Farm Production in England, 1700-1914 (review)

Farm Production in England, 1700-1914. By M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett, and B. Afton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+295. $74.

While historians generally agree that there was an agricultural revolution in English farming, they do not agree about when that revolution occurred. Traditionally, they have placed the agricultural revolution in the same period as the industrial revolution, approximately 1750 to 1850, and yet there are those who put it a century or more earlier. The debate about the timing of the agricultural revolution, though important for our understanding of English history, has unfortunately been hampered by a lack of good data. We know that population growth was rapid from 1750 to 1850 and food imports modest, leading many to conclude that agricultural productivity must have increased substantially during this period. But direct evidence on farm output has been scarce. The best data so far has come from probate records that give the value of unharvested crops.

M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett, and B. Afton make an important contribution to this debate because they provide new data. They are the first historians willing to undertake the laborious task of piecing together the evidence from farm accounts. This is undoubtedly an important book, and everyone writing on the agricultural revolution in the future will have to refer to it.

Farm Production in England represents the results of an extensive review of farm records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, records which, until now, have remained largely unexploited. The quantity of material is vast; for this book Turner, Beckett, and Afton examined 979 farm accounts (chapter 2 contains a review of the types of records available). They are careful in their use of the data, they provide estimates in which we can have confidence, and they conclude that the agricultural revolution occurred, not in the eighteenth century, but in the first half of the nineteenth. Since they have not examined records before 1700 they cannot rule out the claims of Robert Allen and Eric Kerridge that a revolution occurred earlier, but they do show that yields were flat during the eighteenth century, which supports previous claims by Allen and Gregory Clark.

The book's main contributions concern the measurement of crop yields and animal weights, and the documentation of the prevalence of new farming techniques. In chapters 4 and 5 the authors calculate yields (in bushels per acre) for wheat and for other grains. They do not estimate the trends statistically, but present their results in graphs showing average yields in each year during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unfortunately, the year-to-year variation is great, and the trends are not large, so that it is often difficult to interpret the graphs. Still, there does appear to be a definite increase in the yields for all crops in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Chapter 6 measures the carcass weights of slaughtered animals. Here the trends are less clear, and for many animals there was no increase in weight, but the authors conclude that the carcass weights of lambs, calves, and cows did increase during the early nineteenth century.

As to the causes of increasing yields, the authors document the use of new crops, such as swedes and mangolds, and of new fertilizers, such as guano and oilcake. Livestock were bred more carefully and new feeds introduced. Turnips and clover were widely adopted before 1750, however, and thus cannot account for the increased productivity in the nineteenth century.

This study is based on superb data, and the authors are if anything too modest in their use of it. They measure land productivity, animal weights, seeding rates, and the prevalence of new techniques, but do not attempt to measure either labor productivity or total factor productivity, both of which should be important for dating the agricultural revolution. Crop yields have been the major focus of the literature, but they do not tell the whole story. Similarly, the average...