New research has begun: Farms Aflame.

Thanks to being awarded a Whiria Te Mahara New Zealand History Grant, Jared has begun researching his next book, Farms Aflame: The Secret World of Rural Arson (working title). The phenomenon of stack burning – the deliberate arson of harvested crops such as wheat, oats and barley – was common knowledge in grain-producing areas of Aotearoa during the nineteenth century. At times stack burning was almost epidemic, leading to calls for a united front of farmers to protect themselves. Yet rural incendiarism has received almost no attention from local historians. Stack burning is absent from histories of labour, rural Aotearoa, the ‘great estates’ and wheat booms of the 1870s-1900s.

A history-from-below with a dash of true crime, this narrative nonfiction illuminates the shadowy world of debt, fraud and disgruntled workers. Farms Aflame will offer a new understanding of the colonial countryside and its myths.

_{^{Image reference: 1/1-008341-G, Alexander Turnbull Library}}