Being Neighbours: Cooperative Work and Rural Culture, 1830-1960

Throughout history, farm families have shared work and equipment with their neighbours to complete labour-intensive, time-sensitive, and time-consuming tasks. They benefitted materially and socially from these voluntary, flexible, loosely structured networks of reciprocal assistance, making neighbourliness a vital but overlooked aspect of agricultural change.

Being Neighbours takes us into the heart of neighbourhood – the set of people near and surrounding the family – through an examination...