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This chapter argues, against some other More scholars, that Hannah More remained a significant character into her sixties. She became ever more closely associated with the Evangelical wing of the Church of England and this is seen most clearly in her patronage of the Bible Society. She also supported the Evangelical petitioning campaign to open up British India to Anglican missionary work. She wrote two books in this period, Practical Piety and Christian Morals, both of them attacks on what she saw as Calvinist Antinomianism. Her home at Barley Wood, near Wrington, became a centre of Evangelical activism and sociability.

This chapter shows how farming developed in Eurasia from increasingly intrusive plant management, which sometimes elicited rapid genetic responses from a few plants (especially cereals and pulses), coupled with a sudden climatic deterioration that removed many alternative food resources for human populations in the Near East. From 12,800-11,600 BP, the Younger Dryas Interval resulted in markedly cooler, drier conditions across much of Eurasia. Semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers in the Near East were forced to rely increasingly on the collection of wild cereals as other edible plants and all kinds of animals became much scarcer. The intense management of cereals like rye and barley favoured ‘domestication friendly’ mutations, such as large seed size and non-shattering seed heads. By 11,800 BP, the first domesticated rye variety was being cultivated in the Syrian village of Abu Hureyra. Over the next few millennia, domesticated versions of wheat, barley, and pulses were being grown across the Levant.

By 10 million years ago, the major cereal groups had diverged from each other and were distributed across the world. Many of these grassy plants have remained recalcitrant to domestication, but thanks to their unusual genomic architectures, a few of the larger grained species were able to adapt to cultivation during the early Neolithic period to become our most important crop plants. The major cereal crops in the Near East were the wheat/barley/rye groups, which included many polyploid hybrids, especially among the wheats. In eastern Asia, rice and millets were the first cereals to be farmed, while in Africa sorghum and several millet species were cultivated. The major American cereal was maize, which was initially domesticated from teosinte to form small-cob maize in a relatively rapid process that was followed by several millennia of slow increases in cob length that eventually resulted in the high yielding crop of today.

In the Near East, farming started in the Levant and northern Mesopotamia and, by 9,000 BP, was established across much of the region. Farming villages grew into towns that gradually increased in size and techno-social complexity. This development was punctuated by at least three serious aridification events in 8,200, 5,200, and 4,200 BP that led to the partial abandonment of rainfed farming and dramatic reductions in social complexity. A momentous development was the invention of irrigation by the Samarrans after 8,000 BP. This allowed the colonization of southern Mesopotamia and the evolution of the first true urban cultures in Sumerian centres such as Ur and Uruk. Sumerian agriculture was dominated by intensively farmed barley monocultures controlled by elites who developed writing, organized warfare, imperialism, and ruled over an increasingly coercively managed subject population.

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.

Facilitating the change from craft to industrial distilling required distillers to engage with the physical environment, agriculture, technology and innovation, transportation improvements, workforce development, federal and state laws, and social constraints. Corn became a prerequisite as a starch source. Farm livestock provided milk, meat, fiber, and motive power, but they also consumed grain and were therefore both supportive of and in competition with farming-distilling operations. Distillers disposed of their spent grains by feeding it to cattle and hogs.

Bembo and his team's journey ended in a vast plain that stretched as far as the eye could see. They lodged in one of the houses, where there was not even enough barley for the houses. They rode all night and took only a rest around dawn in a low place between two mountains. They set off again soon after sunrise and traveled all day through desert places. They took their leave after many delights, and the consul accompanied them to the staircase, while the other merchants honored them by accompanying them to their consul's house, where the captain lived. That same evening, their consul received the visit of the French consul. The pasha was not there, as he was engaged in a campaign. They found a countryside irrigated by a stream which springs from a mountain that they later climbed after some travelling.

Stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were a staple of theaters across the United States well into the twentieth century. In 1876, after jubilee troupes had become a national craze, George Howard and his wife Caroline added a jubilee troupe to their stage production, setting off a new trend. Soon jubilee singers were a prerequisite for every “Tom” production. This chapter examines the role of black singers in the show, using Howard’s revision of George Aiken’s script as well as reviews, and lists the spirituals used in the initial productions. A symbiosis between Tom shows and jubilee troupes developed, with jubilee troupes increasingly adding ethnographic portrayals of slave life to their concerts. Soon other plays that had a more tangential relation to plantation life (or none at all) began incorporating jubilee singers. Meantime, the Hyers sisters and Elizabeth Hopkins mounted musical plays that incorporated spirituals as well as cultivated music. Minstrel managers attempted a new level of “verisimilitude” in theatrical representations of slave life and music, constructing outdoor plantations and holding performances in slave cabins and cotton fields, as well as on nearby stages.

This chapter examines the replication of “grammar” in alimentary systems, which results into a structure where every element acquires a meaning. In the alimentary lexicon of the peasant population, bestie minute or small animals, such as pig—ideal for meat, or sheep—ideal for milk, are the most prevalent element. During the high Middle Ages, animals were raised along with the development of forest-pastoral activities. Among vegetables, the primary role was held by grains. Early in the Middle Ages, two new plants—rye and oats—were cultivated. Previously known only as invasive grasses, they slowly took over space given to such traditional plants as spelt and wheat by virtue of their high yield and resistance to adversities of climate. On the other hand, the combination of barley and oats documented in the early years of the tenth century represents a juxtaposition of the old and the new.

Twenty-five years after embarking on what was to become one of the major Iron Age excavations of the twentieth century, Barry Cunliffe was also reflecting on the endless cycle from Beltain, through Lughnasadh, to Samhain and Imbolc, and back to Beltain (Cunliffe 1995). While the journey to which Cuchulainn aspired was across the bosom of his bride to be, Cunliffe’s journey took him to a deeper understanding of the culmination of European Prehistory. The campaign he so impressively led at Danebury hillfort formed a critical leg of that journey; it remains a keystone to everyone’s understanding of Iron Age society. He was not alone among his research group in reflecting upon that annual cycle of seasons and feasts, which is preserved in various subsequent Celtic and Gaelic accounts; the principal archaeobotanist and archaeozoologist on the Danebury Environs Project incorporated them into their resumé of seasonal economic activities (Campbell and Hamilton 2000). Cunliffe had previously inferred, on the basis of an analysis he conducted with Poole (1995) of different patterns of erosion and infilling in the thousands of pits within the hillfort of Danebury, that Beltain and Samhain were the times of their ritual opening and infilling. These same pits provided the present author with one of the richest archaeobotanical data-sets I have had the opportunity to examine, and formed a cornerstone of my arguments about Iron Age agricultural production (Jones 1981, 1984a and b, 1985, 1991, 1995, 1996). The discussion and critique those analyses have generated are at least as valuable as the original publications themselves, and the most recent of them draws the debate in an interesting direction. In a meticulous and critical study, Van der Veen and Jones (2006) question a number of aspects of my original argument, and shift the emphasis from my own, which was upon relations of production, to a new emphasis upon relations of consumption. Whereas I had connected the plant remains within the pits to the toil of farmers, they speculated upon the celebrations of the feast.

Berry in central France figures frequently in assessments of the level of complexity in western temperate Europe at the annexation of Gallia comata in 52 BC. Information from a number of sites, particularly Levroux (Indre: e.g. Büchsenschütz et al. 1988; 1992; 2000; Krausz 1993), contributes to what is now a tolerably well-understood pattern, contrasting markedly with the poorly known settlement record for the earlier Iron Age of the area. One site forms a conspicuous exception. For the end of the Hallstatt Iron Age and the initial phase of its successor—broadly the decades either side of 500 BC— Bourges (Cher) is now known to be of critical importance, not only in regional terms, but also as a variant of the elite phenomenon known as the Fürstensitze that occurs widely across west-central temperate Europe. It will come as no surprise that the first English-language author to recognize the emerging importance of this site was Barry Cunliffe in The Ancient Celts, and it is thus with pleasure that this interim statement on Bourges and its immediate hinterland at the time of the transition from the Hallstatt to La Tène Iron Age has been prepared. Since 1995, with Jacques Troadec, the municipal archaeologist, Olivier Büchsenschütz, Pierre-Yves Milcent and others, the author has been excavating within and on the periphery of Bourges—by the first century BC certainly Avaricum of the Bituriges—as part of a long-term rescue project on that site and its surroundings. A few, selected aspects of this are considered below. The pace of development, and evolving legislative arrangements for rescue archaeology, mean that other important sites in the commune have been examined by Alexis Luberne and colleagues in the State Archaeological Rescue Service, INRAP, and reference to some of their work is included below. The rate of change in and around the city, particularly as military establishments—many initially set up at the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian war—are redeveloped for light industry, and new housing, transport and other infrastructure is constructed, provides much scope for new discoveries; what follows is thus by necessity provisional.

A deeply felt aversion to spending accumulated capital is an ancient part of the heritage of most societies. Although my father was a doctor, not a businessman, he taught this to me. He had lived through the bankruptcy of his own parents during the Great Depression, watching as they gradually sacrificed the inventory of their store in Passaic to keep the family in food and clothing. On one side of this store, my grandfather sold records, phonographs, and sewing machines and repaired the appliances that he sold; on the other side, my grandmother, a brilliant dress de-signer, prepared bridal gowns for customers who came from as far away as New York City. She would dress the brides on the wedding day, too, and was celebrated for her ability to make the plainest bride look beautiful. But as the depression wore on, business fell off, the customers stopped coming from New York, and the stock of goods dwindled away. There was no choice but to close the store; my grandparents’ livelihood was gone forever. Later, my father and the oldest of his four brothers made it a priority to pay their parents’ creditors in full, a decision that entailed sacrifices in itself. The lesson was handed down to me: you can spend your earned income and any interest you may have received, providing you first set aside a portion to increase your savings; but never spend the principal, your capital, except as an act of final desperation. To most of us, capital is associated with business, yet the habit of preserving capital and handing it on to the next generation started, I am pretty sure, not as an economic or financial practice, but as an agricultural one. In Neolithic societies, it must have begun when farming replaced hunting and gathering as the main source of food. From Anatolia to North Africa to Peru, the staple grains of wheat, rice, corn, millet, oats, barley, and rye, the legumes such as peas and beans, and other vegetables from squashes to radishes, were almost all annual crops.

Knowledge of climate impacts is necessarily embedded in multifaceted, multiscaled contexts. The many facets include physical, ecological, and biological factors–as well as social, political, and economic ones–interacting on a spectrum of scales ranging from the individual to the household, the community, the region, the nation, and the world. Such complexities encompass natural as well as cultural aspects. Therefore, assessing the role of climate requires a comprehensive, integrated approach. Various methods and models have been proposed or developed to aid understanding of the relationships between agriculture and climate variability (and more specifically, ENSO) in regions around the world. Relevant methods include socioeconomic research techniques such as interviews and surveys; statistical analyses of climate and agronomic data; spatial analysis of remote-sensing observations; climate-scenario development with global and regional climate models and weather generators; and cropmodel simulations. Here we describe conceptual models that guide regional analysis, a framework of methods for regional studies, and examples of research in several agricultural regions that experience varying degrees of ENSO effects. Conceptual models are important because they can guide research and application projects and help physical, biological, and social scientists work together effectively within a common context. Equally important is the role of conceptual models in promoting effective interactions between researchers and agricultural practitioners. An early conceptual model for enhancing the usefulness of seasonal climate forecasts has been called the “end-to-end” approach (figure 5.1a). This model consists of a linear unidirectional trajectory in which El Niño events precipitate climate phenomena that, in turn, induce agronomic responses, with ensuing economic consequences. In disciplinary terms, the end-to-end trajectory begins with the physical sciences, proceeds to agronomy, and then to social science—primarily economics. The end-to-end model quickly evolved into an “end-to-multiple-ends” approach (figure 5.1b) because social science consists of many disciplines besides economics. Outcomes and insights regarding the use of seasonal climate forecasts differ, depending on whether the disciplines of economics, anthropology, political science, or sociology are involved. However, a weakness of these conceptual models is the absence of agricultural practitioners (e.g., farmers, planners, input providers, and insurers) in the research process.

World food crops have been improved progressively since their domestication about 10,000 years ago. Progress was especially rapid after the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inheritance, when scientific principles could be applied to crop improvement. Modern varieties of wheat and rice, which ushered the so-called green revolution and led to the doubling of cereal production in a 25-year period, are examples of recent achievements in increasing crop productivity. The present world population of 5.8 billion is likely to reach 7 billion in 2010 and 8 billion in 2025. Per caput food intake will increase due to improved living standards. It is estimated that we will have to produce 50% more food by 2025. Food grain production in Africa will have to increase almost 400%, in Latin America 200%, and in Asia 60%. In the past, food production grew as a result of increased yield potential of new crop varieties, as well as increases in cropped area. In the future, major increases in cropped area are unlikely. In fact, in most Asian countries the cultivated area is declining due to pressures of urbanization and industrialization. Pesticide use is dropping as a result of concerns about their harmful effects on the environment and on human health. Increasingly, the industrial base is competing with agriculture for water and labor. Thus, we will have to produce more food from less land, with less pesticides, less labor, and less water. Increases in crop productivity are therefore essential to feed the world in the next century. One way to increase crop productivity is to develop crop cultivars with higher yield potential. Of the various strategies for increasing the yield potential, two are reviewed in this chapter. Selection for semidwarf stature in the late 1950s for rice (Oryza sativa L.) and wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the most striking example of a successful improvement in plant type. Although selections were guided by short stature, resistance to lodging, and efficient biomass partitioning between grain and straw, breeders were unintentionally selecting for improved canopy architecture, light penetration, and other favorable agronomic characteristics (as reviewed by Takeda, 1984).

This chapter describes how the self-pollinating, or ‘selfing’ trait of cereal becomes instrumental to its successful domestication throughout south-west Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean Basin. Evidence suggests that most self-pollinating plants are more suitable for domestication than cross-pollinating ones. This chapter also discusses cereal cultivation among wheat, barley, rye, common oat, broomcorn millet, foxtail millet, sorghum and rice.

Selecting improved varieties of wheat from among existing wheat plants is an ancient art that dates back thousands of years. In contrast, the deliberate generation of new varieties by controlled breeding is more recent. Wheat breeding developed from an arcane art practiced only by a few isolated individuals into a global community of professional scientists in the period from about the mid-eighteenth century to about 1925, but especially from about 1875 to 1925. Wheat improvement, however, ultimately involved more than just finding or creating varieties with greater utility. A relationship between people and wheat developed over the millennia that increasingly left both species in a state of ever higher mutual dependency. Put another way, wheat and people coevolved in ways that left neither much ability to prosper without the other. Professional wheat breeders occupied a pivotal role in this ongoing coevolutionary process, especially after the nineteenth century. An understanding of wheat breeding thus depends upon understanding how wheat and people “grew up together.” Wheat in everyday English designates a particular grassy plant that produces a starchy grain or seed. Most people think of wheat primarily in terms of this grain, which is used to make bread, cookies (biscuits), pastries, and pasta. Consumers easily distinguish between wheat and other grains such as rice, oats, maize, rye, and barley as they appear in manufactured products or as ready-to-consume grain in food stores. In contrast to their savvy as consumers, most urban dwellers probably could not differentiate between these grains in the farmer's field, particularly between wheat, rye, and barley. Nor could they necessarily give a good explanation of why wheat is particularly suitable for the products in which it is used. Moreover, they probably would be unfamiliar with other uses of wheat, such as using the grain for feed or the straw for fodder and roof thatching. Finally, in all likelihood these consumers would be hard-pressed to give details about the quantities of grain that can be obtained per hectare per year or much about how yields have increased in recent decades. In short, most consumers know and appreciate wheat but only on rather narrow and unsophisticated grounds.

The behaviour and properties of roots are central subjects in this book. A number of biochemical and physiological properties have already been described, for individual roots, in chapters 2, 5, 7, and 8. However, the macroscopic properties of root systems are of very great importance, to an extent that may not be immediately apparent from the point of view of the laboratory. These properties include the root/shoot ratio, the root system dimensions, its topological properties, and its distribution in the soil profile. The property of greatest practical importance is the way in which root length density (length per unit volume of soil) is distributed in the soil, because this defines the spatial limits to the efficiency of a root system in absorbing water and nutrients. For these reasons, we have collected material relating to root system properties here in a separate chapter. This may be particularly helpful to readers because there are very few single-part recent publications that deal with this subject. It appears logical to start with a discussion of how much root a plant possesses, its dependence upon the allocation of fixed carbon, and the efficiency with which this is used to form root tissue. Carbon is the basic currency of plants, and the way in which they distribute and use it is part of their growth strategy. The allocation of carbon in plants has been extensively researched within the above-ground part, but not the below-ground part, because of the difficult access to the root system, and the difficulty of separating the root, root surface and soil processes. It is important to understand the way in which carbon is allocated to both the root system as a whole, and then to the different parts of the root system, its symbiotic partners, exudates and other root products. Some broader issues are also relevant. Some of the carbon allocated to the root could be wasted, from the point of view of the plant or the farmer (Gregory 1994a).

The countries of North Africa and West Asia, hereafter referred to as the “Near East,” cover a large part of the world (more than 7,200,000 km2). This region is characterized by diverse but generally dry climates, in which evaporation exceeds precipitation. The level of aridity is indicated by the aridity index, the ratio of annual precipitation to annual potential evapotranspiration, calculated by the Penman method (UNESCO, 1979). The degree of aridity is shown spatially in figure 16.1 and summarized per country in table 16.1. These data show that the region is characterized by humid, subhumid, semiarid, and arid to hyperarid moisture regimes. In addition, temperature regimes vary considerably, particularly due to the differences in altitudes and, to a lesser extent, due to the oceanic/continental influences. For most of the region, the precipitation generally occurs during the October–April period and thus is concentrated over the winter season. Table 16.1 shows that, with more than 90% of the land area in hyperarid, arid, or semiarid moisture regimes, aridity is very significant in the Near East. Turkey is better endowed with surface and groundwater resources due to the orographic capture of Atlantic cyclonal precipitation, but much of the interior is semiarid. If one excludes the hyperarid zones, which cover the driest deserts and have no potential for agricultural use, nearly 34% of the region, or about 2,460,000 km2, is dryland (i.e., the area with arid or semiarid moisture regime). These are the areas with some potential for either dryland farming (in semiarid zones) or for extensive rangeland (in arid zones). In the Near East countries, agriculture contributes about 10–20% to the gross domestic product and is therefore a major pillar of their economies. However, the indirect importance of agriculture is larger because it provides the primary goods that constitute the majority of merchandise exports and because of the relatively high number of people employed in agriculture. Because of the high degree of aridity in large parts of the region, agriculture in the Near East is particularly vulnerable to drought. Most of the agricultural systems depend on rainfall.

This chapter reconstructs Ottoman irrigation policies in the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial plain. Numerous considerations shaped the Ottoman management of irrigation agriculture in the region. The state’s active support for agricultural development, for instance, was tied to Ottoman concepts of upholding precedent and justice. On the other hand, the ecology and location of the Tigris and Euphrates within the empire restrained whatever agricultural investment the Ottoman state desired to make in the region. Istanbul balanced those cultural, political, and environmental considerations to maintain a hybrid irrigation landscape, largely small in scale and local in character, but with a few giant canals that were administered directly by Ottoman imperial authorities.