150 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
graphical regions under globalization. Bell considers the scale of the rural globally,
terming this the ‘transnational rural’.^27 He off ers a vision of rurality that is far from
idyllic.^28 With others hovering at the margins, it is diffi cult to keep a purifi ed
national identity free from the transnational fl ow of people and fusions of culture
produced by global capitalism. On fi rst thought, with Bell’s transnational rural it
is possible to see that Sibley’s purifi cation and exclusion of the other within the
rural at home can be replicated abroad. With the use of Said’s Orientalism, this
essay begins to explore a new approach for rural geography and calls for a wider
understanding and interconnection with the globalizing world.
Th e Chinese Rural as ‘Other’ Rural
Little travels to the Chinese farm where she fails to recognize her own vision
of the rural idyll even as she fi nds it contested. Th roughout the nineteenth cen-
tury, cheap labour and commodities moved from the periphery to play a crucial
role in creating wealth in Britain. Th e Treaties of Nanking and Tientsin in the
mid-nineteenth century encouraged an infl ux of merchants, missionaries and
travellers to China for trade and cultural exchange. Th ese visitors explored the
country, claiming their rights aft er the triumph of the Opium Wars, but were
anxious about China’s increased hostility toward them.^29 Little, for example,
was prevented from building a summer cottage on the hillside near the Yangtze
River by the magistrate, ‘on the pretext that the country people were so much
opposed to foreigners he dared not sanction our living amongst them: [yet he]
then made a great favour of having persuaded a certain Farmer to have us as
tenants’.^30 Moreover, Little’s writing explains the West’s authorized aggression
against the native. Th is conforms to the anti-conquest account that Mary Louise
Pratt has defi ned as ‘strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois
subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert Euro-
pean hegemony’.^31 Echoing Sibley’s notion of purifi cation and defi lement, Little
oft en remarks on the dust, mud and dirt of the Chinese. She starts her diary by
saying : ‘I was annoyed to fi nd the furniture in our Farm not cleaned, and a good
deal of smell of dirt’.^32 Little shows that the meaning of the rural idyll is shift ing.
Th e supposed countryside hegemony is so powerful that dirt is the carrier of a
particular racial identity. Th e Western view of Chinese culture is nothing more
than Oriental despotism, which masks civility behind barbarism and duplic-
ity. Th is view relates to the identity politics within Europe that distinguishes
self/nation from the other. Little’s neglect of Chinese people and their customs
might be argued to be a self-defensive strateg y that Pratt describes as aiming to
‘inspire a salutary fear among the Chinese’.^33
However, the Chinese rural environment is one which conventional English
society would probably fi nd unrecognizable. Th e farm, the Chinese farmer and