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This chapter examines Max Weber's exploration of the American heartland and frontier, with particular emphasis on his experiences in Oklahoma and the Indian Territory. It first considers how the idea for Weber's Oklahoma and Indian Territory trip originated in the first place before discussing the “unique problems” that Weber encountered in the Indian Territory, including questions of tribal membership or citizenship, and land allotment. It then analyzes Weber's claim that the coming of modern industrial civilization led to the rapid disappearance of the romanticized past. As he put it, the “Leatherstocking romanticism” of native life and the frontier was coming to an end. The chapter also explores Weber's views on the construction of “nature,” the emergence of a new world, and traditionalism and concludes with an assessment of the significance of the frontier to Weber's work.

This chapter considers the public career of Mary Ann Gilbert (1776–1845), a landed proprietor in Eastbourne in East Sussex where she established herself as a leading agricultural expert and poor law reformer. Her activities had a substantial impact on local parochial politics and her work was cited and discussed in parliamentary reports and government commissions. Gilbert personifies the overlapping themes of landownership, local influence, and personal authority. Her ability to construct herself as a female expert through cultural confidence and specialized knowledge, her employment of the varying modes of epistolary exchange, her use of ephemeral print culture, and her relationship with parochial government all emerge as particularly important themes. This chapter examines the salience of dynastic subjectivity as well as Gilbert's public spheres, her marriage, and her role in agricultural reform and the allotment movement during her time.

In the two decades preceding removal, Creeks and other Indians in the South were under great pressure to distance themselves from their black relatives. Georgia and the United States seized Creek land in the Treaty of Indian Springs and the Treaty of Washington. After the Creek removal treaty of 1832, white land speculators began stealing Indian allotments. At this time, William Grayson purchased his father's slave, Judah, and married her.

The Dawes Act and allotment brought an end to the Creek Nation. Although both Creeks and black Indians struggled to hold onto their land, those with lighter skin were relatively better off. The oil boom in Tulsa proved particularly harmful to Indians.

This chapter introduces the contexts of Removal and Allotment and positions them both in the ideology of colonization and the response of decolonization. Throughout the chapter U.S. colonial ideas (paternalism, territoriality, godly authority) are discussed as a larger framework. Simultaneously, Native decolonization efforts are outlined as a responsive, critical framework. A larger purpose statement – regarding the Native-U.S. relationship and the importance of studying the mingling of governmental and Native rhetoric in these contexts – is also articulated. The chapter ends with a discussion of textual veracity, textual methods, and the inevitability of strategic essentializing.

Chapter Four addresses colonizing governmental discourses surrounding the Dawes Act of 1887 and the identity constructions that arose as the nation edged ever closer to removed Native communities in the West. The chapter, particularly, argues that the U.S. government transformed the paternal relationship it employed in the 1830s to exclude Natives into a rhetorical strategy of assimilation. In the process, American Indians were constituted as dependent and yet civilized enough for agricultural production as a key contribution to the U.S. nation-state. This illustrated a commodification of Native communities through republicanism. And, the government constructed itself as a republican father that would train American Indians for possible citizenship through the allotment policy’s insistence on yeoman farming. The late nineteenth century promises of citizenship pointed to the possibility that American Indians could exist as equals within the civis. However, the colonizing Dawes Act continued to distance American Indians from the U.S. nation. This conflation of assimilation and segregation underscored the identity duality of U.S. nationalism. But, the possibility that citizenship was feasible acted as a decolonial rupture that American Indians worked through to petition for both U.S. citizenship and separate sovereignty.

Chapter Five analyzes the fashion in which American Indians decolonially challenged the allotment policy, and did so in part by restructuring their dependent – and the government’s self-professed paternal and controlling – identities codified in the Dawes Act. American Indians crafted their rebukes to the policy through petitions, memorials, biographical and literary works and public speeches that served to interrogate the identity duality that was entrenched in the allotment scheme. Specifically, the chapter argues that American Indians gave voice to this dualism and these identity constructions, signifying both the hybrid relationship between the U.S. government and Native communities and the decolonizing power of indigenous voice in exposing the government’s contradictions. That is, Dawes era Native discourses pierced the mythos of republicanism and paternalism that the government imbricated, thus revealing the incongruence of the allotment policy’s promises of citizenship combined with further exclusion.

This book concludes with a discussion of how the community of Chewey and the Cherokee families who lived in the area survived allotment. When anthropologist Albert L. Wahrhaftig conducted his research there during the 1960s, Chewey remained a stable community that still exhibited communitarian ethics. In the decades after allotment, Cherokees there continued to propose their own solutions to the challenges of survival. Allotment was supposed to assimilate them, but Cherokees often have remained at odds with the policies dictated by the federal government and the ideals imposed by the outside world. This is not because Cherokees cannot adapt. As Wahrhaftig put it, “Cherokees innovate when it is necessary to do so in order to keep their way of life intact. Not unchanged, but intact.” Cherokees in Chewey organized to develop what Wahrhaftig called a “common and autonomous economic base.”

This chapter examines the provisions of the Persons with Disabilities (PWD) Act in India concerning the right to access and public services of persons with disabilities. It explains that Chapter VII and VIII of the Act aim to ensure non-discrimination and access for persons with disabilities in transport, the built environment, and for allotment of land, and evaluates the implementation of these non-discrimination duties. It also considers issue of access to voting rights and the right to have access to information and technology.

This concluding chapter resumes the Shoeboots family story in the Dawes Allotment era of the 1890s, and analyzes Doll and Shoe Boots' youngest son's failed application for Cherokee citizenship. As more outsiders of various racial backgrounds crossed Cherokee borders, distinctions between former slaves of Cherokees, Afro-Cherokees, and newcomer blacks began to blur. The overwhelmed Cherokee government seized on a strategy that would strictly determine who had the right to settle on Cherokee land and practice the privileges of citizenship. However, the U.S. government was developing a policy that would further disempower the Cherokees and other Native nations. In 1887, the General Allotment Act was passed, which intended to dissolve Indian tribalism and foster assimilation into American society.

Chapter 3 argues that the policy of allotment and the Indian boarding school program work together to enact a “romance plot.” Through readings of statements by officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and annual reports by school principals and reservation agents, it illustrates how Indians are portrayed as lacking “home” and “family,” casting systemic efforts to break up native social networks, landholding patterns, and modes of governance as an attempt to teach them the forms of domestic affect that will enable them to gain equality as national citizens. Zitkala-Ŝa’s American Indian Stories (published in 1921 but composed of turn-of-the-century pieces) responds to the heteronormative impositions of Indian policy by contextualizing Dakota marriage within complex kinship systems, which themselves are shown to be durable, extensive, emotionally rich, and central to native political life. Yet while critiquing the fragmenting force of privatized domesticity, Zitkala-Ŝa offers an image of tradition that displaces discussion of the presence of polygamy and homoeroticism among Sioux peoples in ways that try to make tradition more acceptable to white readers by editing out the features likely to be read as sexually deviant. In illustrating this “bribe of straightness,” the chapter situates her writing within both the controversy surrounding Mormon plural marriage and the prominence of Lewis Henry Morgan’s evolutionary theory of family formation.

Small farm owners’ own ideological inclinations hampered their ability to organize against the forces that threatened them. Though they shared a common plight, black and white farmers saw themselves as separate groups, an understanding that hurt them all and foreclosed their ability to organize in their best interests. In this way, the small-farming class was, in part, a casualty of the elite-dominated, one-party system of the Jim Crow South. Drawing upon federal farm records and little-used state farm census surveys, this chapter examines the tobacco acreage control program to illustrate this point. The tobacco program, created under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, disqualified farmers producing less than an acre of tobacco, and disproportionately affected black farmers. I argue that their exit from farming undermined the bargaining position of all small farm owners and penalized farmers who had diverted acreage from cash crops to subsistence crops during the 1920s.

From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War corporate gardens and parks provided opportunities for sports, music, dancing and gardening, activities that in some districts would not have been so readily accessible to working people, particularly to women and to youth. Middle class attitudes to ‘rational and respectable’ recreation shaped these activities and before the First World War, they were segregated by gender. However, recreational opportunities provided by these companies for their female and child employees were progressive by the industrial standards and, in some ways by the social standards of the day. The corporate landscapes also provided valuable land for food production in wartime and in the Great Depression.

I have spent most of my living and working life in the countryside, surrounded by open fields, woodlands and hills, and in close contact with the soil. I recently changed my job and moved to the University of Manchester, which is in the centre of one of the largest cities in England. Because of this move my contact with soil is much less; in fact, as I walk each morning to my office, there is hardly a handful of soil to be seen. But is this really true of the whole city? Concrete, asphalt, and bricks certainly seal much of the ground in Manchester, as in most cities and towns. But soil is in abundance: it lies beneath the many small gardens, flower beds, road and railway verges, parks, sports grounds, school playing fields, and allotments of the city. In fact, it has been estimated that almost a quarter of the land in English cities is covered by gardens, and in the United States, lawns cover three times as much area as does corn. As I write, I am on a train leaving central London from Waterloo Station, and despite the overwhelming dominance of concrete and bricks, I can see scattered around many small gardens, trees, flowerpots and window boxes, overgrown verges on the railway line, small parks and playing fields for children, football pitches, grassy plots and flower beds alongside roadways and pavements, and small green spaces with growing shrubs outside office blocks and apartments. The city is surprisingly green and beneath this green is soil. Throughout the world, more and more people are moving to cities: in 1800 only 2 per cent of the world’s population was urbanized, whereas now more than half of the global human population live in towns and cities, and this number grows by about 180,000 people every day. This expansion has been especially rapid in recent years.

My first visit to a battleground was during a family holiday to Scotland. We were staying in Applecross, a small, isolated village on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands that looks over the sea towards the Island of Raasay. On the way back we passed through Inverness, the most northerly city in Scotland. To break the long journey we decided to stop off at Culloden Moor, the site of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, between the Government forces, which were mainly English, and the Jacobite army, made up of Scottish Highlanders led by Bonnie Prince Charlie. I had never visited the site before, but I recall thinking that it was an odd place for a battle; it is exposed moorland and the ground is rough and boggy, which would be difficult ground on which to go to war. I later learned that Bonnie Prince Charlie’s choice of this site for battle was catastrophic; not only did the exposed ground leave the Jacobite forces vulnerable to the superior artillery of the Government forces, but also the boggy soil hampered their attack, rendering them even more exposed. These factors led to the slaughter of the Jacobite forces and the collapse of the Jacobite campaign. I don’t know exactly how much the boggy soil contributed to the outcome of this war but it certainly played a part. For centuries, soil has played an enormous, and often unexpected, role in the outcome of war. War can also leave lasting and often irreversible scars on soil, leaving it churned, riddled with battle debris and bodies, polluted with heavy metals, toxic dioxins, oil and radioactivity. In many cases, it is left unusable. War can also indirectly affect the soil, for example through the need in Britain, during the Second World War, to cultivate gardens and city parkland for food. And the current growing demand for food, coupled with environmental pressures related to climate change, will place increasing pressure on soil, potentially leading to future wars. This chapter will look at how war is affected by and how it affects soil.

In Fig. 4.1 we show diagrammatically the contrasting relationships and dependencies of rural households in the forested region of European Russia, north of Moscow and in the black earth steppe to the south. In this and the following chapters we analyse the various components making up these food production systems, beginning with the land. At the heart of personal subsidiary farming in rural Russia is the household plot or uchastok; the small parcel of land lying within the boundary of rural settlements on which rural dwellers may grow crops and construct outbuildings. Ever since the translation of Karl Wadekin’s (1973) seminal work, the uchastok has been referred to in English language literature as the ‘private plot’, and ‘personal subsidiary farming’ as ‘private farming’. The underlying conceit of the Western view, which it must be remembered grew out of the Cold War ideological battles between communism and market capitalism, was that the private plot was proof of the efficacy of individualism and private property over collectivism and social ownership. In reality, of course, household plots were not ‘private’ in the neoclassical understanding of property rights, since they could be neither bought nor sold (nor, indeed, was there much protection for their users from their alienation) and the food individuals produced did not originate exclusively from the plot but drew on other environmental resources, access to which was covered by a variety of often ill-defined rights and obligations. Since 1991, there have been some important improvements in property rights for the rural population. In particular, they have acquired title deeds to their plots (although there are size limits and their conveyance has to take place according to normative prices) and the use of other resources has, in some cases, been subject to legal regulation or (re)codified. At the local level, land use often remains governed more by custom than by the provisions of statutes and codes. It thus makes sense when discussing rural people’s access to resources to define ‘property rights’ broadly as a field of public claims and entitlements over a variety of resources, rather than as a bundle of clearly defined rights.

Household production varies according to the range of resources available to it; different environments give rise to different types of production, setting limits upon what can be produced. But as we saw in the previous chapter, in order to gain access to the environmental resources they need, households are at the mercy of a variety of gatekeepers that include local authorities, large farm managements, other private landowners, and the community at large. Among the other actors with which rural households have to interact, by far the most important in most regions are the large farms or ‘agricultural enterprises’. In this respect, there is continuity with the Soviet period when the managements of collective and state farms determined the social, cultural, and political character of rural places and the economic welfare of the rural population. Collective and state farms were like ‘company towns’, but with their authority extending over large territories and embracing a number of populated places. Figure 5.1 shows the territorial arrangement typical of a collective farm during the Soviet period. Since 1991, many of their former areas of authority, both formal and informal, have been withdrawn from large farms; they have lost control of land under rural settlements and they have reduced influence over a range of local services where their interventions used to be decisive. To advocates of market reforms, the retreat of large farms from these areas is a welcome rationalization of the agrarian economy and part of the process of redirecting farm activities towards producing agricultural products by the most efficient means possible. But this retreat has often left a gap that cashstrapped local authorities and private enterprise have not yet been able to plug, so that rural people’s experience of the market transition is of the loss of formal employment and a reduction in the level of services they previously enjoyed. In this situation, it is not surprising that rural Russia has been the scene of a muted, but real, contestation of market reform on the part of people intent on defending their access to resources and services to which they still believe they are entitled.

This book has shown how political corruption permeated Lebanon's bureaucratic institutions throughout the post-Ta'if period. It has analyzed incidences of corruption in their immediate institutional and political contexts by focusing on the institutions' bureaucratic organization and the underlying politics of their evolution. The book concludes with a summary of its findings, first by discussing how political settlement contributed to the failure of public institutions in postwar Lebanon to meet the criteria of bureaucratic organization. It then considers why the central bank was spared from the bickering of political elites and describes the Lebanese state as a state of muhasasa, or an allotment state. It also presents some key Lebanese voices on the subject of corruption and explains why Lebanon's attempts at administrative reform to combat corruption have been widely regarded as a failure. Finally, the book assesses the implications of its findings for the comparative study of postwar recovery.