Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 276

Peter Jones is familiar to many as a historian of rural France, although his most recent book was on the knowledge economy of the West Midlands in the late eighteenth century. Now he has returned to agriculture – but retaining his focus on the production, transmission, use and impact of knowledge – and to France, but also to much of the rest of Europe, between (roughly) 1750 and the 1840s. This takes him into several big questions, from van Zanden’s idea of the Little Divergence between the countries around the southern North Sea and the rest of Europe, to the effect of changing markets and institutions, the role of literacy on farm management, and the process by which changing knowledge affects technical adoption decisions; in fact, most of the central concerns of agricultural historians.

He begins by tracing the emergence of new ways of thinking in the second half of the eighteenth century: physiocracy and cameralism, political economy and agronomy, a term which appeared among French writers in the 1760s, and was defined as a theory of agriculture informed by science – especially chemistry – in the 1798 dictionary of the Académie Française. New ideas crossed national boundaries. Duhamel de Monceau’s Traité de la culture des terres, beginning its publication in 1750, was influenced by Jethro Tull’s work of twenty years earlier; Albrecht Daniel Thaer, who established an agricultural school at Möglin outside Berlin in 1806, was inspired by Adam Smith and Arthur Young. He quotes with approval Young’s contention that after the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 almost all the European states applied themselves to the study of agriculture, leading to a ‘pan-European context of agricultural renewal’ (p. 43), with various fiscal and agrarian reforms, cadastral surveys, land clearance and enclosure initiatives in France, the Habsburg Empire, Russia, Prussia and Spain. The wars at the turn of the century may have disrupted knowledge transmission, but they could not prevent it altogether. In 1798 Sir John Sinclair, President of the Board of Agriculture in London, was receiving requests from France for the latest English books on agriculture and rural economy, and in 1809 he made contact with the President of the Agricultural Society of Paris to request samples of spring wheat, which, with the Emperor’s approval, were duly sent, along with the President’s latest pamphlet on cereal cultivation. Contemporaries remarked on the increasing production of agricultural literature in most European countries and languages in this period. Landowners, farmers, nobility and writers all travelled to widen their agricultural knowledge, agricultural and economic societies were formed, and parish priests from Spain to Finland were used to both gather and disseminate information.

More than 100 million people were added to the population of Europe between 1750 and 1850, and they were mostly fed by a European farm labour force decreasing as a proportion of the total. Jones devotes three chapters to assessing the extent to which the spread of knowledge was translated into changes in practice, and new practices into increased production; in effect, a wide-ranging survey of European agriculture in this period. Demonstration farms, agricultural shows and societies, enclosure, farmers and labourers who were persuaded or attracted to travel to transfer their skills, improved ploughs, ‘numberless new-fangled machines’, and new crops: the effect of the agricultural enlightenment, Jones argues, was to ensure that these could be found on farms across Europe. It was a ‘highly complex and multi-faceted’ process, and these chapters explore both its successes and failures. He also provides an account of developments in agricultural science, and a 26-page bibliography of primary and secondary sources.

In recent years, thanks to the efforts of international research groups and latterly to the meetings of the European Rural History Organisation, a number of books have been produced in which the experiences of different countries have been explored in separate chapters, often beginning or ending with an attempt to draw some overall conclusions. This book is one of the first to carry the process of integration and comparison to the next level, in which each stage of the argument is related to the experience of several different countries, so that an individual paragraph might mention estates in England and Prussia, landlords in Denmark and France, and farmers in Scotland and Spain. Peter Jones has the linguistic ability to read the necessary literature in several languages, and in the central theme of agricultural enlightenment he has found a focus which brings together most of the questions that concern agricultural historians. The result is an important book, which opened my eyes to comparisons I had never previously considered, and it is to be hoped that the publishers soon produce it in paperback form so that it attracts the wide readership that it deserves.