The development of family farming in west Devon in the nineteenth century 1

One geographical area where family farming is particularly strong is the pastoral western half of Britain. In West Devon, for example, 80 per cent of the full-time farm labour force was provided by the farmer and family in 1979. Harriet Friedmann suggests a double specification of a simple commodity form of production, whereby factors, internal and external to the family unit, ‘determine the conditions of reproduction of the form and the manner in which its circuits of reproduction intersect with those of other classes’. Any suggestions that Devon, as a peripheral and pastoral county, might have lagged behind the rest of England in the development of capitalist social relations of production cannot be borne out by the figures on labour force composition. During the last decades of the nineteenth century agricultural labour was shed as a response to deteriorating product prices on the world market.