JOURNAL: Special Issue Making the Village Fit for the Future: Rural Development in Twentieth-Century Asia (Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und Gesellschaftsforschung) XXXIV (2024), nr. 6)

 

(image source: Comparativ)

Abstract:

This journal issue re-evaluates rural reform in twentieth-century Asia. So far, historians have approached development outside the cities as a contingent dimension of empires and nation-states or as a derivative of urban planning efforts. By contrast, the case studies assembled here frame the history of villages and rural change as a decisive arena in which ideas and practices concerning the redesign of state and society were formulated, negotiated, and experimented with. Particularly during transitional years of accelerated historical change, such as after the world wars and during decolonization, the concept of the rural and rural communities functioned as a medium for diverse and often conflictive notions of the future, imaginations of socioeconomic order, and political aspirations. The authors of these development paths were not only international development experts or urban elites but also (self-proclaimed) representatives among rural communities who wove their vested interests, ideas, and norms into the fabric of development and modernization. In that light, this journal issue proposes to investigate more in detail to which extent, for whom, and with what consequences negotiations about the meaning of the rural gave shape to developmental ideas more generally. In other words, the case studies analyse rural history and the conceptual history of the rural in Asia as key elements of twentieth-century development history.

Introduction (Clemens Six) 
DOI 10.26014/j.comp.2024.06.01

Gendered Development Work and Non-State Primary Healthcare Provisions: The Skippo Medical Van Scheme in Rural India, c. 1940s to mid-1970s (Maria Framke)
DOI 10.26014/j.comp.2024.06.02
Abstract:

This article focuses on gendered rural development work in late colonial and early post-colonial India. Next to the question of livelihood generation and education, the issue of health and hence of women’s vulnerability, was taken up by members of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC). From the 1930s the AIWC had been interested in maternity and child welfare work. It lobbied for adequate medical aid to women and birth control. With independence looming, the organization turned its attention increasingly to the Indian villages. In 1946, the AIWC initiated a mobile van scheme, called Skippo, to provide primary healthcare facilities to remote rural areas. The article investigates the healthcare related work of the AIWC for rural communities, focusing on the formation and development of the Skippo van scheme, the ideas behind it and its successes and failures. By asking what motivated Indian women activists to work for the health of their fellow countrypeople in the villages, the article strives to understand how women scripted themselves into the narratives of national progress and development. Women activists of the AIWC established various entanglements with international actors and organizations in pursuance of rural development work. Examining these transnational networks of cooperation the article gives further insights in their nature, content, and outcome. It clearly demonstrates the beneficial influence of transnational nongovernmental networks for primary healthcare in post-colonial rural India, while also showing how Indian activists tied in the politics of international rural development.

Lost Rural Futures: Agrarian Nationalism and Industrial Dissent in Modern China (Mark E. Frank & Tristan G. Brown)
DOI 10.26014/j.comp.2024.06.03
Abstract:

A debate in the early 1940s between two social scientists, Yang Kaidao and Zhou Xianwen, reinvigorated a national conversation about China’s relationship with agriculture. Clearly China’s roots were agrarian, but was it destined to remain “a country founded on agriculture” with the rural village as the focal point of the state and the nucleus of society, or must the republic industrialize in order to survive? If the answer seems obvious to the present-day observer, it remained debatable on the eve of the communist revolution. This paper uses the Yang-Zhou debate as a window on past visions of an agrarian future that were impassioned yet full of irony: agricultural fundamentalists pointed to settled agriculture as a distinctive and transhistorical feature of the Chinese state, but their arguments and policy recommendations echoed similar movements in Japan, Italy, Latvia, and many other twentieth-century states. We contend that China’s twentieth-century agrarian fundamentalism should be acknowledged both as a pivotal yet underexplored cornerstone of Chinese nationalism and as a key link in a broader global agrarian-nationalist movement that largely dissipated after the Second World War.

Modernization through Rural Development: German Development Aid in Southeast Asia in a European Setting, 1930s–1970s (Andreas Weiß)
DOI 10.26014/j.comp.2024.06.04
Abstract:

After the loss of its colonies, Germany had to find new strategies to connect with the world. This article examines the continuities and differences after the two world wars when the Weimar Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany tried to re-establish their contacts with the non-European world through development aid for the agricultural sector. Following German agricultural ‘experts’ from the (semi-)colonial period to the independence of Siam/Thailand and the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia, this paper asks how these different German states combined agricultural modernisation and development aid over time. It argues that personal connections originating from the interwar period are more important to understand the steering of German development aid in the 1950s than the Cold War, which has dominated much of the historical literature to date. A closer look also reveals that West German development aid was surprisingly flexible and non-ideological. This is all the more surprising against the background of the European and international context that influenced West Germany’s relations with Southeast Asia, as West Germany was caught up in the systemic competition of the Cold War confrontation, especially through the existence of the second German state, the German Democratic Republic.

Forum

The Transformation of the Perception of Change since the late Eighteenth Century (Harald Kleinschmidt)
DOI 10.26014/j.comp.2024.06.05
Abstract:

Using Lévi-Strauss’s dichotomy of hot and cold societies, this article examines culture- and epoch- specific perceptions of change in conjunction with attitudes toward pasts. It argues that a transformation of the cold perception, seeking to keep change at bay, into the hot perception, focused on promoting change, took place in Europe at c. 1800. This transformation concurred with the strengthening experience of a gap disjoining past from present and of the felt need to conjoin past with present through historiography. In other parts of the planet, however, the cold perception of change prevailed jointly with the experience of continuity from past into future. The discrepancy between these perceptions of change and attitudes toward pasts has ushered in conflicts during and after colonial rule and has suspended or even suppressed endogenous potentials for change in groups subject to colonial rule.

Book reviews

•  Chris Gratien: The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022, 318 pp. (Ramazan Hakkı Öztan)
• Janet Polasky: Asylum Between Nations: Refugees in a Revolutionary Era, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023, 312 pp. (Matthieu Ferradou)
• Matthijs Lok, Friedemann Pestel, Juliette Reboul (eds.): Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (c. 1700–1930), Leiden: Brill, 2021, 434 pp.(Matthias Middell)
• Melanie Judgen, Dee Smythe (eds.): Unsettling Apologies: Critical Writings on Apology from South Africa (Law, Society, Policy Series), Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022, 312 pp. (Mechthild Nagel)
• Faeeza Ballim: Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023, 167 pp. (Ulf Engel)
• Silke Hackenesch (ed.): Adoption across Race and Nation: US Histories and Legacies, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2022, 229 pp. (Benedikt Stuchtey)
• Simon Godard: Le laboratoire de l’internationalisme. Le CAEM et la construction du bloc socialiste, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2021, 325 pp. (Sara Lorenzini)
• Jie-Hyun Lim: Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing, New York: Columbia University Press, 2022, 344 pp. (Jean-Numa Ducange)

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