ABSTRACT
If few historians now cling to the old idea of an ‘agricultural revolution’ transforming English farming in step with an ‘industrial revolution’, improvement nevertheless remains a key concept in any discussion of development and change over the eighteenth century. It draws attention to the extent, pace and diffusion of better farming methods. Although, under the scrutiny of researchers digging ever deeper on small allotments selected from the wide fields over which an earlier generation of historians ranged, any suggestion of dramatic change has crumbled away, it is still the case that over our period the aggregate effects of changes in farming practice and of the extension of the cultivated acreage by the reclamation of wastes and uplands were very considerable.
