ABSTRACT
My purpose is to present an interpretative survey of recent contributions to the historical geography of agriculture and agrarian society for the period 1500 to 1900. Practicalities and the inescapable consequences of my own academic socialisation dictate that the approach be Anglocentric. Had space allowed, it would have been possible to extend discussion beyond Britain or, more accurately, England, to embrace the rest of the world — a piece of conceptual neo-colonialism broadly in sympathy with one important strand in the recent historiography of historical geography and the related disciplines of economic and social history. The so-called world-system approach argues that from the sixteenth century, if not earlier, the global periphery was linked to the countries of the north-west European core, which were ‘miraculously’ spared the limitations upon growth intrinsic to the process of growth itself (Jones, 1981a), by steadily tightening bonds of dependency and subordination. In the ‘pre-modern’ world, trade between cultural regions was for the most part implemented by communities of resident aliens, who were constantly at risk of absorption into the host culture of the countries concerned (Curtin, 1984). There was a degree of equity in the reciprocal processes involved. In the world-system world, European military superiority and the gradual growth of commercial and industrial activity meant that the acquisition, on terms favourable to Europe, of global markets and global supplies of raw materials was both possible and imperative. Hegemony, achieved in a cultural and commercial, as well as political sense, eventually ensured that the destinies of all peripheral areas, and not only those of large-scale European settlement, were increasingly bound up with the core (Wallerstein, 1974; 1980; Wolf, 1982; Harvey, 1983). Take this line of reasoning, even denied some of its reductionist extravagance (Dodgshon, 1977), and a Europocentric view of the past stands legitimised by the very course of the events it surveys.
