There is a growing body of work on white farmers in Zimbabwe. Yet the role played by white women – so-called ‘farmers’ wives’ – on commercial farms has been almost completely ignored, if not forgotten. For all the public role and overt power ascribed to white male farmers, their wives played an equally important, although often more subtle, role in power and labour relations on white commercial farms. This ‘soft power’ took the form of maternalistic welfare initiatives such as clinics, schools, orphan programmes and women’s clubs, mostly overseen by a ‘farmer’s wife’. Before and after Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence these played an important role in attracting and keeping farm labourers, and governing their behaviour. After independence they also became crucial to the way white farmers justified their continued ownership of most of Zimbabwe’s prime farmland. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the role that farm welfare initiatives played in Zimbabwe’s agrarian history. Having assessed what implications such endeavours had for the position and well-being of farmworkers before the onset of ‘fast-track’ land reform in the year 2000, Hartnack examines in vivid ethnographic detail the impact that the farm seizures had on the lives of farmworkers and the welfare programmes which had previously attempted to improve their lot.

To those who are cursed or gifted with the burden of wealth, two things are as unchanging as the seasons. First, one is born with death as a sibling. Second, what you own in turn owns you. This book, written by a bar topnotcher and an experienced lawyer in estate planning, will put an end to property problems that afflict those with possessions, great or small. In this sense, the author performs the role of a legal undertaker who makes sure that no one leaves behind property problems together his mortal remains.

This volume highlights the copious and various depictions of the three orders of society during the Late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Early Modern Period. It discusses the origins and development of the trifunctional division into the orders of the oratores, bellatores and laboratores, and the abundantly preserved visual material, which proves that this scheme was one of the most widespread ideological foundations of European societies at that time. Late Gothic and Renaissance depictions of the three orders of society can be found in different mediums, from woodcuts to wall paintings, and were produced by important artists such as J. Fouquet and Pieter Bruegel, as well as anonymous painters. The vast numbers of preserved examples of this topic confirm the significance and strength of this iconographic theme at the end of the Middle Ages.

Their wages had been reduced again! Struggling to keep their families on the meager wages paid to agricultural labourers in England in 1833, George Loveless, his brother James, brother-inlaw Thomas Stanfield, and friends founded a legal union, the Tolpuddle Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers. Land owners, fearful of the consequences of such a union and that the status quo between rich and poor would be irrevocably altered, had George and five members arrested and charged under an obscure law that they had administered an illegal oath when enrolling new members into the union. They were found guilty and sentenced to transportation for seven years. They became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs. In a parish workhouse Seth Fielding, a fictitious, illiterate farm labourer, lies dying of tuberculosis, consumed with guilt about the part he was forced to play in betraying the six men. Through delirious Seth’s wandering thoughts we see his deep love for his wife Mary and family, the hard life of a farm labourer, the Dorset countryside, and the turmoil the men’s conviction has on the political situation throughout England.