I am one of eight co-authors of a new open-access article in Rural History, ‘Rural Inequalities in Britain: Undisciplining Rural Histories/Connected Histories and Collaborative Methods’, published as part of the journal’s ‘Where Next in Rural History?’ series. Written with Alf Ellis, Ben Garlick, George J. Severs, Julie-Marie Strange, Yvette Taylor, Annie Tindley and Clare Whistler, it is a collaborative, deliberately ‘undisciplined’ essay that brings together history, sociology, geography, queer studies and creative practice.
Rural inequalities do not rest in the past. Poor housing, depopulation, low-paid work and limited access to health and welfare recur across rural Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. The article opens with a 1910 petition from a young boy with tuberculosis in Brora, in the Scottish Highlands, and asks two questions: what do histories of poverty and class look like in rural settings, and can a more interdisciplinary approach help explain why rural inequality persists?
We set out three problems and three provocations. First, class has largely gone missing from rural history, which has been shaped by urban, industrial perspectives that cast rural workers – including women and children – as marginal or passive. Second, land and wealth in the British countryside need to be understood as connected across empire and metropole: colonial wealth and enclosure shaped the rural landscape, and their legacies continue in new forms of landed and corporate power. Third, queer histories, which have been largely urban, need to be brought into conversation with rural histories.
The article grew out of a series of workshops with academics, rural community and heritage groups in North East England, and practitioners including poets and a drystone waller. In the spirit of the ‘Dig Where You Stand’ movement, it argues for creative, participatory and place-based methods that can reveal the violence and injustice in how resources and rights are distributed.
The article connects closely with my recent chapter, ‘Enclosures and the Making of Modern Britain’, and with my new research project, Elemental Inequalities.
Read the article (open access): Ellis, A., Garlick, B., Severs, G. J., Strange, J.-M., Taylor, Y., Tindley, A., Tyler, I. and Whistler, C. (2026) ‘Rural Inequalities in Britain: Undisciplining Rural Histories/Connected Histories and Collaborative Methods’, Rural History.
