Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 1 (2013), p. 182

This edited volume, ‘Landscapes of agricultural knowledge: strategies of innovative resource use in journals and societies of the eighteenth century’ takes up a theme fairly prominent of late in Germanophone scholarship, and the history of science: how does knowledge spread? Despite the importance of innovation and the ‘knowledge economy’ in current studies of economic growth, for a number of years many historians of pre-twentieth-century economies and agriculture have focused on the collection of quantitative data regarding output, prices, tenure, and so forth. Change is identified by shifts in the data and then explained by arguing, sometimes in a rather circular fashion, that the constellation of prices and tenurial structures must have provided the right conditions for innovation to take place. This is important work, and often the best we can do: but frequently the means of achieving change are not considered.

Of course, it is hard to get at where ideas come from, and there is an equivalent danger in putting too much weight on texts read by a small minority of farmers whose real impact is hard to gauge. This collection attempts to approach the problem through the study of institutions set up to promote communication about agricultural innovation, the tools they used, who joined them, and what they promoted. In practice, one still remains distant from evidence of actual application even on the great estates of Europe, never mind more modest holdings. Of course, members of enlightened agricultural societies were only too aware of the limitations of their reach: ‘to really put our suggestions into practice, does not stand within our power’, as the ‘Berner Society’ commented in a preface to one of its publications in 1764. Editor Marcus Popplow sidesteps this conundrum by arguing the histories gathered here show an important set of contributions to the development and popularization of a long-term movement towards improvement and the ‘scientification’ of agriculture. As a causal argument this remains as vague as an inference from price series, but nevertheless it is an important area for study, and a very welcome contribution.

The book consists of 14 chapters, the weight of which are case studies in Germany and Switzerland, but supplemented by chapters on Scotland, Bohemia, Russia, and Sweden. These cases, and their commonalities, help us see developments in each region as part of a much broader European movement during the Enlightenment, especially from the 1750s, with extensive exchange of texts and journals across political and linguistic borders. Indeed, it is a shame there are no contributions on England and France, as historians of those countries erroneously have a tendency to view their own histories in isolation (even from Scotland).

The journals and societies of the ‘economic enlightenment’, it is argued here, represent a ‘specific culture of innovation’ that saw knowledge flowing from organized exchanges of best practice among the educated, who in turn would draw farmers into their aspirations for self-improvement (ideally with subsidy from government to facilitate publication, meetings, and experiment). It was a national duty to exploit resources to the maximum. This was not only a matter of best practice with plough, beast (combating animal disease was a particular concern), sylviculture or seed, but also a matter of information: facilitating early efforts at data collection. One such example is in meteorology as described by Cornelia Lüdecke, aiming to put weather science on a firmer empirical basis with the explicit aim of providing forecasts to farmers. Martin Stuber deals more directly with the varied literature and devices used to ‘popularize’ agronomic recommendations and encourage a culture of debate and experiment, without being able to directly measure reception. For the most part, the studies focus on the membership and interests of society members and contributors to journals: a relatively small circle of pastors, gentleman enthusiasts, and academics. They were, however, by no means marginal to political currents of the time, and in Germany included many of the leading figures in political and economic thought such as Wolff, Zincke, and Dithmar; translation and dissemination of foreign works was also widespread. Much of success in gaining an audience for later champions of innovation such as Albrecht Thaer, seen retrospectively and partly through his own efforts as father of a revolution in German agronomy, can only been seen in the light of the very thorough preparation of the soil in the eighteenth century. England’s famous Annals of Agriculture appear too as a latecomer to this scene.

That said, rather like the institutions, this volume lacks a strong editorial hand throughout, and largely remains a series of isolated, if complementary case studies. The chapters are rather uneven in length and conception, some clearly produced early in a research career, while others are barely digested books. Yet there are rich pickings and this is a valuable contribution to pulling together the intellectual and agricultural history of eighteenth-century Europe.