Author(s): | Turner, M. E. Beckett, J. V. Afton, B. |
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Reviewer(s): | Verdon, Nicola |
Published by EH.NET (August 2002)
M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett and B. Afton, Farm Production in England
1700-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. xii + 295 pp. $74 or ?45
(hardback), ISBN: 0-19-820804-9.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Nicola Verdon, Rural History Centre, University of
Reading.
When was the English agriculture revolution? This is one of those key
questions that historians have been debating for many decades. In their new
book, Michael Turner of the University of Hull, and John Beckett and Bethanie
Afton from the University of Nottingham, present fresh evidence on farm output
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in doing do offer a
reinterpretation of the timing and nature of the agricultural revolution in
England.
Lord Ernle penned the classic account of the agricultural revolution back in
the early twentieth century. He stressed the importance of technological and
institutional change, the introduction of new crops and the ‘Great Men’ who
encouraged the adoption of them in the period running concurrently with the
industrial revolution (c.1750-1850). This perspective was undermined by a wave
of new scholarship in the 1960s, led by J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay, E. L
Jones, and Eric Kerridge. These studies stressed the importance of change in
the period before 1750 and widened the parameters of the agricultural
revolution (although Chambers and Mingay still cited the period 1750 to 1850 as
the key one). F. M. L. Thompson, meanwhile, suggested that after 1815 a ‘second
agricultural revolution’ took place. Since then new sources which allow a more
thorough quantitative assessment of output and productivity have been sought by
historians, with recent research by Mark Overton, for example, stressing once
more the importance of the century between 1750 and 1850.
Turner, Beckett and Afton maintain however that much of the available ‘hard
data’ are weak and a ‘significant gap’ in our understanding of the agricultural
revolution persists because of deficiencies in surviving evidence from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (p. 24). Before the 1860s no official,
systematic data on agricultural output were recorded and historians have been
reliant on the data collected by Arthur Young and the authors of the General
Views of Agriculture, amongst others. As Turner, Beckett and Afton point out,
these are not necessarily systematic or unbiased. Instead, they suggest, fresh
data exist in the form of farm records. In chapter two the range and scope of
this material is examined. The authors do not draw back from highlighting the
limitations of these records. Farm accounts, labor records and memorandum books
are ‘highly individualistic documents,’ and vary greatly in quality and
quantity (p. 61). Yet, Turner, Beckett and Afton insist that when analyzed
together, their possibilities are enormous: ‘In truth it is a magnificent
collection which has been virtually neglected in the numerous efforts made to
understand the agricultural history of the two centuries or so prior to 1914′
(p. 212). Farm Production in England is then, the first systematic
attempt to analyze the evidence on agricultural output and practice provided in
farm records. What do they find?
Chapter Three deals with the question of the changing nature of farming
practice and techniques in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However,
the problems associated with using farm records are immediately apparent and
the authors concede that such sources only offer an impressionistic and
qualitative perspective on this issue. The evidence does suggest though that
‘agriculture moved, albeit slowly, from a low input/low output position in the
early eighteenth century, to a higher input/higher output agricultural economy
in the mid-nineteenth century’ (p. 115). This contention is explored in much
greater depth in the next three chapters when output in the key agricultural
sectors – wheat, barley, oats and livestock – is assessed. New estimates of
wheat yields based on farm records show an average for the 1720s of 19 bushels
per acre, rising to 21-22 bushels by the mid eighteenth century. This declined
in the 1780s and 1790s, but thereafter the trend was upward, rising to a peak
in the 1840s at around 30 bushels per acre. After this yields settled to a
plateau of 27-28 for the remainder of the century (Table 4.4, p. 129). Wheat
yields therefore suggest that the agricultural revolution should be firmly
located in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Barley yields
point to a similar conclusion, with the key period for rising yields being
between the 1820s and 1840s (Table 5.1, p. 153). The trend in oat yields is not
so emphatic but also shows a considerable increase in yields in the first half
of the nineteenth century, reaching a peak of nearly 50 bushels per acre in the
1840s (p. 157). Observations on other crops (rye, beans and peas) are fewer but
also show trends comparable to wheat, with an upward curve in output in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century. Put together, all this evidence on
crop output becomes ‘compelling evidence of a real, and sustained, break with
the past’ (p. 213).
Animal carcass weights also indicate advances, with the increase in size of
lambs and calves the best indicators of productivity improvements. Although the
authors concede that measuring livestock output is ‘very complicated’ (p. 173)
and fraught with pit-falls, overall ‘we have no reason to doubt that the output
of the livestock sector improved in terms of both numbers and weights’ (p.
215). In their concluding chapter the authors argue that English agriculture
successfully fed a growing population, with yields rising significantly from
the turn of the nineteenth century. Farm records therefore place the
agricultural revolution ‘firmly within the period from about 1800 to 1850’ (p.
230).
This book lends powerful support to the view of the agricultural revolution as
a phenomenon largely of the first half of the nineteenth century. The evidence
presented on wheat yields – often seen as the standard gauge for the state of
English agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – is especially
useful. But caution is needed. There are clearly many problems with using farm
records to date the agricultural revolution. Turner, Beckett and Afton base
their findings on evidence from just under one thousand estate or
owner-occupied farms. Although at least one record comes from every English
county, the regional base of the dataset is skewed in favor of the south-east.
More importantly, data from individual farms can significantly skew the
results. This is especially the case for livestock figures, which are the least
convincing part of the thesis. In addition, farm records tell us little about
how crop yields were increased or about labor productivity. Farm records
then, perhaps do not offer the watertight solution to the issue of when and how
the agricultural revolution occurred. Yet this is an important and innovative
book and a useful addition to the historiography on one of the key questions of
modern English history.
Nicola Verdon is a Research Fellow in the Rural History Centre, University of
Reading. Recent publications on female and child work patterns in the
nineteenth-century English countryside have appeared in the Agricultural
History Review (2001) and the Economic History Review (2002). Her
book Rural Women Workers: Gender, Work and Wages in the Nineteenth-Century
Countryside will be published by Boydell in November 2002.
Subject(s): | Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Extractive Industries |
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Geographic Area(s): | Europe |
Time Period(s): | 20th Century: Pre WWII |