Labour migration, mass unemployment and the state: Class, gender and work in the Land Settlement Association in inter-war rural England

This paper develops research on employment and class transitions in rural economies by arguing that migration policies and gendered divisions of labour need to be central to any explanation. The paper takes as its focus state responses to mass unemployment during the ‘great recession’ of the 1930s in the United Kingdom. Through an analysis of a corpus of archival material and data, the paper examines the role of one programme – the Land Settlement Association – in the process of transforming unemployed miners and industrial workers into a new rural ‘yeomanry’ of smallholder commodity producers. It argues that in order to understand this attempt at class transformation we need to appreciate the centrality of gender and domestic divisions of labour to the process of class transformation and to extend existing debates on precarity in seasonal, international agricultural workers programmes to consider transformation of unemployed industrial workers, who became internal migrants, into agrarian subjects. • The study contributes to literatures on rural class transformation and the importance of gender and household child labour. • It examines a range of novel archival materials to examine the case of the UK's Land Settlement Association programme in the inter-war years. • The study highlights the significance of household contributions to livelihood creation as unemployed families relocated to new settlements. • The paper contributes to debates over migrant labour, class and gender in rural spaces.