ABSTRACT
Although the agRicultuRal Revolution, the radical transformation of techniques of cultivation and stock-rearing which made possible the extraordinary population growth of industrializing societies, is classically dated to the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, there is some evidence of earlier technical progress which has been used to argue for previous agrarian change. yielD-seeD Ratios, for instance, improved (and sometimes doubled) across Western Europe between 1500 and 1700. With the advent of new crops in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, ratios may even have quadrupled. There was also a shift away from the traditional practice of permanent husbandry (arable cultivation), with more progressive farmers learning from their experience of winter pasturing and reverting their arable fields to pasture at five-(or sometimes seven-) year intervals in a practice that became known as ‘convertible’ or ‘up-and-down husbandry’ (Broad 1980). Progress of this kind was stimulated by increasing demand in the non-arable sector. Rising population levels across Europe – increasing from perhaps 75 million in 1500 and 100 million in 1600 to 110 million in 1700 and 190 million in 1800 (De Vries 1984, 36; ‘Europe in 1800’ in Part VI) – were combined with increasing urbanization and the proto-industrial development of pastoral areas (which stimulated demand for wool, hides and animal fats). The evidence suggests that, broadly speaking, supply was able to keep pace with these rising levels of demand despite the disproportionate growth in the size of the non-arable population. Some European countries, especially those which bordered the Baltic, were exporting grain even in the sixteenth century, which suggests that they had become self-sufficient by then; and even in England, where the growth of the non-arable population was most marked, grain exports were possible by the 1630s. So the evidence of at least some innovation in the agricultural sector is compelling. Hypothetically, there are three mechanisms through which this might have been achieved: the introduction of additional factors of production (usually land, capital or labour) in order to increase gross output; the development of more efficient factors of production (new crops, perhaps, or cheaper labour), which might result in increased output per unit of input; or some combination of the two (though of course increases in gross output will dilute the force of net output). The historical evidence in fact suggests two distinct periods of agrarian change, which were almost certainly the result of shifting levels of demand for agricultural produce. The period 1500-1650 was one of very significant population increases across most of Europe. Although growth rates varied they were almost universally combined with increasing urbanization. Farmers across Europe were encouraged to boost output dramatically and they did so principally by using additional factors of production. The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries accordingly saw the more intensive use of land hitherto considered marginal for arable purposes: fens were drained, marshes reclaimed, woodland cleared and the jurisdictional privileges of forests abrogated. This increase in the amount of land under cultivation was supplemented by the large-scale employment of abundant and cheap labour, both in the form of landless wage-earners (paid in cash, usually in arrears, by the day but able to gain regular work only at busy times of the agricultural calendar) and servants in husbandry (usually contracted annually and paid in bread and board). To a limited extent, there is also evidence of the sporadic introduction of new agricultural techniques:
the further development of convertible husbandry, the floatation of water meadows and the introduction of new crops and rotation systems, all of them stimulated by the burgeoning literature on agricultural improvement. Since most of these practices were aimed at greater efficiency rather than raising output, however, they remained relatively uncommon at a time when high agricultural prices and low labour costs meant that efficiency savings (which often required expensive investment in the short term) were not a high priority for most farmers. The period after 1650, by contrast, saw the long period of demographic expansion draw to a close and the stagnation of agricultural demand created a rather different set of priorities for farmers squeezed between increasing labour costs and falling food prices. To maintain, let alone increase, existing levels of production would only glut an already depressed domestic market. One solution, of course, was to funnel grain into exports, and it is generally true that agricultural products took a dramatically increased share of an export market which had traditionally been dominated by textiles in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (Table 1).
