Event Type: Branch

Takes Place: 21st January 2025

Time: 19:30 - 20:45

Venue: Online via Zoom

Description: Historians have recently drawn parallels between the ideas that were used to defend land enclosure campaigns in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and Ireland, and those applied to the expansion of colonies. In both, the ‘wasteful’ under-exploitation of land by indigenous populations was used as a moral justifications for its appropriation for capitalist agriculture. This talk focuses on the reclamation campaigns in former royal forest of Exmoor after it was sold by the Crown in 1818. It shows how advocates of agricultural ‘improvement’ certainly described the moor and its inhabitants as ‘wild’ and in need of ‘civilisation’. However, the paper argues that these ideas were largely replaced after 1870 by public discussions that defended the moor’s ‘wildness’, particularly as it was represented by its surviving Red Deer. The most powerful advocates of this new perspective were the supporters of stag hunting, whose very successful media campaign turned the hunt into a tourist attraction. The paper suggests we should see these attitudes not as a resistance to the ‘modernity’ of 19th-century society, but as a different version of it.

How to book: https://www.devonhistorysociety.org.uk/events/

Price: Free for National & local members of the HA, and of the Devon History Society. Non-members £4

Tel: 01752 843750

Email: a.cousins345@btinternet.com

Website: www.ha-plymouth.org.uk

Organiser: Devon History Society & Alan Cousins

Lecturer: Professor Henry French, University of Exeter

Comments: This is a Devon History Society event shared with HA members, for whom booking is free.

Region: South-West England

Branch: Plymouth