Labour and Livelihoods in the Agri-Industry of the Lincolnshire Fens: Life-histories of entangled worlds of work, value, and temporariness

This thesis explores the labour and livelihoods of those living and working across the agricultural industries of the South Lincolnshire Fens. This 'flat and boring' landscape on England's east coast has attracted recent scholarly interest in the high levels of Eastern European migration and prominent support for 'Brexit' and 'Reform', notably around the town of Boston. My thesis recentres work and economic life, where since the 1980s, 'supermarketization' has reconfigured relations of production and reproduction across the supply chain. The Fens complicate sociological categories of both the rural and post-industrial. While neighbouring regions have experienced de-industrialisation, a different economic transition has taken place here through the intensification of the capitalist food system. Work and industry have not 'left'; it is abundant, but 'unglamorous' and 'cheap', and a shifting labour regime has consequences for the cultural meaning of work.

I set out a series of interlocking reproductive dilemmas across the Fen's fields, factories, and haulage, as agricultural capital struggles to (re)produce the required labour force. Through a historical ethnography and biographical/life-history interviews with workers across agri-industry, the thesis asks not only how agri-industrial capitalism shapes people's lives, but reciprocally, how people in turn struggle to make a living and create liveable lives. I explore how this agri-capitalist formation is produced through historically situated cultural processes, as a shifting constellation of class, migration, value, and temporariness.

The thesis contributes to debates around the cultural production of contemporary work and capitalism, by examining cultural sentiments as forces of production. For example, I explore how cultural sentiments from an older moral order of work continue to animate contemporary economic life through a nostalgia for small traders.