, I show how Napoleon influences Romantic concern about 'imposing' ideas onto analysis of the world. In this way, Napoleon exposes insecurities at the heart of Romantic self-perception.

AbstractContemporary challenges in rural and environmental politics hinge on understanding what success and failure mean. One avenue of studying success and failure of political and social change efforts is to study social movements and intentional communities often equated with how many years such efforts persisted. The Catholic Worker movement's combination of a vision of radical social change, religion, nonviolence, hospitality, activism, and agrarianism involve publications, urban houses, and farms that constitute a movement and a network of autonomous intentional communities. The Catholic Worker movement's communal farms began in 1933 and at various points those efforts were deemed failures. Thus, the story of the Catholic Worker farms is one of impermanence and struggle for a desired ideal. However, what we are missing in condemning the farms to failure is the utter success since the 1970s of a strong agrarian and environmental strain of the Catholic Worker movement based on farm activity, activism, and cooperative economics. This study reconceptualizes failure in the language of process and context. The Catholic Worker farms case study refigures failure such that we can articulate a politics of possibility related to the dramatic challenges not only of society but also of the environment.

AbstractThis article proposes a revised conceptual definition of consensus social movement. By using the example of the Catholic Worker, I construct a workable concept of a consensus social movement based on Quaker consensus and indigenous decision-making. The new definition of consensus social movement brings theoretical strength as demonstrated in the illustration of the Catholic Worker. The concept of a consensus social movement offers a revised theoretical tool for the social movement literature toolkit.

AbstractIn the wake of an explosion in the organic food sector, it is vital to differentiate, not only between conventional and organic producers, but between types of organic producers. By exploring a network of family organic farmers in the US Midwest through participant observation and interviews we can better understand the inherent overlap between the categorisations of producer and consumer through the lenses of identity and the reflexive producer. By studying a small network of organic food producers, I illustrate the emergence of a small, but important category of reflexive producers that shed light on the alternative ideology and actions of family organic farmers concerned with protecting the environment and the health of their customers and people in general. Furthermore, reflexive farmers illustrate the moral care associated with good farming.

AbstractThis article adopts Van der Ploeg's theory of repeasantisation to demonstrate that, even in the largely industrialised agricultural state of Kansas, USA, there are unexpected interstices within neoliberalised agriculture where industrial farmers can exercise and produce autonomy. This study draws from interviews across a range of production strategies including conventional industrial farmers, entrepreneurial, and self‐styled organic farmers. A central claim of this article is that entrepreneurial farmers demonstrate peasant principle practices and therefore a process of repeasantisation is occurring in the USA. Most importantly, this emerging repeasantisation offers a glimpse at the kinds of sustainable agriculture that might be possible in the future. The article concludes that repesantisation strategies may offer hope for societal and ecological repair.