This book is about the prevalent characteristics and distribution of the major agricultural systems of the world - shifting cultivation, wet rice cultivation, pastoral nomadism, Mediterranean agriculture, mixed farming, dairying, plantations, ranching and large-scale grain production. In Part One some major periods and processes that have affected agriculture are discussed. Chapter 2 deals with the origins and early diffusion of agriculture and its significance. Chapter 3 deals with the subsequent diffusion of crops and livestock, particularly since the discovery of the New World, and Chapter...

This is a book about the population of London during the early modern period and a detailed book about the population of a European metropolitan city at that time. Much is now known about the historical demography of rural England, but very little is understood about the larger towns and cities. Roger Finlay applies new techniques in historical demography, principally family reconstitution and aggregative analysis of parish registers, to study the growth of population in London. He shows that parish registers are as reliable for the analysis of population trends in London as in rural England....

The age of Francis Bacon marked the beginning of a long period when empirical science was seen as the key to progress in extending man's control over nature. Recently, however, a breakdown of confidence in the outcome of worldwide industrialism and a growing concern over threats to the earth's ecosystems have brought mounting criticism of specialized, exploitative science. Demands for conservation and social responsibility are leading to a reappraisal of the whole philosophy of science that has been dominant for three centuries, and many observers see this as a new scientific revolution,...

This book attempts to advance locational explanation in industrial geography by more fully exploring relationships between organizations and the environments within which they operate. The volume is in two parts, the first developing a theoretical framework and the second testing this framework with data for firms in the electronics industry in the UK. To produce the theoretical framework, ideas derived from geographers' studies of linkages and information flows are reviewed and amalgamated with ideas embodied in organization theorists' contingency models of organisational structure. These...

In 1978, when this book was first published, the provision of water services was a fundamental environmental issue. In England and Wales, organizations were created to protect and enhance the nation's water resources. This book considers the problems involved in achieving those objectives and attempts to assess the potential of the organizational arrangements to assist. Each type of water management problem is presented in the context of an actual example. The conflicts inherent in the need for surface reservoirs are discussed using the Lake District as an example. The Severn Trent river...

This book is an investigation of the manner in which the provision and operation of the housing market in Britain has influenced the spatial evolution of urban areas. In particular, the pattern of residential mobility and intra-urban migration is used to demonstrate the way in which changes in the housing market have produced changes in the social geography of the city. One English city, Leicester, is used as a case-study to show how such processes have operated since the Industrial Revolution.

This book approaches the study of patterns by emphasising the processes responsible for them.

The book casts considerable light on the process of regional economic development in the English industrial revolution.

Central grants to local governments are a major aspect of public policy in all western economies. This book has two main aims: first, it seeks to relate central grants to the overall structure of taxes and expenditures of the economy as a whole, and second, it draws together for the first time a major set of empirical evidence on one major grant programme standing at 12,000 million in 1982, the Rate Support Grant in England and Wales. The thesis of the book is developed in three parts. Part one examines the objectives of central grant programmes: namely, need, resource and cost equalisation....

Originally published in 1973, this book reports experiments in the modelling of freight flows in Great Britain, on the basis of 78 origin-destination zones covering the entire country. Its central purpose is to establish whether gravity model or linear programming approaches provide the most appropriate way of describing the existing spatial distribution of freight volumes and hence of predicting future flows, given possible allocations of population. Linear programming appears to be the msot useful way to approach freight modelling on this scale. The model outputs allow the authors to probe...