Talk:British Agricultural Revolution

Geography problem
This article mentions "Flanders" as being part of present day Belgium, yet the Flanders article, mentions Belgium as well as France and The Netherlands, which is the correct geographical location? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.105.213.178 (talk) 01:23, 9 May 2009 (UTC)


 * In the original administration of the Carolingian Empire, at the time of the Treaty of Verdun in 843 the original partition was into roughly north-south bands, with Flanders the northernmost County of the Western band, Western Francia, its eastern border running from the Rhine Estuary southwards to meet its southern boundary running from the Somme eastwards. However, the internal politics of Charlemagne's descendants, combined with some force of arms, meant that by the time of the Treaty of Merssen in 870, the northernmost Counties of the next band to the east, Austrasia (Holland, Brabant, Hainaut and Luxemburg), fell under its hegemony, so the effective eastern border lay on the Rhine. With the exception of Holland, the other counties were at that time francophone, until the death of Baldwin VI in 1070 saw his juvenile son unable to hold his inheritance against a claim from his uncle, being killed at the 1st Battle of Cassel. Robert's force was predominantly from northern Holland, and they were paid by the seigneuries of most of the original County of Flanders, creating the existing linguistic partition. The eastern Counties then broke away (by this time undergoing an economically-based rank-inflation into Duchies), and with the diminution of Francia into France in the 14th Century fell under the German Holy Roman Empire, as part of the Kingdom of Burgundy.
 * In English history, the developing economic power through the intermarriages with Hainaut (John of Gaunt being truly of the Flemish city of Ghent, for example) made the later Plantagenets and the rise of Burgundy an economic entity which nearly destroyed France in the first half of the 15th Century, France only being saved by the Pyrrhic victory of Agincourt, which put vigourous young blood into power in France who then proceeded to be the first to arm their military with artillery, the cutting edge which allowed Joan of Ark to reverse the balance of power in the 1430s.
 * Flanders then passed with the Empire into the Hapsburg Empire, thence into Spanish hands, whose oppression drove the northern Duchy of Holland and Northern Brabant into rebellion in the Wars of Religion. That then moved the French border further northwards in the early 17th Century. The War of the Spanish Succession saw it pass into Austrian hands through the 18th Century, until the French occupied it in 1792, and on the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Austrians rationalised their holdings and denounced their claims on these holdings, which by now were recognisably close to Belgium. These became a problem at the Congress of Vienna, as they could neither be given to France, nor stand alone, as promised by Prussia - the British Foreign Minister Viscount Castlereigh opposing the plan because they were econnomically too weak. The Dutch at first refused to take responsibility because of the residual religious difference remaining after the Wars of Religion, the Belgians being almost as fundamentalist in their Catholicism as the Dutch were Calvinist, but were eventually bought off by the promotion from the Principality of Orange to become the Kingdom of the Netherlands, together with the possession of the Ducal Estates, 1/3 of the land. However, the religious friction anticipated was realised, and increasingly draconian measures to maintain control caused another rebellion in 1830, creating the Kingdom of Belgium when the Francophone President of the Société Générale, controlling the Ducal Estates, had to finance the nascent rebellious State without being able to claim the political power to actually take control himself, as the populace saw him as a Dutch puppet: with the political protection of the King who owed him his throne, he was then able to loot the Estates by selling them off to his friends and family at a pittance, allowing him to take his revenge on the inhabitants.
 * Thus it is that it you draw a line westwards from the northern edge of Luxemburg, across Belgium and Northern France, the language to the north of the line is the family of low-German dialects generically known as Flemish or Dutch, and those south as Walloon French. To be absolutely specific, although the Dutch language is taught in Belgian schools because no true textbooks in academic Flemish exist, the reality is that the Flemish dialects are recognisably closer to Dutch of about 100 years ago. Those territories in France share the administrative imposition of academic French sufferd by the Basque and Breton-speaking minorities. Equally, the geographic continuation of the Ardennes mountains in Eastern Belgium stretches far south into the Vosges and Jura in Eastern France, preserving a sense of geographic identity with the former Austrasia, reinforced by the occasional historic transfer of Alsace, the French term for the area, into German hands.
 * This east-west split in Belgium was also reinforced by a resource differentiation in the Industrial Revolution, which arrived in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. The Walloon area was quite rich in coal and some iron, and so was able to industrialise in a way mostly missing from Flanders, which remained agricultural. This reversed the general economic balance of the country, as the wool industry in partnership in the English had for many years made Flanders one of the richest areas of Europe - the Spanish, for example, disparagingly named the flamingos they discovered in Mexico because they reflected their more than somewhat bigotted opinions of the Flemish, namely dim, brightly dressed, and up to their knees in water! It is no wonder the Dutch rebelled...
 * The wake of the economic inversion caused corresponding resentment in Flanders, and the increasing radicalisation was augmented by the internal oppression in the Ducal Estates I described above, although this has subsequently weakened as a leading member of the family responsible described to me, "they invested in family rather than wealth", dividing the power base by what is now 3000 members. Belgium found itself the wrong side of the French fixed defences at the start of WWI and II, which channelled the German Armies across Belgian territory in a bid to outflank them, and by the time WWII came around the Flemish had started to resent the French with a will: they were the only nation in Europe other than Germany and Austria to raise a Regiment of volunteer Waffen SS, the fanatical arm of fascism. That sense of identity continues to this day, to the extent where the extremists accuse the French of deliberately using their men as cannon-fodder in WWI, a malevolent fiction (my great-grandfather Louis Nestor Guiot having been one of the Walloon field commanders accused of only issuing orders in incomprehensible French which caused the massacres: he started as a common soldier, his military records show he also spoke Flemish, as did the next three generations of his family, and in retirement he settled in Ostende. It must however be said that his son-in-law, Senator Ferdinand Massart, was one of the Francophone provocateurs in the linguisitc debates of the 1960s, and in the same breath that the Massart-Guiot family were significant in the WWII Resistance, publishing the Libre Belgique in the teeth of German censorship).
 * However, at the same time the Belgian accession to the European Coal and Steel Community, the birthplace of the European Union, saw the reversion of the economic power to Flanders in agricultural aid, whereas the steel capacity of Wallonia was greatly diminished, the compensation going into the equity ownership in Brussels without penetrating into the workers in Wallonia.
 * I hope that this potted history shows how the Flemish can be seen as firstly agricultural and secondly a linguistic area stretching as far south in France as Lille (in Flemish, Reussel) and Boulogne. Fundamentally it is governed by a linguistic spread radially from the north towards the south across the geographical landscapes defining the national boundaries by diagonal river flows going into the North Sea, which rather flow from the south-east to the north-west. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.252.227.106 (talk) 15:47, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

"The northwestern fifth of Belgium, the Nord département of France and a small southwestersn coastal strip of the modern Netherlands" would have sufficed, unless you're including Artois. I'll move this rambling piece to the Flanders entry unless anyone has a sensible objection. Chiffrephile (talk) 19:51, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Timing
In the first paragraph we need an accurate statement for just when the Agricultural revolution was happening? Obviously the historiography gives us different perspectives: I'd therefore say from mid C17th through 19th. Anyone advise better? Ephebi (talk) 08:52, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Marx described the proletariat's perspective, running approx from mid-18th Century to mid 19th.
 * although Poor relief was put on a formal national footing from 1601, displaced workers were being controlled through settlement laws from 1666
 * the big Union systems were changed to deter the large number of claimants (1722) or take on huge numbers of dispossessed ag. labs from 1782, throughout the 19th.
 * Individual Inclosure Acts were being passed during the C18th & C17th.
 * Inventions for mechanization started to arrive from 1701
 * I'd expected the article to cover say c. 1750-1850. Johnbod (talk) 21:25, 9 September 2013 (UTC)


 * The period dating has been revised based on Overton (1996).Phmoreno (talk) 18:27, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Clover and turnips were already significant by 1700 and yields above those of European competitors: England had even recently become a significant net grain exporter while prices were generally low. It didn't start in 1700, still less 1750. I've extended the range accordingly. Mark Overton (a fine scholar and a decent chap) has one position on the matter, others have theirs. Some (Greg Clark isn't alone) survey 400 years of output growth and ask "Revolution? Huh??" It really depends what we're measuring: 1700 is a turning-point for aggregate output (but then so is 1470), but 1650 better represents the emergence of new techniques and the upturn in per capita output and more so of labour productivity. Note I kept a vague "between", rather than setting dates. "Between" means it could be considered shorter. Revolutionary or not, it's also part of an evolution, and why anyone should seek to exclude the key early period is beyond me. We should strive to accommodate diverse viewpoints, and we can. Chiffrephile (talk 02:37, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Major revision
The major revision seems to be underway with much inappropriate and unsourced material already removed. I added a major changes and innovations section after the lede and hopefully will be able to start a subsection on each bullet item in the next few days.Phmoreno (talk) 15:10, 1 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Update: Finished a rough first pass. Planning to rewrite Enclosure, which is going to be complicated and may take several days, possibly a week, depending on my schedule.  Also will sort through and revise crop rotation and incorporate some parts of it into other sections where it now belongs after the section title change.Phmoreno (talk) 03:05, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I've attempted a revision which may or may not be major: there was a lot of nonsense/irrelevance to be corrected/removed. It still needs work. But the title is nonsense. Nobody in the field talks about a "British Agricultural Revolution", because Scottish conditions and experience were so different. That there's a "British Agricultural Revolution" entry (which doesn't address Scotland) and another for "Scottish Agricultural Revolution" should alone show it's nonsense. The two should be renamed "Agricultural Revolution in England" and "Agricultural Revolution in Scotland" (I'd welcome "Agricultural Revolution in Wales" too if anyone's up to starting it. "British Agricultural Revolution" needs to go: it's frankly embarrassing to contribute to. Chiffrephile (talk) 14:54, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Comparison with China
A disclaimer was added to the lede regarding the much higher crop yields in China. When the more important crop rotation and enclosure sections are updated I will add a short section comparing British agriculture with the Chinese system.Phmoreno (talk) 14:41, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

I've tried to improve this. I don't know where that 10-20 claim come from - not from Needham, I'm sure. China's rice yield was of course far higher than that of any European cereal, but rice was only about half of China's grain (and under 1% of Europe's, and of course none of England's, making a direct comparison of that one crop meaningless as an indicator of wider productivity). Chinese grain yields overall were rather above the 19th-century British level, non-rice yields about midway between Britain and the European average after allowance for double-cropping. China's overall output per unit of agricultural area was a good deal higher, though it's difficult to quantify: I've tried to clarify this in the section.

The comparison with Continental Europe is actually far more informative, not least for what it tells us about subsequent agricultural development on the Continent. And the contraction of British arable farming in the face of overseas imports is an important part of the story. Chiffrephile (talk) 13:59, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

Where in China are you attempting to talk about? Presumably not the Gobi Desert or the Tibetan Plateau. Some of Southern China is tropical and so can not be compared with an island in the North Atlantic which has a much shorter growing season. What point are you trying to make and why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.97.83.42 (talk) 15:06, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Reader Comment, shocked at changes
I started using this article as a reference for innovations in british farming in January 2014. Returning to it today in March 2014 I'm shocked at how much material has been removed. I understand that this is done for the most part to improve the accuracy but the devastation to the section on "Advances that helped the Agricultural Revolution" seems to me, as a reader, unnecessary. The section provided a good context for how the change was driven by inventions in both tools and processes. While many of the milestones were not referenced, and I assume that is the problem, they could easily be checked by the reader. The almost complete removal of this section seems like overkill - in the form that the section was presented in January 2014 it appeared to me as a neophyte a good starting place and very relevant to topic of the page.

Dorich123 (talk) 16:06, 7 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I read the section "Advances that helped the Agricultural Revolution" carefully to see if anything was salvageable. The problem with it in general is that it discussed a lot of topics that were not related to agriculture.  Also, many of the technologies mentioned post dated the 1700-1850 period.  Some were invented pre 1850, like the railroad, telegraph, guano and Chilean nitrates, but did not become widespread by 1850.  This is especially true of farm implements like horse drawn reapers, binders and harvesters and the threshing machine. If you read the entire article you will see many of the technologies from the deleted section listed in their appropriate new sections.  I would also add that my edit is based on Overton (1996), which is one of the standard sources for this topic.  If the writer of the deleted section had at least one good reference relating any claim to the British Agricultural Revolution, that claim would not have been deleted.Phmoreno (talk) 19:43, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Farmer displacement
While giving the figures showing a drop in number of farmers, the article doesn't mention the displacement of farm families. Sam Johnson realizes "something is wrong" on his doubly-chronicled A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (by himself and another by Boswell), but insufficiently schooled in agricultural history to understand how what he is observing fits in. Something clearly happened in England some time earlier than Scotland, but not really chronicled. In all cases, families who had tilled the land for generations were kicked off, quite legally, from their leaseholds. Often with no place to go. Some literally starved. Others were booted out in winter and froze. Others, more fortunate, emigrated.

Better chronicled, because it was later and affected more people, was the Irish famine. While the latter was triggered by a potato fungus, it also "solved" in the worst way possible, overfarming and agricultural inefficiencies. In all these cases, efficiency of production was the key to change. The point being that there were "casualties." As today, in the US, the number of farms drops by 1% annually and production continues to go up. At least, the revolution has stabilized. Student7 (talk) 20:28, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Note that serfdom was obsolete in England 15th-16th century, resulting in out-migration to cities. Prior to that (12th century, e.g.), villeins, who could manage to run off and spend a year in town, were then free. The King's way of enhancing low wage jobs in town; and he could tax towns a lot easier than rural areas, owned by nobles. But also out-migration from farms. So it had gone on, in other ways for a long time. Student7 (talk) 15:01, 14 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Article a bit misnamed as it included England and Wales, but not Scotland nor Ireland. Student7 (talk) 15:12, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Be careful about an over-precise definition of serfdom - Flora Thompson's descriptions of the village economy in the book of Lark Rise To Candleford shows that although the legal system may not have allowed the Lord of the Manor to haul a runaway back, none the less the town economy was not always the improvement of living conditions dreamed of - that mechanism is described in many areas in Henry Mayhew's 1851 London Labour and the London Poor (I would like a similar reference for the mill towns: to demonstrate my fundamental ignorance, the closest we may have are Arnold Bennett's fictional descriptions of the Potteries). As regards the mining communities, AJ Cronin's works, particularly The Citadel, take a similar fictionalised documentary role, and were pivotal in the establishment of the National Health Service. There were, and are, more forms of serfdom than the legal. Indeed, if one examines the etymology, the idea of servitude in its different degrees of slavery, bondsmanship, serfdom and life in service reflects the gradual breakdown of the feudal system into a class-based heirarchy - which is another way of saying it hasn't broken down at all in the UK. We still have a number of hereditary peers exercising real authority over the legislature in the House of Lords, and although the class system has to some extent opened, access to it is stil to a great extent restricted by wealth or the more esoteric qualities of leadership. In all instances, the ties include those of family, which can tie generation after generation to the same locality: it was only with the rise of the Social Welfare State model that the dependence of the elderly on their children was eased, and that may not be able to endure.
 * The Scottish question was far more bounded by the relative timing of the Industrial Revolution falling hard on the heels on the defeat of the Scottish monarchy, producing a far more restricted Agricultural Revolution as much of the land is far more marginal than suitable for the real benefits to be gained, and with the population less minded to comply, the result was Clearance on a far wider and more brutal scale than the Enclosures in the UK (which should not be read as meaning the Enclosures were not brutal). The situation in Ireland was not dissociated from that either, although it had a pre-conditioning from Tudor times in the growth of Protestantism: there may be a case to be made that in both instances, this may be an early example of the conflict between the power of industrial combines and other loyalties, such as tribal and religious affiliations. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 176.25.142.238 (talk) 11:08, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Table deletion
I've deleted the utterly ludicrous population table under "British agriculture 1800–1900". The "Britain" figures were absurd - England alone to 1851, England, Wales, Scotland and all Ireland in 1901, Great Britain and Northern Ireland thereafter, and incredibly with annual growth rates inserted between entirely different areas, at least one of which didn't even relate remotely to the two (bizarrely compatible) numbers it was supposedly referring to. The estimate of 700,000 for London's population in 1700 was far in excess of any estimate I've ever seen, and I've seen most of the intelligent ones and some that weren't. But the crowning idiocy was the "rural" population - England was 64% urban in 1801? Obviously it's an incompetent garbling of the agricultural share of the labour force (though the percentages for 1500 and 1600 didn't even plausibly indicate that, and even the broadly sound 36% in 1801 is now thought a minimum counting family members engaged in production). It's annoying because a few of the numbers were valid and clearly mangled from reputable sources (Mitchell/Deane/Cole and Wrigley/Schofield). Deletion may seem drastic, but am I really to wade through each indicated source (at least one of which was defective, but scarcely claiming academic pretensions for it to be named & shamed), reassemble each aggregate or recalculate each rate or percentage? I doubt anyone has the time to repair this awful mess, which is why it's gone. Chiffrephile (talk) 17:58, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

Material archived
I have moved old discussions to Talk:British Agricultural Revolution/Archive 1 to make this page more usable.  Catfish  Jim  and the soapdish  14:21, 24 June 2015 (UTC)

Unsupported synthesis tag
Re. Section on major developments and innovations: An unsupported synthesis tag for the following passage:

''The British Agricultural Revolution was the result of the complex interaction of social, economic and farming technology changes. Major developments and innovations include:''

I'm not sure which sentence the tag addresses; however, Overton (1996) essentially says this. The social-economic change is refers to the ending of feudal relationships, the legal details of land ownership (which are complex), the enclosure movement, the development of a market economy, the elimination of trade barriers, etc. and other changes. I haven't read Marx but he was a good historian who discussed social and economic changes from feudalism to capitalism and perhaps some of his work would be suitable for reference to these points. However: "Marx was incorrect about enclosure driving the proletariat off the land. It was only one factor. The proportion of the workforce engaged in agriculture had been declining." (Overton, 1996, p-192)

If you have a better way to describe this and would like to expand on the short description, then by all means please do so. Anything in the list of technologies/changes not referenced in Overton (1996) should have another reference in a separate section. If not, then a reference needed tag is appropriate.Phmoreno (talk) 12:50, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure either what the tag referred to specifically: the sentence seems fairly uncontentious - vague, but then so are the causes. My only beef would be that the process was driven until the C19 by changes in technique (methods) rather than technology (hardware). I took the liberty of changing "sparked" to "accelerated": the old customary labour was already in retreat by the 1270s (Kosminsky), and the classical order of directly-run demesnes had been changing as early as the C12 with the emergence of "farming", originally the leasing of estates (Dyer). Your Overton quote implies Marx wasn't wrong, just incomplete - but then so was everyone's analysis in the C19 (we're still not quite there yet). It's certainly true though that the agricultural share of the labour force had been in decline for probably centuries - one has only to look at urbanisation, the rise of rural weaving & mining, and the growth of trade that engaged a host of intermediaries from farm to city. Chiffrephile (talk) 02:15, 21 July 2015 (UTC)

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Jethro Tull
I've flagged as citation needed the claim that his seed drill had little impact... that's the very opposite of what my high school texts said, but that's a while ago. History doesn't change but our understanding of it does. Sources? Andrewa (talk) 19:25, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Not everything you were taught in school was factually correct, or more likely, it was poorly understood by the people who wrote the textbooks. I am unfamiliar with the working mechanism of Tull's seed drill, but the technology to manufacture affordable and reliable machinery of all types required machine tools and machining techniques and such things as metal stamping and die forging that were developed over the mid to late 19th century.  See: American system of manufacturing Phmoreno (talk) 23:06, 7 October 2018 (UTC)


 * Very true. That's one reason I flagged it rather than trying to correct it (the other being that I don't have a source to cite either).
 * We tend to grossly underestimate the significance of our industrial inventory. Steelworks are made of steel. Sulphuric acid is used to make sulphuric acid. Lathes are used to build lathes, and grinders to build grinders, and computers to design computers. Andrewa (talk) 04:00, 10 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Please all note that the post was to which I was replying was revised after I had replied. Andrewa (talk) 19:22, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Exosomatic energy
No mention of increased exosomatic energy inputs via the use of steam engines with wood and then mass quantities of coal in Britain? The biggest contributing factor in the exponential rise in human population since 1800 is the access to immense stores of dense fossil Carbon energy and Carbon feedstocks. Energy/ economy/ human population are highly corelated at nearly 1:1:1. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sendler2112 (talk • contribs) 18:11, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

Dubious claims about British vs Dutch historians
Article says "The British origins of the revolution is the view shared by the British historians. The Dutch historians disagree" – I struggle to believe that, in this day and age, 100% of British historians take one view on a disputed question and 100% of Dutch historians take the opposite. Maybe each group has a consensus that amounts to less than 100% – but then we should seek to clarify how big the consensus on each side is, and whether it is constant or changing over time. SomethingForDeletion (talk) 04:36, 4 June 2024 (UTC)