The Dynamics of Agricultural Change

The Historical Experience

David Grigg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000682212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ökologie

First published in 1982. Until the nineteenth-century the history of agriculture was the history of mankind but it has not perhaps received the wide attention that this importance justifies. In this study, the author reviews for the student of agricultural history successive attempts to describe and explain agricultural changes that are not specific to a limited area or a particular time. In a sense The Dynamics of Agricultural Change is a systematic historical geography of agriculture.

Some of the models the author explores have been developed within agricultural history; some, drawn from other disciplines, can be applied fruitfully to it. What is the relationship between population growth and agricultural development? Between environmental changes and those in agriculture? What was the effect of the industrial revolution? And has there been an agricultural revolution?

This book suggests to university students of economic history, historical geography and agriculture, a number of stimulating ways of interpreting and reinterpreting agricultural history.

1 Introduction

Agriculture has formed the basis of economic life for over 10,000 years, and until 100 years ago the great majority of the world’s population were directly employed in farming and pastoral activities. Industrialization, beginning in Western Europe and spreading slowly to European settled areas overseas, and later to many other parts of the world, has greatly reduced the importance of agriculture in the economy. In Britain and the United States only 2 per cent of the work force are employed in agriculture, and in the world as a whole less than half those gainfully employed now work in farming.

But the history of agriculture was the history of mankind until the nineteenth century, although it has not received the attention it is perhaps due. Historians have concentrated upon political history, not upon the mundane and unexciting events of farming life: even economic historians have shown more interest in the life of towns and the fortunes of industry than the ways of farmers. But although there are few agricultural historians this has not prevented them producing a voluminous and distinguished literature, which is perhaps inevitably concerned primarily with Europe and the European settlements overseas. It is for this reason that this book deals almost exclusively with Europe and North America; it is not that the rest of the world has no agricultural history of interest, but that for the most part it has yet to be written.

Those concerned with agricultural history – whether they be historians, economists, geographers or sociologists – have for the most part followed the example of historians and written narrative history, concerned with the chronology of agricultural change in one particular area, although the size of that area has varied from an English parish to the whole of Europe, and the time from a few years to a millennium or more. In the past twenty years there have been marked changes in the methods and aims of the academic disciplines which have traditionally concerned themselves with agricultural change. In the late 1950s, for example, geographers began to tire of the description of regions and the concern for unique facts about the earth’s surface. They sought instead to make geography a ‘law giving’ science, seeking generalizations that would explain similarities rather than emphasizing the uniqueness of places. To do this they had to borrow a methodology from the more sophisticated social sciences – particularly economics – and to use statistical methods to test hypotheses and formulate models.

Economic history also experienced a sea change, beginning somewhat later, but following much the same course. In Britain, departments of economic history had grown up separately from departments of economics, and were on the whole closer bound to history. But in the last fifteen years a new school of economic history has emerged; these writers have argued that economic history can only be explained satisfactorily by the use of economic theory; that a rigorous methodology is necessary for collecting data, formulating hypotheses, and testing them. The New Economic History had its origins in the United States, but has spread to Britain. But in both countries its primary concern, with a few notable exceptions, has not been with agriculture.

Agricultural historians and historical geographers have perhaps been slow to respond to these changes in their disciplines; historical geographers however have constantly admonished each other to adopt the new approaches. Some historical geographers have had the confidence to urge agricultural historians to adopt the models of human geography and apply them to the study of agricultural change. It might be thought from reading such essays that agricultural history lacked any attempts to generalize about the nature of agricultural change, and had concerned itself only with the microscopic examination of the unique. This hardly seems fair to those who have dealt with agricultural history in the past. Are von Thiinen, Marx and Meitzen to be dismissed? Have not modern agricultural historians such as Wilhelm Abel and B. H. Slicher van Bath attempted interpretations of European agricultural history on the heroic scale? There certainly have been attempts to generalize about agricultural change, although these have not always been clothed in the language and methodology of modern social science. The term model is thus interpreted liberally – indeed perhaps even in a libertine manner – in this book. What it tries to do is review for the student of agricultural history those attempts to describe and explain agricultural change which are not specific to a limited area or a particular time. In a sense this book is a systematic historical geography of agriculture. Several categories of writer are discussed. First there are those who have put forward explicit models of agrarian change – such as Karl Marx and B. H. Slicher van Bath. Second, the models of other writers can be fairly easily adapted to the study of agricultural change – Malthus, Ricardo and von Thiinen are good examples – and the implications of their work are considered. Third, some models used in modern human geography may be of help in understanding the agricultural past: the diffusion of agricultural innovations is one such case. Fourth, some of the methodological approaches to the study of modern agricultural change may be usefully applied to the past. The measurement of the growth of productivity change is one such instance.

These approaches to agricultural change seem to be worthwhile, and it is the purpose of this book to review such models and their implications. The book is arranged in four parts. The first part shows how some historians and economists have seen population change as a cause of overpopulation in rural societies, giving rise to adverse changes in farm structure, land use and technology (Chapter 2). In contrast others believe population growth to be an essential stimulus to improvement in agriculture: Ester Boserup’s work is the best example of this approach (Chapter 3). In the second part of the book some attempts to relate environmental and agricultural change are considered. Change in agriculture does not proceed at the same pace or in the same way in all areas. Thus Chapter 4 attempts to show how Ricardo’s theory of rent may be helpful in analysing regional rates of change. Chapter 5 takes some of the ideas of modern ecologists, who deal with the flows of energy and nutrients through agro-ecosystems, and demonstrates how these approaches may help the understanding of agricultural history. Climate has often been suggested as a possible cause of agricultural change, and this presumption is examined in Chapter 6.

The great break in agricultural history came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the industrial revolution and its implications for agriculture (Part Three). Some argue that this event transformed peasants into modern farmers, so in Chapter 7 some theories about the nature of peasant societies are examined; the following chapters consider several different aspects of industrialization and their consequences for agriculture. Structural transformation, new demands and new technologies are considered in Chapters 8 and 9, while the results of the transport revolution are dealt with in Chapter 10.

Part Four of the book deals with the idea of an agricultural revolution. Although historians have seen change in agriculture as slow, they have identified some periods of more rapid change, and dubbed these ‘agricultural revolutions’. These can be usefully reinterpreted by considering the diffusion of innovations, and by applying some methods of defining and measuring productivity change. These approaches are considered in Chapters 11, 12 and 13.

Population, environment and industrialization are not the only keys to agricultural change. Many nineteenth-century writers thought institutions to be the heart of not only agricultural but all historical change, although they differed as to what was the critical institution (Part Five). The ownership of land was held by some to be of paramount importance: Marx’s interpretation of agrarian change in England deals essentially with the changes in the ownership of land, and the role of enclosure in altering this, and is discussed in Chapter 14. In North America nineteenth-century historians believed that American institutions were derived from Europe. F. J. Turner in contrast thought the American environment transformed European institutions; the medium of change was the frontier, a concept which he used to interpret agricultural as well as political history.

This by no means exhausts the models of agricultural change that have been put forward, but it is hoped that it suggests to students of the economic history and historical geography of agriculture a number of stimulating ways of interpreting – and reinterpreting – agricultural history.

Part One

Population and agricultural change

2 The adverse consequences of population growth

The relationship between population growth and material wealth has long been a matter of debate. Interest has focussed upon two aspects of the problem. First, what are the relationships between population growth and the food supply? Second, how does population growth influence economic growth? There is a large literature upon both these topics, stretching back to the eighteenth century; yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the effect of population growth upon agriculture – upon land use, farming methods, productivity and farm structure. If there are few theories linking population and agriculture, nonetheless most writers have taken distinctive attitudes to the problem. First are those who believe that rapid population growth invariably has adverse effects upon the agricultural economy, causing the subdivision and fragmentation of farms, underemployment and unemployment, falling real wages, an increase in arable land at the expense of grazing land, falling crop yields, and a decline in the number of livestock that can be kept.¹* Second are those – a minority of writers – who believe that only population growth spurs economic development and that it is the major cause of agricultural change in peasant societies, enforcing adaptations in land use intensity, and changes in the implements used.² In this chapter the idea of overpopulation in rural societies is discussed, and in Chapter 3 some of the positive responses to population growth are considered.

Malthus

The view that population growth can only have adverse consequences for society is closely associated with Thomas Malthus. Although Malthus did not deal with the effect of population growth on land use or on the structure of agrarian society, but on the food supply, much subsequent work derives from his theory and it must be outlined here. He first put forward his views in An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, and then greatly extended this in a revised edition published in 1803.³ He argued that population had the capacity to increase at a geometric progression whereas food output only had the capacity to grow at an arithmetic progression. But as population did not increase at a geometric progression there must exist checks to population increase. He recognized two categories: first, preventive checks, of which he considered only one, moral restraint or the deferment of marriage; and second, the positive checks, which included all the causes of a shortened life, but principally war, famine and disease.

* Superior figures refer to the Notes and references on pages 230–55.

What later writers have called a Malthusian cycle took the following course. Suppose population is stationary, birth and death rates being equal and income per caput at subsistence level. For some reason income per caput rises. This allows people to marry earlier and the birth rate rises; they can also buy extra food, are more resistant to disease and so the death rate falls. Thus population begins to increase. After a time, and because of the law of diminishing returns, the increase in the food supply falls behind the increase in the population. Consequently income per caput falls and as it does marriage is once again deferred and fertility declines, and as income per caput falls towards the subsistence level the death rate rises. Population growth ceases as fertility and mortality reach the same level, and income per head returns to the subsistence level. Malthus’ essential conclusion was that while population can increase, it will always eventually be halted by rising mortality as income per caput falls, and that periods of temporary affluence will always be eroded by population growth, income per caput always returning to the subsistence level.

Malthus’ theory was much criticized by his contemporaries and by subsequent writers. In particular he ignored the possibility of technological advance in agriculture allowing a greater increase in food output. Nor did he allow that there might be birth control within marriage, or that men might defer marriage or have fewer children within marriage in order to achieve a better standard of living. Subsequent interpreters of his theory have been apt to emphasize that population growth is halted by rising mortality rather than falling fertility, which Malthus, however, did allow as a possibility.

Optimum theory

For much of the nineteenth century food output and income per caput rose faster than population, which itself was increasing rapidly. Contemporaries believed that technological progress and investment, neither considered by Malthus, had invalidated his theory. Towards the end of the century there was renewed concern about population growth, but economists then applied themselves not to the inevitability of overpopulation but to a consideration of what was the best, or optimum, population for a country to have. This was done by applying the newly discovered principles of marginal analysis to the relationships between output and population.⁴

The optimum population with given resources, technology and capital is JK which maximizes output per head (Figure 1). With any population less than JK average output per head is less than the maximum, and an increase in population will give an increase in total output, average output and, in some cases, marginal output. This is due to the existence of increasing returns to extra labour inputs; the existence of such a condition has not been widely investigated but presumably occurs in sparsely populated, recently settled areas, where extra population would allow improvements in transport, the spread of general overhead costs among a greater population, and the use of part of the population to clear new land for cultivation or to improve irrigation. One modern writer has argued that parts of Africa are underpopulated rather than overpopulated.⁵

Figure 1 The definition of an optimum population

At population JK marginal product equals average output per head and thereafter with a greater population output per head declines and marginal product falls below average output. At any population above JK diminishing returns are operating, and although total output increases, output per head falls, and in terms of optimum theory the country is overpopulated. However at higher populations than JK...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One: Population and agricultural change
• Part Two: Environment and agricultural change
• Part Three: Industrialization and agricultural change
• Part Four: The pace of change
• Part Five: Institutions and agricultural change
• Notes and references
• Index