The region and its resources

This chapter describes the landscapes of production found around London. Salterns and stone quarries in the Thames estuary, managed woodlands upriver of the city, and the ironworking sites of the High Weald are considered, along with the evidence for livestock and arable farming. These extraction industries responded to the creation of the Roman city, and saw considerable intensification from the Flavian period into the second century. This drew on the development of a supporting infrastructure that benefitted from military engineering and management, and is argued to have responded to elevated procuratorial demand. Some surplus may have been raised by taxes and rents in kind, and parallels are drawn with sharecropping arrangements for tenant farming documented in North Africa. The potential importance of imperial and other estates is also reviewed. Whilst direct evidence is lacking it is argued that imperial land-holdings would have been extensive in conquered territories, and this may account for some of the particularities of the economic relationship between London and its hinterland.

“It Ain’t Hardly Worth the Trouble to Go on Living”

Chapter 2 focuses on Erskine Caldwell and seeks to complicate understandings of his best-known works Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre. Though often derided for mocking the poor and using them as comic relief, Caldwell works to instil a sense of anger in readers as he reveals the economic plight of tenant farming during the Great Depression. In addition, the chapter looks at Caldwell's nonfiction work, including his phototext You Have Seen Their Faces, written with photographer Margaret Bourke-White, and contrasts its cultural context with the comparatively better known Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In addition, the chapter considers Caldwell's journalism, which originally raised national attention to the plight of the farmers he later immortalized in his fiction. Finally, the chapter closes by considering Caldwell’s later career and fall from critical favour.

Between militants and “mafia”: Interrupting dispossession in rural Pakistan

In 2000, one of Pakistan’s largest social movements began: a tenant struggle for land rights on the country’s military farms. Though the military tried to subdue the movement, it eventually succeeded insofar as many tenants stopped paying rent. As a result, villagers experienced a generalized (albeit uneven) prosperity. Certain movement leaders, in particular, became especially wealthy, relocating from their mud houses to big bungalows, replacing their motorbikes with SUVs, and transitioning from tenant farming to lucrative businesses in nearby cities. They also started moving around with armed security, allying with urban elites, and entering Pakistan’s major political parties. Rumors also began spreading that some leaders were using violence or intimidation to accumulate this political-economic power. In the movement’s afterlife, ordinary villagers began to wonder: were their leaders still committed to militantly pursuing villagers’ collective interests? Or were they now using the movement for their own private, even criminal, ambitions?