Alternative Agriculture: A History: From the Black Death to the Present Day

ISBN-13: 9780198206620 / Angielski / Twarda / 1997 / 384 str.

Joan Thirsk

Opis

People like to believe in a past golden age of "traditional" English countryside, before large farms, machinery, and the destruction of hedgerows changed the landscape forever. Yet crops from the past like flax, hemp, rapeseed, and woad are gradually reappearing in the "modern" countryside. Thirsk reveals how the forces which drive the current interest in alternative forms of agriculture--a glut of mainstream meat and cereal crops, changing patterns of diet, the needs of medicine--have striking parallels with earlier periods of English history, emphasizing that solutions to current problems can still be found in the hard-won experience of people in the past.

Recenzje

there is a sense of fidelity which protects her work against the vagaries of academic fashion. Nowhere are these qualities clearer than in Alternative Agriculture. Firstly, there is the sheer scale and learning of the book ... it moves easily and with elegance from an England traumatized by the Black Death to an England learning to live with BSE ... this is not only a broad-sweep history but also a complex and minute examination of the processes of agricultural change ... Alternative Agriculture is a marvellouw justification of the historian's craft - a book which is both a careful and engrossing account of our past and a text which speaks into current debates and arguments. I wish I had written it.

O autorze

Joan Thirsk (CBE, FBA), was Fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford from 1965-1983, and has twice been President of the British Agricultural History Society.