ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the first part of the vast modern transformations of agriculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These transformations were part of the broader processes of the formation of European capitalist economies and the rise of European and then American economic and political dominance. In the nineteenth century these changes included the emancipation of the great majority of servile farmers and laborers in the Americas and Europe. They also included the development of agricultural systems oriented toward market production. This development, often called the “agriculture revolution,” involved less a revolution than a different path taken by those involved in the farming systems of the Netherlands and England. Such systems found their ultimate expression in the agriculture of the United States and Argentina. The chapter then examines the agricultural systems of Africa, Asia,
and Latin America as they came under increasing European domination or colonial control. That control involved European attempts to adapt traditional farming to European methods and to involve these regions in the emerging Europe-centered world economy. One of the main results of this process was ironic: the same civilization that abolished slavery and serfdom created conditions that drove vast numbers of farmers into debts that oppressed and limited them almost as much as the old servile systems.
