Agricultural History Review, Volume 44 Part 2 (1996), pp. 1–20

This paper makes a case for re-establishing the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a crucial period of agricultural advance in England worthy of the description 'agricultural revolution'. It therefore counters the stream of claims made since the 1960S that developments in earlier centuries were of more significance. The two key indicators of progress are taken to be, first, an unprecedented increase in agricultural output brought about by an equally unprecedented increase in land productivity, and, second, an unprecedented increase in labour productivity which was a necessary corollary to industrialization. New evidence is presented to demonstrate that these changes were mainly a feature of the period from 1750 , and, although the seventeenth century was not devoid of developments in agricultural technology, it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth that these and other developments came to fruition in an 'agricultural revolution'. 

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