ABSTRACT
Between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Treaty of Versailles, almost three-quarters of a century had passed, and many things had changed during this time. A golden age of agrarian capitalism had arrived but, after some decades, the base on which it had been founded began crumbling away. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, agricultural prices fell. From about the same time, the evolution of farm wages began dissociating itself from that of agricultural prices. The effect was a wage-price squeeze on the margins for farm profits and land rents. Shifting the pressure to land rents was hampered because small farmers did not raise their income claims together with rising agricultural wages. As a first reaction, they rather tightened their belts to meet low output prices and reduced opportunities for supplementary employment. As a consequence, in contradiction to classical economic theory, it was farm profitability that became depressed. This undermined the viability of large-scale agriculture, in spite of its advantage in productivity. At the time in which merger and cartel movements began pushing industry on the way towards oligopoly, large farms were broken up, languished, or were gradually transformed into family farms. At best, they struggled along with difficulty in places where industrial underdevelopment, repression or cheap immigrant labour helped keep down farm wages.
