Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 343

There is, according to Tauger (pp. 1–2), a complex relationship between farmers and urban civilization, and between farmers and their environment, but in general, he argues, farmers are subordinate in both cases. Therefore the history of agriculture is, from this perspective, an account of the various ways in which farmers escaped from this subordination, only to meet, in recent times, a fresh set of challenges in the form of global warming, peak oil, pollution, debt, and declining farmer numbers (p. 2). Before the nineteenth century, he argues, farmers were self-sufficient, but then, initially in the West, and subsequently elsewhere, ‘civilization incorporated the farmers into itself, creating a relationship of interdependence’ (p. 181), and this, he suggests, makes both vulnerable to dependence on oil, environmental threats, and socio-economic injustice. The modern world therefore needs to learn from the various ways in which early farmers recycled their waste, adapted to markets and environments, and produced food without requiring large inputs of energy. In short, it needs to respect the dependence of civilization upon agriculture (p. 182).

This book is part of a series on ‘Themes in world history’, aimed at undergraduate world history survey courses taught especially in the United States, but also elsewhere. In less than 200 pages it therefore has the task of not only outlining the origins and development of agriculture across the world, but also making the story relevant to world history in general, often, presumably, to students who will not become history specialists. It is a formidable challenge. In meeting it, Tauger adopts a conventional structure, dividing world history into seven periods, three before 1500 CE, and four afterwards, although the level of detail increases towards more modern times, and more than half of the book covers the nineteenth and twentieth century in three big chapters. Within each chapter again the arrangement is fairly conventional, with separate sections on Europe, the Americas, China, and south and central Asia.

In a book such as this, which aims to encapsulate the work of an enormous number of archaeologists and historians, it is tempting to identify the points at which the author is at variance with generally accepted interpretations, or makes simple errors of fact, and most period or subject specialists will no doubt find several in a rapid scan of the book. Is it helpful to apply the term ‘debt peonage’ to both tenants in ancient Athens (p. 18) and feudal serfs (p. 39)? Whether or not medieval peasant land allotments really are most often called manse (p. 38), by the time the term has reached the glossary (p. 184) it has been redefined as ‘the large house of the lord’. Devotees of Arthur Young’s advocacy of enclosure may be surprised to learn that he has changed his name to Robert, and that ‘only Denmark carried out land consolidation and enclosure in the eighteenth century’ (p. 83). Four pages later we are told that there was fierce peasant resistance to pre-1700 enclosure in England, and that ‘Parliament’ imposed enclosure legislation after 1800. A paragraph on the Common Agricultural Policy (p. 142) becomes confused because the effects of its early policies are conflated with its subsequent development, and discussions of eastern European agricultural history often seem to mean only Russia (see p. 68).

Faced with such a range of material to cover, and to be compressed into so short a space, some errors are probably inevitable. The more significant question is whether they undermine the reader’s confidence in the book as a whole, and whether they vitiate the author’s overall argument. Perhaps what matters more than the detail is whether the overall concept forms a useful framework for world agricultural history. For readers who come new to the subject some framework, or overall issue that persists through the book, is surely better than none if their interest is to be maintained; the question then is whether Tauger’s ‘subordinate farmer’ model is more useful than one which traces the effects of technology transfer, trade, and changes in land ownership and occupancy across space and time, or one which assesses the changing balance of demand and supply for agricultural products and the factors that affected it. Its novelty and debatability may in themselves be a useful device for capturing and keeping the reader’s interest. On the other hand, some suggestion that there could be alternative frameworks or models, and where they might be found, might have made the book even more useful as an introduction.