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This chapter begins by reviewing the traditional historiography on mainly English but also touching more widely on British agricultural production, output, and productivity from the pre-industrial period c.1700, through the early, middle, and mature stages of the industrial revolution, to 1914. It reviews the contested ground over the chronological turning points of the agricultural revolution, turning points that have been determined by historians' estimates of agricultural output. Those estimates, both the contemporary ones by observers such as Charles Smith and Arthur Young, and the recent ones by modern scholars are tabulated, compared, and assessed. It is concluded that a new approach is required, an approach based on the product producers themselves, the farmers.

This final chapter returns to the question of farm production in the context of when and how an agricultural revolution met the needs of a demographic revolution. In so doing they make two calculations. The first is an estimate of net national wheat output for the years 1750, 1800, 1820, and 1850 (that is gross production net of seed input) and compare this with population change. They establish that the initial impact of the demographic revolution may have been to reduce the per capita availability of home food production (hence the observable rise in net imports), but that after the initial population upsurge the farmers responded to the circumstances of a changing market. They did so by producing an agricultural revolution firmly located from about 1820. The second calculation links the new estimates of farm production with existing farm labour estimates to construct a labour productivity estimate which emphatically places that agricultural revolution in the 19th century.

Traditionally, the output and production of wheat has served as a thermometer gauge of English or British agriculture. This chapter puts that wheat question back in the spotlight. It begins by assessing what is already known about the course of wheat yields from the 17th century to the late 19th century. Until the advent of the June returns in the 1860s most estimates were simply that, estimates and not on-farm measurements. This chapter is based on direct farm measurements of output. It gathers together over 3,000 such measurements from the 1720s to the 1910s from a wide geography. There are many nuances in the accompanying assessments, but the main conclusion is that the great leap forward in wheat yields took place in the 19th rather than in the 18th century. This conclusion forms the first evidence which dates the agricultural revolution later than traditional historiography located it.

Presents a new view of the standard of living development in Sweden during the agricultural revolution, using evidence on the ability to overcome short-term economic stress. The results corroborate previous findings, based on a variety of indicators, that standard of living in Sweden increased for most people after the mid-nineteenth century, but also support a more negative view of the immediate effects of the agricultural transformation in the beginning of the nineteenth century on the landless groups in society.

This chapter does for barley and oats what the previous chapter did for wheat, and it more or less reinforces the new findings about the timing of the agricultural revolution. But it also allows a wider appreciation of farm output to emerge based on proper measurements rather than estimates and to bring into the argument an added approach based on productivity. Output is usually measured as grain crop per acre, but this misses out the all important input of seed, or what we call the seeding rate, from which a new measure of productivity based on output per unit of input, can be assessed. This shows that not only were grain yields improving over time, but they improved at the same time as inputs were reduced. This reinforces both the timing of the agricultural revolution and also its magnitude in meeting the extra food needs of the parallel industrial and demographic revolutions.

This chapter focuses on the importance of different strategies devised by farmers to meet the late 19th-century depression. Lord Ernle wrote something about the agricultural revolution in 1912. When smallholdings were contemplated in the Land Utilization Bill of 1931, he dubbed them an anachronism. The same bias had provoked a much earlier outburst from Arthur Arnold. He appeared before the Select Committee on Small Holdings in 1889. Both of them saw the need for a differently structured system. Moreover, Edwin Pratt, in his book A Transition in Agriculture, focused his gaze on the increasing demand for food other than wheat and meat.

This chapter describes what has been called “the first human-built holy place”, probably used for ancestor worship. At the same time modern Homo sapiens began domesticating plants and animals and coming together to form villages and towns. As ancestor worship became more formalized “skull cults” emerged. As population increased, the ancestors were assigned places in a hierarchy with the highest eventually emerging as the first gods.

This chapter provides a brief review of the history of technology, covering pre-historical technologies, the agricultural revolution, the first two industrial revolutions, and the third industrial revolution, based on information technology. Evidence is provided that technological development tends to follow an exponential curve, leading to technologies that typically were unpredictable just a few years before. An analysis of a number of exponential trends and behaviors is provided, in order to acquaint the reader with the sometimes surprising properties of exponential growth. In general, exponential functions tend to grow slower than expected in the short term, and faster than expected in the long term. It is this property that make technology evolution very hard to predict.

Beginning with his first visit to Scotland in 1767, this introductory chapter sets out the broader historiographical context to the Duke of Buccleuch’s career and the improvement of his estates. The distinctive nature of the Scottish agricultural revolution is examined, which was, to a large extent, instigated, bankrolled and implemented ‘from above’ by the Scottish landowning classes. Given this, it is argued that the attitudes, beliefs and mentalities of these landowners become of crucial importance to understanding the particular nature of agrarian change in Scotland and its distinctive culture of improvement. The close relationship between this improving ideology and the wider Scottish Enlightenment is highlighted, and it is suggested that improvement must be considered as much a cultural concept as an economic one.

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the way evolving models of human organization—from hunter-gatherer to megacities—have an impact on human psychology, human relations, and the development of alienation. The idyllic paradigm, according to some researchers, was the low-population-density hunter-gatherer societies based on mutual exchange and shared resources. The principal organizing mechanism in these societies was kinship, which offered a defined behavioral guide. Eventually, the discovery and development of agriculture led to the Agricultural Revolution, and village-based sedentary societies supplanted the small hunter-gatherer units. Human interaction became more complex and impersonal in the higher-density towns and villages, and the sharing society evolved into one based on private property, trade, and the development of elite social classes. The next critical turning point following the Agricultural Revolution was the Urban Revolution. Several classical and contemporary theorists developed the concept of “social alienation” to describe the impact of the rushed pace of city life and the ephemeral nature of relationships on mental attitudes and social relations. Indeed, the rise of globalization, megacities, and migration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century revived interest in the alienation theories of the 1950s and 1960s. The chapter then describes the American developmental psychologist Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial identity development.

This chapter imagines a revolutionary shift in agriculture, told from the point of view of a narrator living in the mid-twenty-first century. Given that the twentieth century’s “Green Revolution” led to thirty million acres of land being degraded through soil erosion each year, and given that agriculture is the second largest source of greenhouse gases, this narrator presents agriculture as the top threat to biodiversity on the planet. The chapter thus calls upon future generations to “awaken a new and … creative, diverse, complex, and equally wild human place within that ecosphere.” This shift is based on the development of “new hardware,” in the form of a variety of herbaceous perennial crops. Such crops restore the function of the prairies while providing food and fuel to humans. This shifts the focus of agriculture from fossil fuel intensive industrial farming to the “ecological intensification” of biodiversity. This intensification results in “a soil alive with wildness,” as well as extensive carbon sequestration in these renewed prairie soils. Moreover, this new era of ecological intensification breaks down the “human/nature” split, connecting “all organisms, including ourselves, as enclosed within a ‘miraculous skin’”—what the author refers to as the ecosphere.

The introduction briefly surveys the developments that have taken place in the last 500 years relating to the growth of crown capitalism, monoculture, the rise of international trading regimes, the impact of industrial farming, and the scientific and romantic reaction that gave birth to organic farming. Organic farming merged romanticism, holism, ecology, science, and desiccation theory, and fitted within the larger environment movement that spanned from the nineteenth century to the present. It placed an emphasis on wholeness and change that inverted or rejected the main philosophical assumptions underlying scientific rationalism realism and re-introduced into mainstream European culture elements of immanence and mysticism.