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

ISBN-13: 9780198208136 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 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

bristles with such fascinating details which challenge notions about what is traditional and what is innovative in English agriculture ... Thirsk's stimulating and often entertaining account is partly a work of history and partly a manifesto on the future of agriculture.

O autorze

Dr Thirsk, CBE, FBA, was Reader in Economic History at Oxford University from 1965-1983, and has twice been President of the British Agricultural History Society