ABSTRACT
Many historians have called the process which enabled this transition an ‘agricultural revolution’, although the term is now used much more cautiously than it was.2
A number of studies have cast doubt on the extent to which agriculture was revolutionised in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has long been recognised that the process of significant mechanisation did not get under way on the land until the 1850s. If an agricultural revolution occurred, then it did so – in stark contrast to the Industrial Revolution – with very little assistance from mechanisation. Literally speaking, agricultural change on the ground was effected by hand craft and horse power. A general assumption held, however, that farming became much more productive in the eighteenth century, largely because of higher levels of investment, greater regional specialisation and, encouraged by tenants anxious to make the most profitable use of the land they leased, increased labour productivity. A host of regional surveys on agricultural productivity has failed to confirm a picture of steady growth in productivity over the eighteenth century as a whole. It seems likely that the productivity of rural labour was considerably greater in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries than it was from the 1760s onwards.3 In the second half of the eighteenth century, and under the stimulus of parliamentary enclosure (see below), increases in productivity depended upon extensions of land use, particularly by bringing previously waste land into cultivation. During the period 1770 –1850, the acreage under cultivation increased by about 50 per cent, from 10m to 15m. The
acreage sown with wheat, normally the most profitable crop, went up by about 36 per cent, from 2.8m to 3.8m.
