Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature 1750-1840

ISBN-13: 9780198716075 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 256 str.

Peter M. Jones

Opis

Agricultural Enlightenment explores the modernization of the rural economy in Europe through the lens of the Enlightenment. It focuses on the second half of the eighteenth century and emphasizes the role of useful knowledge in the process of agrarian change and agricultural development. As such it invites economic historians to respond to the challenge issued by Joel Mokyr to look beyond quantitative data and to take seriously the argument that cultural factors, broadly understood, may have aided or hindered the evolution of agriculture in the early modern period ("what people knew and believed" had a direct bearing on their economic behavior Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy]). Evidence in support of the idea that a readily accessible supply of agricultural knowledge helps to explain the trajectory of the rural economy is drawn from all of the countries of Europe. The book includes two cases studies of rapid rural modernization in Scotland and Denmark where Agricultural Enlightenment was swiftly followed by full-scale Agricultural Revolution.

Recenzje

Agricultural Enlightenment displays the qualities of an historian in complete command of his subject thanks to a fruitful career of primary research and study of the scholarly literature. Jones shows, through his careful reconstruction of the evidence, that, in the face of roughly the same slow rates of urbanization and industrialization, agricultural growth only took place in England and Holland.

O autorze

Peter M. Jones is a graduate of the University of Leeds (BA) and the University of Oxford (DPhil) and has spent nearly the whole of his career as a teacher and researcher in the History Department of the University of Birmingham.