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This chapter discusses the plights of a regular Southern farmer and his climb up the “agricultural ladder”. Merchants were of equal importance in the Southern agricultural scene and had even been blamed for the South's debilitating addiction to cotton for they served as links that tie isolated farms to commercial agriculture. This chapter also touches on the problems connected with cotton production such as more tenancy among races, fewer livestock, and less grain. It also looks at social issues like family planning, women's labor, and mobility. Teaching was one of the few professions that women were employed in. This chapter also touches on political battles regarding laws requiring livestock to be fenced leaving landless farmers no way of keeping their animals. Other issues regarding tenantry and landownership are also tackled in this chapter.

This chapter discusses the following: the limitations of source material; the Irish landscape; conquest and feudalization; a new tenantry; Gaelic Irish in colonial society; population estimates; population decline; redistribution of land ownership: the crown; the church; the manor; classes in manorial society; unfree tenants; demesne cultivation; farming and absenteeism; labour; management: reeves, bailiffs, and stewards; field systems; crop rotation; crop yields; agricultural methods: horses and oxen; ploughing; pasture and meadow; enclosures; livestock; agricultural revolution; trade; Italian merchants and bankers; exports and imports: decline of cereal products; fish; livestock and limber; and wine, salt, and metals.

This chapter explores socioeconomic interactions between “Poor Whites” or “Redlegs” and Afro-Barbadians as interpreted through material culture and a particular reading of a Barbadian plantation landscape. The tenantry of Below Cliff, now shrouded in dense forest, is located on the “rab” land or marginal zone of Clifton Hall plantation deemed unsuitable for large-scale agricultural production. Despite the marginality of the space in terms of plantation production and a perceived socioeconomic isolation of island “poor whites” in general, Below Cliff was a space of heightened interracial interaction. I argue that such seemingly marginal spaces (as well as the people who inhabit them) are significant arenas through which to explore the dynamic and nuanced race relations that play out in everyday life on and around the plantation. While plantation slavery was crucial in the development of modern racial ideologies and hierarchies, including attempts to rigidly impose and police racial boundaries, archaeological evidence suggests that on the local level these boundaries were exceedingly porous.

This chapter traces how public policy was crucial to the making of a capitalist order in Oklahoma after statehood in 1907. It notes that along with taxation and credit, a critical policy in the making of a landlord elite and landless tenantry was the principle that race was fixed and unchanging. The chapter observes that in a context of rapid land loss, Creeks engaged in a combination of explicitly political action, politically charged cultural and spiritual practices, and day-to-day resistance to challenge the denial of their national autonomy, the loss of their lands, and the cultural transformation that allotment was intended to bring about. It observes that the power of federal, state, and even county land policy and lack of authority over it encapsulated the political challenges of the statehood era for Creek people.