agrarian revolution essay

Ch. 25 The Industrial Revolution

Effects of the agricultural revolution, 25.1.4: effects of the agricultural revolution.

The increase in agricultural production and technological advancements during the Agricultural Revolution contributed to unprecedented population growth and new agricultural practices, triggering such phenomena as rural-to-urban migration, development of a coherent and loosely regulated agricultural market, and emergence of capitalist farmers.

Learning Objective

Infer some major social and economic outcomes of the Agricultural Revolution

• The Agricultural Revolution in Britain proved to be a major turning point, allowing population to far exceed earlier peaks and sustain the country’s rise to industrial preeminence. It is estimated that total agricultural output grew 2.7-fold between 1700 and 1870 and output per worker at a similar rate. The Agricultural Revolution gave Britain the most productive agriculture in Europe, with 19th-century yields as much as 80% higher than the Continental average.
• The increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, although domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the 19th century as population more than tripled to over 32 million.
• The rise in productivity accelerated the decline of the agricultural share of the labor force, adding to the urban workforce on which industrialization depended. The Agricultural Revolution has therefore been cited as a cause of the Industrial Revolution. As enclosure deprived many of access to land or left farmers with plots too small and of poor quality, increasing numbers of workers had no choice but migrate to the city. However, mass rural flight did not take place until the Industrial Revolution was already underway.
• The most important development between the 16th century and the mid-19th century was the development of private marketing. By the 19th century, marketing was nationwide and the vast majority of agricultural production was for market rather than for the farmer and his family.
• The next stage of development was trading between markets, requiring merchants, credit and forward sales, and knowledge of markets and pricing as well as of supply and demand in different markets. Eventually the market evolved into a national one driven by London and other growing cities. Commerce was aided by the expansion of roads and inland waterways.
• With the development of regional markets and eventually a national market aided by improved transportation infrastructures, farmers were no longer dependent on their local markets. This freed them from having to lower prices in an oversupplied local market and the inability to sell surpluses to distant localities experiencing shortages. They also became less subject to price fixing regulations. Farming became a business rather than solely a means of subsistence.

Significance of the Agricultural Revolution

The Agricultural Revolution in Britain proved to be a major turning point, allowing population to far exceed earlier peaks and sustain the country’s rise to industrial preeminence. Although evidence-based advice on farming began to appear in England in the mid-17th century, the overall agricultural productivity of Britain grew significantly only later. It is estimated that total agricultural output grew 2.7-fold between 1700 and 1870 and output per worker at a similar rate. The Agricultural Revolution gave Britain at the time the most productive agriculture in Europe, with 19th-century yields as much as 80% higher than the Continental average. Even as late as 1900, British yields were rivaled only by Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. But Britain’s lead eroded as European countries experienced their own agricultural revolutions, raising grain yields on average by 60% in the century preceding World War I. Interestingly, the Agricultural Revolution in Britain did not result in overall productivity per hectare of agriculture that would rival productivity in China, where intensive cultivation (including multiple annual cropping in many areas) had been practiced for many centuries. Towards the end of the 19th century, the substantial gains in British agricultural productivity were rapidly offset by competition from cheaper imports, made possible by the exploitation of colonies and advances in transportation, refrigeration, and other technologies.

Social Impact

The increase in the food supply contributed to the rapid growth of population in England and Wales, from 5.5 million in 1700 to over 9 million by 1801, although domestic production gave way increasingly to food imports in the 19th century as population more than tripled to over 32 million. The rise in productivity accelerated the decline of the agricultural share of the labor force, adding to the urban workforce on which industrialization depended. The Agricultural Revolution has therefore been cited as a cause of the Industrial Revolution. As enclosure deprived many of access to land or left farmers with plots too small and of poor quality, increasing numbers of workers had no choice but migrate to the city. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, however, rural flight occurred in mostly localized regions. Pre-industrial societies did not experience large rural-urban migration flows, primarily due to the inability of cities to support large populations. Lack of large employment industries, high urban mortality, and low food supplies all served as checks keeping pre-industrial cities much smaller than their modern counterparts. While the improved agricultural productivity freed up workers to other sectors of the economy, it took decades of the Industrial Revolution and industrial development to trigger a truly mass rural-to-urban labor migration. As food supplies increased and stabilized and industrialized centers moved into place, cities began to support larger populations, sparking the beginning of rural flight on a massive scale. In England, the proportion of the population living in cities jumped from 17% in 1801 to 72% in 1891.

Drawing of a horse-powered thresher from a French dictionary (published in 1881).

The development and advancement of  tools and machines decreased the demand for rural labor. That together with increasingly restricted access to land forced many rural workers to migrate to cities, eventually supplying the labor demand created by the Industrial Revolution.

New Agricultural Market Trends

Markets were widespread by 1500. These were regulated and not free. The most important development between the 16th century and the mid-19th century was the development of private marketing. By the 19th century, marketing was nationwide and the vast majority of agricultural production was for market rather than for the farmer and his family. The 16th-century market radius was about 10 miles, which could support a town of 10,000. High wagon transportation costs made it uneconomical to ship commodities very far outside the market radius by road, generally limiting shipment to less than 20 or 30 miles to market or to a navigable waterway.

The next stage of development was trading between markets, requiring merchants, credit and forward sales, and knowledge of markets and pricing as well as of supply and demand in different markets. Eventually the market evolved into a national one driven by London and other growing cities. By 1700, there was a national market for wheat. Legislation regulating middlemen required registration, and addressed weights and measures, fixing of prices, and collection of tolls by the government. Market regulations were eased in 1663, when people were allowed some self-regulation to hold inventory, but it was forbidden to withhold commodities from the market in an effort to increase prices. In the late 18th century, the idea of “self regulation” was gaining acceptance. The lack of internal tariffs, customs barriers, and feudal tolls made Britain “the largest coherent market in Europe.”

Commerce was aided by the expansion of roads and inland waterways. Road transport capacity grew from threefold to fourfold from 1500 to 1700. By the early 19th century it cost as much to transport a ton of freight 32 miles by wagon over an unimproved road as it did to ship it 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.

With the development of regional markets and eventually a national market aided by improved transportation infrastructures, farmers were no longer dependent on their local markets and were less subject to having to sell at low prices into an oversupplied local market and not being able to sell their surpluses to distant localities that were experiencing shortages. They also became less subject to price fixing regulations. Farming became a business rather than solely a means of subsistence. Under free market capitalism, farmers had to remain competitive. To be successful, they had to become effective managers who incorporated the latest farming innovations in order to be low-cost producers.

Attributions

• “British Agricultural Revolution.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolution . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Rural flight.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Urbanization.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Enclosure.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Industrial Revolution.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution . Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 .
• “Batteuse_1881.jpg.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Batteuse_1881.jpg . Wikipedia Public domain .
• Boundless World History. Authored by : Boundless. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-worldhistory/ . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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The Agricultural Revolution and Human Development

• August 2, 2023
• Agriculture

The Agricultural Revolution, often referred to as the Neolithic Revolution, was a transformative period in human history that marked the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering to settled farming and agricultural practices. This monumental shift, which occurred around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, had profound implications for human development, societal structures, and the overall course of civilization. In this essay, we will explore the key aspects of the Agricultural Revolution and its impact on human development, focusing on its significance, the emergence of agriculture , societal changes, and its legacy.

1. The Significance of the Agricultural Revolution

The Agricultural Revolution represents a turning point in human history, marking the shift from a primarily nomadic and foraging lifestyle to a more settled, agrarian existence. Before the revolution, early humans relied on hunting animals, gathering wild plants, and constantly migrating in search of food. The advent of agriculture brought about fundamental changes, including the cultivation of crops, domestication of animals, and the establishment of permanent settlements. This shift allowed for a surplus of food production , leading to population growth, specialization of labor, and the rise of complex societies.

2. Emergence of Agriculture

The emergence of agriculture was a gradual process involving experimentation and adaptation by early human communities. Initially, humans began to recognize the potential of seeds from wild grasses, such as wheat and barley, by gathering and replanting them. Over time, these practices evolved into deliberate cultivation, with humans learning to control the growth of crops by clearing land, sowing seeds, and managing irrigation. Simultaneously, they domesticated animals, such as cattle, sheep, and goats, which provided a stable source of food, labor, and materials.

3. Societal Changes

The shift to agriculture led to profound changes in societal organization. With the ability to produce surplus food, early communities settled in one place, establishing permanent villages and towns. This sedentary lifestyle allowed for the development of more complex social structures, as people engaged in specialized tasks and trades. As agricultural societies prospered, hierarchical systems emerged, with leaders and authorities overseeing the distribution of resources. Additionally, the division of labor became more pronounced, with specific roles assigned based on skills and expertise. This period also witnessed the differentiation of gender roles, as men often engaged in plowing, herding, and trading, while women played essential roles in crop cultivation, food processing, and childcare.

4. The Legacy of the Agricultural Revolution

The legacy of the Agricultural Revolution continues to shape human civilization to this day. As agriculture allowed for larger food surpluses, human populations grew, leading to the establishment of cities and urban centers. Moreover, the development of agricultural tools and techniques laid the foundation for subsequent technological advancements. However, this shift to settled living also had environmental consequences, including deforestation, soil erosion, and changes in ecosystems.

we can conclude this, the Agricultural Revolution stands as a defining moment in human history, fundamentally altering the way early societies lived, organized, and developed. By transitioning from a nomadic lifestyle to settled agriculture, humans unlocked a cascade of changes that laid the groundwork for the complex civilizations we see today. The shift to agriculture not only provided sustenance but also paved the way for urbanization, specialization, and technological progress. Nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge the impact on the environment and strive for sustainable practices as we continue to build on the legacy of this pivotal era in human development.

1.What is the Agricultural Revolution?

The Agricultural Revolution, also known as the Neolithic Revolution, refers to the significant transition in human history from a nomadic, hunting-gathering lifestyle to settled farming and agriculture. It took place around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago and marked the beginning of permanent settlements and the cultivation of crops and domestication of animals.

2.How did the Agricultural Revolution impact human development?

The Agricultural Revolution had a profound impact on human development. It led to the emergence of settled communities, population growth, specialization of labor, the rise of complex societies, and the establishment of cities. It also laid the foundation for technological advancements and the development of social hierarchies.

3.What were the key innovations of the Agricultural Revolution?

The key innovations of the Agricultural Revolution include the deliberate cultivation of crops through clearing land and sowing seeds, the domestication of animals for food and labor, the development of agricultural tools like plows and sickles, and the establishment of irrigation systems to manage water resources for farming.

4.How did the Agricultural Revolution change societal structures?

The Agricultural Revolution brought about significant changes in societal structures. With the ability to produce surplus food, people settled in one place, leading to the establishment of permanent villages and towns. Specialization of labor emerged, with individuals taking on specific roles based on their skills. This period also saw the development of hierarchical systems with leaders and authorities.

5.What were the environmental consequences of the Agricultural Revolution?

While the Agricultural Revolution facilitated human development and societal progress, it also had environmental consequences. The clearing of land for agriculture led to deforestation and soil erosion. Additionally, changes in land use and the domestication of animals had lasting impacts on local ecosystems. Today, we strive to balance agricultural practices with environmental sustainability to address these challenges.

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The Development of Agriculture

The development of agricultural about 12,000 years ago changed the way humans lived. They switched from nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to permanent settlements and farming.

Social Studies, World History

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The Farming Revolution Taking root around 12,000 years ago, agriculture triggered such a change in society and the way in which people lived that its development has been dubbed the “ Neolithic Revolution.” Traditional hunter-gatherer lifestyles, followed by humans since their evolution, were swept aside in favor of permanent settlements and a reliable food supply. Out of agriculture, cities and civilizations grew, and because crops and animals could now be farmed to meet demand, the global population rocketed—from some five million people 10,000 years ago, to eight billion today.

There was no single factor, or combination of factors, that led people to take up farming in different parts of the world. In the Near East , for example, it’s thought that climatic changes at the end of the last ice age brought seasonal conditions that favored annual plants like wild cereals . Elsewhere, such as in East Asia, increased pressure on natural food resources may have forced people to find homegrown solutions. But whatever the reasons for its independent origins, farming sowed the seeds for the modern age.

Plant Domestication

The wild progenitors of crops including wheat ( Triticum aestivum ), barley ( Hordeum vulgare ), and peas ( Lathyrus oleraceus ) are traced to the Near East region. Cereals were grown in Syria as long as 9,000 years ago, while figs ( Ficus carica ) were cultivated even earlier; prehistoric seedless fruits discovered in the Jordan Valley suggest fig trees were being planted some 11,300 years ago. Though the transition from wild harvesting was gradual, the switch from a nomadic to a settled way of life is marked by the appearance of early Neolithic villages with homes equipped with grinding stones for processing grain.

The origins of rice and millet farming date to the same Neolithic period in China. The world’s oldest known rice paddy fields, discovered in eastern China in 2007, reveal evidence of ancient cultivation techniques such as flood and fire control.

In Mexico, squash cultivation began around 10,000 years ago, but corn ( maize ) had to wait for natural genetic mutations to be selected for in its wild ancestor, teosinte. While maize -like plants derived from teosinte appear to have been cultivated at least 9,000 years ago, the first directly dated corn cob dates only to around 5,500 years ago.

Corn later reached North America, where cultivated sunflowers ( Helianthus annuus ) also started to bloom some 5,000 years ago. This is also when potato ( Solanum tuberosum ) growing in the Andes region of South America began.

Farmed Animals

Cattle ( Bos taurus ), goats ( Capra hircus ), sheep ( Ovis aries ), and pigs ( Sus domesticus ) all have their origins as farmed animals in the so-called Fertile Crescent , a region covering eastern Turkey, Iraq, and southwestern Iran. This region kick-started the Neolithic Revolution. Dates for the domestication of these animals range from between 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Genetic studies show that goats and other livestock accompanied the westward spread of agriculture into Europe, helping to revolutionize Stone Age society. While the extent to which farmers themselves migrated west remains a subject of debate, the dramatic impact of dairy farming on Europeans is clearly stamped in their DNA. Prior to the arrival of domestic cattle in Europe, prehistoric populations weren’t able to stomach raw cow milk. But at some point during the spread of farming into southeastern Europe, a mutation occurred for lactose tolerance that increased in frequency through natural selection thanks to the nourishing benefits of milk. Judging from the prevalence of the milk-drinking gene in Europeans today—as high as 90 percent in populations of northern countries such as Sweden—the vast majority are descended from cow herders.

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A Timeline of the Three Major Agricultural Revolutions in History

By Irene Park | December 13, 2022

The world’s food systems have been influenced greatly by unexpected changes – both big and small – throughout history. Among such changes are three major agricultural revolutions. Together, they not only shaped how we grow, buy, and eat food today; they also transformed our societies, economies, and relationships with the Earth.

The First Agricultural Revolution: From Hunting & Gathering to Settlement

When: Around 12,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age.

Where: Historically, we’ve positioned the First Agricultural Revolution almost exclusively in Sumer, a Mesopotamian civilization in present-day southern Iraq. However, archaeologists have found over time that similar phenomena were occurring independently in dozens of other places globally, including in East Asia, Mesoamerica, Western and Eastern Africa, South India, and more.

What Changed, and Why?

In the Neolithic period, humans foraged for food. They were nomadic, following food sources as needed. However, as the Ice Age of the Neolithic period came to a close around 11,700 years ago, humans were greeted with much warmer and milder conditions. With a more hospitable environment, humans could settle and grow food on their own accord.

In tandem with the changing environment are multiple other hypotheses for why humans chose to settle and farm. For example, the pressures of a growing population may have created the need for cultivating new foods, or perhaps the increasing sophistication of stone tools made effective agriculture a real possibility.

Though we can’t be sure of exact reasons, we do know that people began domesticating plants and animals to fulfill human needs. Crops including wheat, barley, rice, and maize, as well as the origin of livestock, can be traced back to this first agrarian revolution. Villages and communities of varying sizes also blossomed due to the need for cooperative labor in food production.

How Did The First Agricultural Revolution Impact History?

One of the greatest impacts of the First Agricultural Revolution was the ability for large numbers of people to live in one place alongside one another. On a farm, people needed to work together to produce food for everyone. Then, the availability of large amounts of food with little effort (compared to the time and physical intensity of hunting and foraging) led to further population growth within the community. Thus came civilizations and all that follows: social and political structures, arts, culture, knowledge, a burgeoning economy, and technology.

However, in addition to the richness of culture that came out of civilizations, some scholars argue that the first settled societies set the tone for social inequality , which persists to this day. Farming for many people raised questions about fair distribution and divisions of labor. Governing a large population also resulted in hierarchies and suppressing rights for certain groups in the name of maintaining order.

In addition, agriculture was hard on the environment . Hunter-gatherers had a limited environmental impact; they typically took what they needed from one location and then moved on to another, allowing for natural resources to regenerate after each stop. By contrast, farmers manipulated the environment to increase productivity, livestock would often overgraze, and land was altered to make building easier.

The Second Agricultural Revolution: Business, Not Just Subsistence

When: Between 1500 and 1850, coinciding in later years with the Industrial Revolution .

Where: Mainly Britain, though its impacts were felt globally.

As societies grew larger and more complex, the British looked for new ways to maximize productivity in farming. To produce the greatest amount of food in the smallest amount of land, farmers replaced low-yield crops like rye with higher-yielding ones like wheat, barley, and turnips. Throughout this 2nd agricultural revolution, they also developed chemical fertilizers and used advanced tools and machinery to increase output.

Aided by the flourishing of trade and the rise of capitalism, farmers were also able to sell their crops to more distant regions experiencing food shortages, and at higher costs. Agriculture was no longer just about feeding neighbors; it was an opportunity to make a profit in an expanding market. To be financially successful, farmers had to become cost-effective producers, innovators, and managers.

How Did The Second Agricultural Revolution Impact History?

The Second Agricultural Revolution was both a contributing factor and consequence of the Industrial Revolution, which took place in the 1700s-1800s. As labor productivity and agricultural technology use increased and the population boomed due to a growing food supply, many people were left without land or work in rural areas. Thus, they migrated to the city, typically to find work in manufacturing.

In addition, the focus on productivity and profit fueled economic changes . It led to “ enclosures ,” meaning that land use was restricted to the owner and closed to public use. Landowners of large, productive plots grew wealthier, while the number of small landholders decreased, often selling their plots to larger ones. Issues of land and privatization would grow extremely contentious in the decades to come, and they continue to be a source of controversy today.

The Third Agricultural Revolution: The Rise of Bioengineering

When: Between 1950 and the late 1960s.

Where: Mexico is considered the birthplace of the Third Agricultural Revolution , also known as the Green Revolution. However, green revolutions popped up all across the world, particularly in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, some inspired by Mexico and others on their own.

In Mexico, the Green Revolution began as a quest for self-sufficiency in supplying food for a growing and urbanizing population. In India , it was sparked by mass famine. Specifics varied by country, but each developed new technologies that made it possible to feed large populations. These innovations included things like modern irrigation systems, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers. Scientists also genetically engineered high-yielding and hybrid crops that were less susceptible to disease and climate.

How Did The Third Agricultural Revolution Impact History?

The Green Revolution greatly increased crop productivity and significantly reduced hunger and poverty worldwide. Studies show that without it, global caloric availability would actually have declined by 11-13%. More food allowed the population to grow as well. Since the Green Revolution began in the mid-twentieth century, the global population has more than doubled.

From an environmental standpoint, these agricultural innovations have been somewhat damaging. Pesticides and fertilizers are leeching into and contaminating freshwater supplies and depleting nutrients in soil. Most crops introduced during the Green Revolution are water-intensive and thus accelerating water scarcity. Several varieties of indigenous rice and wheat have gone extinct or are endangered, and pollinators are at risk as well.

Is There a Fourth Agricultural Revolution?

As we make our way through the 21 st century, evidence suggests we may be on the brink of a fourth agricultural revolution, this time driven by artificial intelligence. Already, we’re seeing autonomous machines distribute agrochemicals, pick crops, weed, milk cows, and more.

We have yet to fully understand this Fourth Revolution and its impacts, but as we’ve seen with the first three, the consequences will undoubtedly include both positive and negative components that may change the course of our future. Heavy stuff! But don’t fret, we get a say right now in how this turns out.

Teaching About Changing Agriculture

So, as we move forward, challenge yourself and your students to think critically about food and agriculture and all their interconnections: technology, global (in)equalities, labor, health, environmental impacts, and more. To get started, use our high school lesson, Good News, Bad News , to delve deeper into current issues in agriculture.

Image credits: Ice Age ( Ice age fauna of northern Spain by Mauricio Anton is licensed under CC BY 2.5 ); Egypt ( Egyptian Civilization by 2040241shrirambala is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 ); Threshing machine ( Taos County, New Mexico. Threshing wheat by machine, Canyon. Use of threshing machine costs renter.. . by the National Archives and Records Administration); Men in wheat field ( UN Photo /Jean Pierre Laffont); Agricultural robotics ( Robotics engineer with agricultural robots by This is Engineering is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 )

About Population Education

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Women harvest wheat with sickles in Tras os Monte, Portugal.

What was the Neolithic Revolution?

Also called the Agricultural Revolution, the shift to agriculture from hunting and gathering changed humanity forever.

The Neolithic Revolution—also referred to as the Agricultural Revolution—is thought to have begun about 12,000 years ago. It coincided with the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the current geological epoch, the Holocene . And it forever changed how humans live, eat, and interact, paving the way for modern civilization.

During the Neolithic period , hunter-gatherers roamed the natural world, foraging for their food. But then a dramatic shift occurred. The foragers became farmers, transitioning from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled one.

Why settle down?

Though the exact dates and reasons for the transition are debated, evidence of a move away from hunting and gathering and toward agriculture has been documented worldwide. Farming is thought to have happened first in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, where multiple groups of people developed the practice independently . Thus, the “agricultural revolution” was likely a series of revolutions that occurred at different times in different places.

A farmer winnows grain in a field near the Pyramid of Meidum, in Egypt.

There are a variety of hypotheses as to why humans stopped foraging and started farming. Population pressure may have caused increased competition for food and the need to cultivate new foods; people may have shifted to farming in order to involve elders and children in food production; humans may have learned to depend on plants they modified in early domestication attempts and in turn, those plants may have become dependent on humans. With new technology come new and ever-evolving theories about how and why the agricultural revolution began.

Regardless of how and why humans began to move away from hunting and foraging, they continued to become more settled. This was in part due to their increasing domestication of plants. Humans are thought to have gathered plants and their seeds as early as 23,000 years ago , and to have started farming cereal grains like barley as early as 11,000 years ago. Afterward, they moved on to protein-rich foods like peas and lentils. As these early farmers became better at cultivating food, they may have produced surplus seeds and crops that required storage . This would have both spurred population growth because of more consistent food availability and required a more settled way of life with the need to store seeds and tend crops.

Animal domestication

As humans began to experiment with farming, they also started domesticating animals. Evidence of sheep and goat herding has been found in Iraq and Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) as far back as about 12,000 years ago. Domesticated animals, when used as labor, helped make more intensive farming possible and also provided additional nutrition via milk and meat for increasingly stable populations.

A man on a donkey leads sheep down a path in Syria.

The agricultural revolution had a variety of consequences for humans. It has been linked to everything from societal inequality —a result of humans’ increased dependence on the land and fears of scarcity—to a decline in nutrition and a rise in infectious diseases contracted from domesticated animals. But the new period also ushered in the potential for modern societies—civilizations characterized by large population centers, improved technology and advancements in knowledge, arts, and trade.

Related Topics

• SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE
• ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS
• ANCIENT PERSIA

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30 The British Agricultural Revolution

Richard Hoyle was formerly Professor of Rural History at the University of Reading and Professor of Regional and Local History at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. He is now Visiting Professor of Economic History at Reading. He served as editor of Agricultural History Review for twenty years and is the author of numerous publications on tenancy, landholding, and land markets.

• Published: 21 March 2024
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This chapter offers a new interpretation of the British agricultural revolution. It begins by reviewing the historiography of the late eighteenth-century agricultural revolution, showing how the idea had been largely abandoned by the 1980s but has since been revived. The background to it is quickly sketched in, including population growth, but also a move away from arable cultivation through enclosure. The impact of English population growth on Scotland and Ireland is considered. It is explained how contemporaries saw agrarian change in the late eighteenth century as evidence of failure, given that England moved from being an exporter to an importer of grain. War after 1793 encouraged a revival of arable agriculture and massive investment in agriculture including the enclosure of wastes; after 1815 there was a perception that a bubble had burst. The argument that an agricultural revolution took place in the depressed years after 1815 is quickly reviewed.

For generations of historians, it followed logically and naturally that an industrial revolution was mirrored by an agricultural revolution. If they had looked, they would also have found contemporary awareness of radical change. It was not merely reform-minded writers like Arthur Young and William Marshall who were searching out and publicizing the new techniques used by improving farmers. An essay published in 1790 by Joseph Wimpey of North Bockhampton in Dorset itemized “the improvements in agriculture that have been successfully introduced into this kingdom within the past fifty years” under eight headings. 1 These were all alterations in the management of land that paid for themselves through increased net profits.

The first innovation was superior standards of tillage and the preparation of the ground, and from this followed the second, the invention of new implements of husbandry. Wimpey noted an improvement in plows, the best of which reduced the number of horses and men needed to operate them while giving a much better tilth. Third, Wimpey saw drilling machines as a major innovation. They reduced the amount of seed that needed to be sown and made it possible to hand- or horse-how between the lines of seeds. Fourth, Wimpey felt that the increase in the range of crops available to farmers now allowed them to grow what suited their soil rather than growing what would fetch the best price at market. Fifth, it was the “rotation of most beneficial succession of crops” that “comprehends improvements of great magnitude and extent.” Wimpey distinguished between crops that left the soil exhausted (cereals), and those that replenished it (legumes and roots). The judicious use of “ameliorating” crops after “exhausting” crops allowed for continuous cropping. Sixth, the soil itself was improved by the use of soil improvers (marl, chalk, shells, and lime. Wimpey does not say anything about animal manures.) His seventh innovation was the “successful introduction of many new articles into field culture.” Turnips, potatoes, cabbages, carrots, and parsnips had been cultivated for domestic use for much longer than fifty years, “but the field culture of these articles for the feed of cattle in any considerable degree is quite a modern practice.” Wimpey particularly stressed the use of artificial grasses, Sainfoin and Lucerne, and made especially large claims for the former. Finally, Wimpey commented that the use of turnips for the feed of sheep and the fattening of cattle was now so general that it required no comment and mused whether the potato would come to have a similar role as animal feed. He could doubtless have suggested other improvements. Drainage, for instance, was a matter of great interest at the end of the eighteenth century but was not mentioned by him, nor was enclosure, either of open fields or commons.

Other late eighteenth-century accounts of change can be found, but much of the literature of the time was not so much congratulatory as striving for further improvement, for more enclosure, better drainage, greater efficiency in farming, and new machinery. It is replete with accounts of how to get more for less. Contemporaries thought they were living through a time when change was not only possible but happening around them. They had the evidence of their eyes: enclosure, new farmsteads, new crops, more cattle in the fields, and a higher standard of living for farmers.

The Board of Agriculture—not a government department but a pressure group of enthusiasts in receipt of a government grant—was established in 1793. 2 Its members were driven by the conviction that English agriculture was failing because imports of grain had, since about 1765, been steadily rising. The answer was to enclose and extend the area under cultivation. What they could not have foreseen in 1793 was that the following two decades would be marked by high prices, two years of harvest failure and near famine, and the interruption to imports caused by war. As prices were high, rents and the value of land rose. Investment in agriculture promised good returns. This was a golden age for farming, and for farmers.

After 1813 the agricultural boom collapsed. In a great tour d’horizon given as a speech in the House of Commons in April 1816, Henry Brougham, later Lord Chancellor, argued that agricultural expansion over the previous twenty years had far exceeded what was prudent. Agriculture was overextended. Capital had been poured into it which could not be recovered:

[T]he work both of men and cattle has been economized, new skill has been applied, and a more dexterous combination of different kinds of husbandry been practised, until, without at all comprehending the waste lands wholly added to the productive territory of the island, it may be safely said, not perhaps that two blades of grass now grow where one only grew before, but I am sure, that five grow where four used to be; and that this kingdom which foreigners were wont to taunt as a mere manufacturing and trading country, inhabited by a shopkeeping nation, is in reality, for its size, by far the greatest agricultural state the world. 3

He does not use the words, but here is an agricultural revolution.

Historiography

Historians have tried to digest and understand these changes ever since the domestic agrarian economy started to decline under the weight of cheap imports of American wheat, South American beef, and New Zealand lamb after 1880 or so. Two schools of thought can be identified. Following Marx, some historians place a great emphasis on enclosure and the social ills it brought with it: the decline of the small landowner, the emergence of large capitalist farms, the pauperization of commoners and laborers and their enforced migration into towns. This was an approach that perhaps found its apogee in the writings of J. L. and Barbara Hammond on the eve of World War I. 4 The view that enclosure was a legalized form of dispossession of the vulnerable still has its advocates among historians and a prominent place in the popular understanding of history. 5

A quite different school of historians stressed the technical innovations that enclosure permitted. The foremost advocate of an agricultural revolution (although he seems not to have used the phrase) along these lines was R. E. Prothero (Lord Ernle). His English Farming Past and Present bestrode the field for over half a century after its first publication in 1912: the sixth posthumous edition appeared as late as 1961. Prothero placed an emphasis on parliamentary enclosure’s breaking the restraints on agricultural progress. He saw early eighteenth-century agriculture as little different from its medieval precursor. In his view, enclosure unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit of the farmer. Freed from the dead weight of the collective farming of open fields, farmers were then free to draw on a range of new crops—artificial grasses, turnips—all integrated into new systems of rotation, new livestock breeds, and new labor-saving machines. These possibilities were publicized by heroic pioneers—Robert Bakewell of Dishley, T. W. Coke of Holkham, Viscount Townshend (“Turnip Townshend”) of Raynham, Jethro Tull—and word of them was further circulated by William Marshall, Arthur Young, and the publications of the Board of Agriculture. For many people this heroic account remains the agricultural revolution.

Agriculture before 1750 had never been static but was constantly adapting to price signals and new opportunities. Prothero’s view of a discontinuity in practice about the third quarter of the eighteenth century fell out of favor with the realization that the innovations he attributed to that time were often known a century and more earlier. If obscure, the history of the turnip was both longer and more complicated than he understood. Clover was also known well before 1750. There were simply not enough of the new breeds of cattle and sheep to make any great difference to the national herd and flock. Only about 21 percent of the land area of England was enclosed by parliamentary statute. In some counties virtually none was; in others over half of the land area was subject to enclosure by act. 6

The developing knowledge of agrarian practices before 1760 and the fundamentally unquantitative nature of the debate led to the idea of an agricultural revolution being stretched over several centuries. Some historians abandoned the concept altogether or declared it to be unhelpful. In a well-known survey of 1966, Chambers and Mingay argued for an agricultural revolution stretching from about 1760 to the onset of depression around 1880, a long, thin agricultural revolution. 7 The sixth volume of the Agrarian History of England and Wales covering 1750–1850, edited by Mingay and published in 1989, dismissed the notion of an agricultural revolution in the first paragraph of the first page, where the incremental improvement of agriculture over a much longer period was noted and the idea of the agricultural revolution (“if [it] has any validity”) reserved for the years after 1945. 8 Early attempts at quantification were also dismissive of the idea of a late eighteenth-century agricultural revolution, suggesting that the rate of increase in productivity in the eighteenth century was far from impressive and actually declined later in the century. 9

Mingay’s volume of the Agrarian History was perhaps the low point in the historiography of the agricultural revolution, although others continue to eschew both the term and the concept. An attractive and well-informed study of agriculture, landscape, and agricultural buildings of 2004 that placed a stress on change never used the term and took refuge in the more neutral word “improvement.” 10 Tides come in and tides go out, and in 1996 Mark Overton published a paper summarizing the quantitative materials that he and others had been gathering over the previous decade and more from probate inventories, and restated the traditional view that the experience of the later eighteenth century saw a real break with its past on a scale worthy of the epithet “revolution.” Overton’s book of the same year took the title Agricultural Revolution in England , the lack of a definite article being both a tease and a caution. 11

In his 1996 paper, estimating agricultural output by a number of methods and extending his pool of inventories, Overton showed that on a number of criteria, output rose by about a quarter between 1700 and 1750 and continued to grow over the next century. And so he concluded by saying that “evidence overwhelmingly favours the century after 1750 as the period of most rapid and fundamental change in output and productivity, which were associated with equally unprecedented and fundamental changes in husbandry.” 12

Having given some quantitative underpinning to the view that the late eighteenth century was qualitatively different from what had preceded it, Overton went on to explain the characteristics of his agricultural revolution. Some of the features that he identified were not novel but had long been a staple of the literature, so turnips and clover, but he also showed a much higher density of animals and, following on from this, he demonstrated a reduction in the area of fallow. These ideas were developed further with a stronger statistical backing in a later publication, but after Overton’s 1996 paper, the idea of an agricultural revolution has been part of the currency of debate.

The idea was confronted head-on by Michael Turner, John Beckett, and Bethanie Afton in their book of 2004. 13 This was primarily a study of farm productivity seen through the records of individual farmers, but the new data they assembled was placed firmly in the context of agricultural revolution. Their conclusion was that there was a revolution but that it was between 1815 and 1850. They identified an increase in acreage of 56 percent between those dates but a rise in output of 120 percent, showing that yields per acre substantially increased.

Here we might reflect on a paper of 1968 prompted by Chambers and Mingay’s book. F. M. L. Thompson argued that the years after the end of the postwar depression should be seen as a second agricultural revolution that stretched through to the onset of depression about 1880. 14 The first agricultural revolution had been marked by a physical reorganization of the landscape by enclosure, by increased cultivation, increased capitalization, and a greater market orientation. But farms remained mixed (i.e., both arable and pastoral) and largely self-sufficient in nutrients. They were a closed system that produced wheat and barley for sale, livestock for slaughter, and some wool. The roots and clovers the farm produced, together with its hay, were essentially for internal consumption. Thompson perhaps minimized the external inputs to make this system work—he acknowledged the need for clover seed but not the requirement for a supply of young beasts to feed up—but he was surely right when he saw the second agricultural revolution as being driven by much greater farm inputs of nutrients, starting with bone meal, oil-seed cake, then from ca. 1840 guano, mineral phosphates, and nitrates, and this created the prospect of a farm with neither cattle or rotations, but continuous cropping, as has become normal in our own times. This chapter adopts a largely Thompsonian perspective.

The Agricultural Revolution as a Regional Phenomenon

Previous authors have all tended to view the agricultural revolution as a national phenomenon. One of the reasons why the agricultural revolution is so hard to pin down is that rapid innovative change came to different places at different times. There is an argument to be made that what determined the timing was not the market but the soil and, to a lesser degree, location. (A third factor, prices, we will address in a moment.) The classic agricultural revolution—the sowing of artificial grasses for fallows, turnips for winter animal fodder, the adoption of the Norfolk four-course rotations, the investment in new farm buildings to house cattle—developed earliest and proceeded furthest on light soils. Downlands and heathlands were broken up, enclosed and brought into cultivation. Turnips were much less suited to heavy clay soils. Hence turnip cultivation may have allowed agriculture to bound ahead in areas where they could be advantageously grown while in other areas agriculture languished.

Before 1793 this gave heavy land areas a price incentive to enclose to enable arable to be converted to grassland, with a switch into dairying and beef production. After 1793 much of this heavy land was once again plowed. This was high-cost arable land whose innate disadvantages could be overcome when prices were high, but where the plow could not be sustained in the low-price years after 1815. In any case, contemporaries in the postwar years often recognized that this land was exhausted from overcultivation. The problem of how to make a living out of this land in adverse conditions was summarized in the reported objectives of James Loch, appointed steward to the Sunderland estates in the northwest Midlands in 1813. In 1818 it was said that his mission was to “introduce as good a system of farming upon the stiff lands of the country as exists upon the light and turnip soils.” 15 This is as clear a recognition as we might hope to find that these districts had missed out on the rapid advances of the eighteenth century on the lighter soils, not because their farmers were ignorant of them or willfully resistant to change, but because rotations based around roots would not work in their local conditions. In fact, the long-term direction of change on heavy soils was toward grass, cattle rearing, and dairying and the chief means of improvement may be identified as improved drainage and deep plowing. Because cattle were integral, farming continued to be mixed because animal dung offered a route to arable fertility.

If we accept that the agricultural revolution was a succession of regional phenomena, with differing local chronologies, forms, and outcomes, then we should avoid falling into the trap of seeing corn production as the sole measure of success of English agriculture. We need to give weight to the contribution of the meat and dairy sectors of the economy. It was entirely rational for the English agricultural economy to optimize its total output (and income) by some areas shifting to animal and dairy production while drawing in increasing quantities of imported corn to feed domestic markets. An overconcentration on bread grains—and measuring the success of agriculture by the level of imports, as the Board of Agriculture and its circle did in the 1780s and 1790s—gives a wholly misleading view of agricultural achievement in the country.

For present purposes we would define the agricultural revolution as starting in the third quarter of the eighteenth century but ending fairly abruptly in 1814–1815. The onset of war in 1793 and a run of poor harvests in the 1790s and the first decade of the new century distinguish the war years from what had preceded them, being marked by very high prices. By 1815, the enclosure of open fields had more or less run its course. After the end of war, the domestic agrarian economy was plunged into depression for a decade or more, and in many respects it marked time until the appearance of “High Farming,” the capital-intensive, machine-driven, off-farm nutrient-dependent farming regime that characterized the middle years of the century, Thompson’s “second agricultural revolution.” Turner, Beckett, and Afton have warned us, though, not to underestimate the capacity of farmers to squeeze more out of the existing agrarian systems in the postwar years.

The Agricultural Revolution in a British Context

It is all too easy to see the agricultural revolution as a purely English phenomenon. The term has never really been deployed in modern discussions of agricultural change in either Scotland or Ireland. Of course, Scotland suffered the Highland Clearances in which poor arable and pastoral farmers were cleared off their land to make way for sheep. Enforced migration engendered a bitterness that lingers. But this is never called an “agricultural revolution,” perhaps because it only involved a change in land use and not technological innovation. In the Scottish lowlands, the enclosure and reorganization of arable farming by landlords was commonplace in the middle years of the eighteenth century but is much less well known than later changes in the Highlands. In many respects what happened here was much more severe than enclosure in England, lowland Scots farmers generally having no rights in their land, but again the phrase “agricultural revolution” is never used of this dramatic transformation in the modern literature. 16 Much less is known about Irish conditions in the eighteenth century, but in the century after 1750 Ireland was transformed from being a marginal importer of English grain to a major exporter of grain into England (on one estimate contributing about one-sixth of English consumption). Again, the phrase “agricultural revolution” is rarely, if ever, used of Irish conditions, although one suspects that change in the east of the island was every bit as dramatic as anything that happened in Britain. The key difference between England and Wales on the one hand and Scotland and Ireland on the other is that in the latter, enclosure never became a public process. In all three nations landlords who had unity of ownership could enclose pretty much at will. This was less common in England and Wales, and for that reason public legal processes (described below) had to be employed. Enclosure here is well (but partially) documented where in Scotland and Ireland the reorganization of tenant land and the enclosure of commons could be achieved at the landlord’s command and for that reason is much less historically visible. But it needs to be emphasized that the “agricultural revolution” is a British and Irish phenomenon. To view it as a purely English one (as is usual) is grossly misleading. Both Britain and Ireland were able to take advantage of the growing English, southern Welsh, and Scottish urban markets to transform their rural economies.

The Limits of Quantification

One of the reasons why there has always been a tendency to view the agricultural revolution in terms of personalities and new techniques is that until recently we lacked hard quantitative data on agricultural production in Britain before the mid-nineteenth century. The British government collected no statistics on agricultural output or performance before 1866 (but from 1847 in Ireland). Throughout the eighteenth century it was happy to leave the market in agricultural products to market forces operating within the framework of the Corn Laws (the body of legislation that regulated the import and export of grain according to the prices prevailing in the domestic market. 17 ) The one area in which the government did collect and publish statistics throughout was for imports and exports, but relating these trade flows to the state of the domestic market is not straightforward. They did, however, exercise a great hold over Young and his contemporaries, who thought it wrong that the country should be drawing in imports when it could achieve near-self-sufficiency. Failing to grasp larger changes in the economy, they saw rising imports as evidence of agrarian failure.

Fairly solid data exists for four areas of the economy that bear on the agricultural revolution. There are reliable estimates for English population by Wrigley and Schofield, and these can be scaled up to become estimates of British population. We have comprehensive price data, statistics for imports and exports, and the area enclosed by parliamentary enclosure. All bring problems of accuracy and meaning. Overton pioneered the use of probate inventories to secure yield and other farm-level data, but the procedure of the probate courts changed about 1740 and thereafter inventories are no longer available in large numbers after mid-century.

The quantitative basis of any assessment of the agricultural revolution has therefore been extremely weak in the past, and while much improved by the recent work of Overton and others, it remains far from satisfactory. If we move any study of the agricultural revolution along from great men, enclosure, and new techniques, we must decide the criteria we would use to assess whether an agricultural revolution had taken place. The first and most obvious is the extension of the cultivated area. Parliamentary enclosure may be taken as the most obvious evidence for this, but any such assumption needs heavy qualification. Nonetheless, it is clear enough that eighteenth-century enclosure transformed that part of the landscape which was not already enclosed . The second criteria would be that total output increased, and given the scale of population growth between 1750 and 1850, it makes immediate sense to suppose that it did. This is not necessarily a sign of a revolution. Total output could rise because of a recourse to labor-intensive spade agriculture on what contemporaries (such as Malthus) took to be an Irish model and therefore regressive and undesirable. Declining output per head is not evidence of an agricultural revolution. Overall, it is not easy to arrive at a quantitative, as opposed to qualitative, assessment.

An examination of measures of productivity per unit area or productivity per individual employed in agriculture—if they could be calculated—might confirm a revolution. Enclosure might well have actually reduced the productivity per cultivated area: much of the land enclosed had little agricultural potential under the techniques then being employed. A leap forward in agricultural techniques was necessary to get the best out of the addition to the stock of cultivated land. Labor productivity is even more problematic. It is just about possible to arrive at a head count of male agricultural laborers, but much harder to ascertain how many days of the week they worked and for what hours, or what the contribution of female labor was to the overall pool of labor.

The Supply of the Domestic Market

Contemporaries were aware that population was growing after 1750, but they had only a rough idea of the number of people in Britain until 1801, and even then, the rate of growth before that date remained a matter of speculation. The modern and generally accepted estimates for England are those by Wrigley and Schofield (Figure 30.1 ).

Population growth had an obvious impact on agriculture. The three chief grains all served different markets: wheat being used for bread and confectionary, barley for brewing, and oats for feeding to horses. Before about 1770, England was normally self-sufficient in all three grains and had a surplus to export. This surplus may have arisen from the development of light downland soils, often on chalk, whose cultivation may have been permitted by the development of rotations that maintained and even enhanced the fertility of these thin soils. Defoe remarks on this in the second decade of the century. The same developments were taking place on the light heathland soils of the Holkham estate in Norfolk. 18 The author of the first General View for Gloucestershire (1794), commented how

Probably no part of the kingdom has been more improved in the past forty years than the Cotswold Hills. The first enclosures are about that standing [so ca. 1750]; but the greater part are of a later date. Three parishes are now enclosing, and out of about 13, which still remain in the common field state, two I understand are taking the requisite measures for an inclosure; the advantages are very great, rent more than doubled, the produce of every kind proportionably increased. In the open field state, a crop and fallow was the usual course. What is here called the “seven field husbandry” now generally obtained, that is about a seventh part sainfoin, and the remainder under the following routine; turnips, barley, seeds [grass or clover] two years, wheat, oats. 19

All of this served to increase the cultivated area. So too did the second drainage of the Fenland after ca. 1770, when the work of the seventeenth-century drainers was brought to a satisfactory conclusion. 20

Estimated English population, 1696–1851, at five-year intervals. Source: Estimates by back projection from E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, A Population History of England, 1541–1871 (London: Edward Arnold), Table A3.1.

The improvement of downland and fenland shifted the cultivation of corn to new locations and produced an oversupply on the market. The problem of low domestic prices was a long-standing one and was initially answered by subsidized exports (the “Bounty”), but it also forced producers of corn on heavy soils into forms of animal husbandry that produced better profits. In turn, this entailed enclosure, conversion to grass, and depopulation. It was this sequence of changes that shaped the public perception of enclosure until late in the century. 21 The surplus for export progressively disappears, and by the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was consistently a net importer of grain.

The data presented in figure 30.2 for imports and exports has been cited on several occasions and is taken to be authoritative. It is not certain, however, on what basis it was calculated. It is not clear, for instance, whether the earlier data includes Scotland. The table says that it includes trade with Ireland. The data does, however, illustrate the point that a relatively low level of exports before 1765 grew to a high level of imports thereafter.

Contemporaries read rising imports as a failure of English agriculture where we might read it as a rational response to farmgate prices. The need to reduce imports by plowing up land was a preoccupation in the circles of the Board of Agriculture: hence the chapter in the General Report on Enclosures (1808) entitled “Produce of the Country Insufficient for Its Consumption.” This referred solely to grain: the Board and its members had a blind spot over pastoral production. 22

Wheat imports and exports, 1697–1842 (quarters). Source: British Parliamentary Papers 1843, House of Commons paper, 177, LIII, 9. Corn. Returns to an address of the Honourable the House of Commons, dated 23 March 1843; ordered to be printed 7 April 1843 , Table 12, p. 58, “Total quantities of wheat and wheat flour imported into and exported from Great Britain in each year from 1697 to 1842.”

So while the background to the classic agricultural revolution was population growth at home, there was much more to it than population growth. A rising standard of living among at least a part of the population made for a higher per capita consumption of meat and cheese. With more money in their pockets, people increased their consumption of beer and spirits, leading to an increased demand for barley. Increasing numbers of horses for traction required more provender for their sustenance. Increased demand of corn in particular was met in part by imports. In 1773, with the memory of the harvest failure of 1765 and the disturbances of 1766 in mind, the Corn Law was reconfigured to encourage imports in order to maintain domestic peace in high-price years. The domestic corn market it created did not serve the needs of English farmers very well in the twenty years after 1773 and encouraged a recourse to pasture. But from 1793, in the years of war, prices became extremely high, imports were disrupted, and farmers received a considerable incentive to convert pasture to arable land and adopt new techniques to meet a hungry market. All this came crashing down with the excellent harvest of 1813 and the end of the war. Farm incomes fell precipitately and a revision to the Corn Law was enacted in 1815 to maintain grain prices, but at a fraction of their wartime levels. Brougham was doubtless right to identify the wartime years as a bubble, an overextension of the cultivated area, with a vigorous market in land at inflated prices that had left many landowners with insurmountable debts as rents fell postwar.

Enclosure lies at the heart of the agricultural revolution as it is normally understood. But enclosure is also perhaps the most misunderstood process in English history, in part because we use a single word for an experience that everywhere went through but that had different characteristics, legal forms, and implications according to when and where it took place. In sum, it is the process of taking land over which multiple rights existed and vesting it solely in a single individual (in severalty), whose rights are not qualified by the seasonal rights of others to graze the land. The land itself is enclosed by fences, hedges, or walls.

In the case of open-field land (“sub-divided arable”), then the rights of a landowner within the open-fields were tempered by their collective management and the use of the land, normally for one year in three, as a fallow when there was a general right to graze. The opponents of common fields always maintained that this system was inflexible and the entrepreneurial spirit of improving farmers was restrained by their more conservative neighbors. This may have been true in many cases, but there are also examples of the fallows in open fields being used to grow clover and turnips. It would now be accepted that open fields were not as inflexible as hostile observers maintained, but what is more material is that a farmer who wanted to put down his land to grass could not easily do so because he was trapped in a cooperative system of arable farming. In openfield enclosure, land was reallocated, so the holdings of an individual ceased to be scattered and were normally consolidated into one compact, ring-fenced holding.

Commons were grazing land shared between a range of people in the village. They might be closely controlled by stints, in which specific individuals owned the right to graze a specified number of animals. Where manorial control had broken down, a common might be more of a free-for-all. In this last circumstance, overgrazing often resulted and a “tragedy of the commons” ensued. In enclosure the right of common is abolished. The whole area subject to common was divided into parcels of land held in severalty. As these might be too small to be useful and located at a distance from their owner’s house, they are often sold to larger landowners and so the enclosure of commons acts as a mechanism to bring about the consolidation of ownership.

Parliamentary enclosure in England was a specific stage in a much longer process. Its characteristic was that the owners of the land sought a private act of parliament to appoint commissioners to undertake the enclosure. But where the land belonged to a single landlord, there was no need to seek public sanction to enclose. Where the number of proprietors was small and they trusted each other, again, there was no need to seek an act of parliament. But the fear was always that where the ownership of an open field or common was shared between several proprietors, one of them might claim that the proposed arrangements were disadvantageous to them and exercise a veto, or, at a later date, they might try to withdraw their consent in an attempt to unravel what had been done. And some proprietors could not consent to an agreement, especially if they were minors, clergy owning glebe, or the life tenants of land. Hence there was the need for a way of binding the parties to an agreement. Up to about 1750 a decree in Chancery was deemed sufficient: from about that time lawyers recommended a private act. But at no point was all the land being enclosed subject to enclosure by an act: land continued to be enclosed by unity of ownership, by agreement between the owners and by encroachment.

A private act brought another advantage as well. Where there was no consensus among the landowners that enclosure was desirable, a private act could be secured if the majority of the landholders, or the owners of a majority of the land, consented to it. Hence a private act could force enclosure on the owners of property who did not seek or welcome it.

It is insufficiently appreciated is that enclosure did not start with parliamentary enclosure. Most of the country was already enclosed by 1750. Rather than seeing parliamentary enclosure as the apogee of an extended process, it is better to see it as its tail end, mopping up the enclosure of parishes that had remained unenclosed for one or more of a number of reasons: divided ownership, the failure to achieve a consensus that enclosure was desirable, or the legal problems posed by landowners who could not consent to enclosure—or where the investment that enclosure entailed was unlikely to make any return.

While the legal process remained the same, in practice parliamentary enclosure meant different things in different places. There was barely any parliamentary enclosure in some counties. Nationally, Turner has shown that there were two marked periods of parliamentary enclosure with an intermission in between. Enclosure in the 1760s and 1770s was largely the enclosure of open field arable in a band of Midland counties stretching through Lincolnshire to the East Riding of Yorkshire. This was recognized by contemporaries as depopulating enclosure, that is, it involved conversion to pasture and a reduced need for labor. In the second period, after 1793, enclosure was more scattered but included the enclosure of open fields in the south Midland counties and East Anglia, and commons and waste in the northwestern counties. 23

Young and his circle in the Board of Agriculture and his contributors to Annals of Agriculture were fixated on enclosure. Rather than see “waste” as land that was used for common for a reason, they saw it as a wasted opportunity. Plowing up commons would obviate the need to import grain. They saw the existing legal process of enclosure as an impediment and so pressed for a general enclosure act. A bill along these lines was passed in 1800 but fell far short of the Board’s aspirations. Nonetheless, enclosure proceeded at a pace in the wartime years.

So long as enclosure was fashionable, its advantages were seen to be compelling. It increased the cultivated area in the way that Young and his circle thought desirable. It also increased the area under cultivation in a second way by permitting farmers to have green rather than bare fallows. It allowed arable land to be put down to grass. It probably reduced labor inputs by decreasing the time spent traveling between a farmer’s dispersed land in an open field, but advocates of enclosure also pointed to the costs of planting and then maintaining hedges. (Overall, far fewer laborers were needed if a farm was converted to pasture.) It allowed drainage to take place within the confines of a single farm where arranging drainage in an open field was more difficult and perhaps impossible. For landlords, it allowed them to break the existing terms of tenancy and raise rents to what they saw as realistic levels. Its disadvantages, such as they were, largely fell on the poor and laboring classes who lost property rights (where they had them) and employment opportunities. 24

A review of the contemporary literature shows that its advocates were unspecific about the productivity gains that accrued from enclosure. They occasionally produced elaborate (and implausible) calculations of the quantity of additional grain that might be produced by the general enclosure of wastelands. There was a general agreement, though, that enclosed land paid higher rents than unenclosed and that enclosure could be expected to produce a once-off bonanza for the landlord. This does not directly equate with greater productivity but resulted in part from a resetting of tenurial relationships and an increase in the cultivated area: enclosed commons paid rent where open commons did not.

Modern attempts to calculate productivity gains, no matter how sophisticated, have been largely unconvincing. 25 In fact it is virtually impossible to calculate gains without making some heroic assumptions about information that was never collected by contemporaries. Moreover, enclosure before 1793 often involved conversion to pasture, so in many instances there is no direct comparison to be made about productivity pre- and post-enclosure. Likewise, it is impossible to separate the effects of enclosure from that of a booming wartime agrarian economy.

Technological Change

The agricultural revolution involved a considerable investment in reorganizing the landscape through enclosure and in the necessary costs that followed. It is hard to establish whether it also brought about technological changes that improved productivity.

When the Board of Agriculture launched its General Views in 1793, it called on its reporters to gather information about the implements and the tools being used by farmers. Annals of Agriculture also regularly carried descriptions of new technical innovations. Though all this evidence deserves fuller and cross-county examination, at the moment it is hard to conclude that improvements in farm equipment increased either labor productivity or the efficiency of horse traction. A number of reporters to the Board discussed the Rotherham plow, but if this was still being adopted in some counties, it was also hardly new, having allegedly been patented in the 1720s. 26 The agricultural engineering trade, supplying farmers with standardized equipment made from wrought iron, only really emerged after 1825 so that in the late eighteenth century, farmers were still buying wooden equipment fabricated by village or small town manufacturers who may—or may not—have been influenced by developments in design. 27

The machine that at a later date bore the blunt of laborers’ anger was the threshing machine. 28 Early threshing machines appeared in Scotland in the 1780s. There is evidence that they were quite common in Scotland in the 1790s, and it is reported that by 1811 there were no fewer than seventy-five in the Isle of Man. There seems to have been less eagerness to adopt in England, particularly southern England. William Mavor, discussing Berkshire in 1809, dates the take-up of threshing machines in the county to after 1805, although he thought that their use in northern England was “usual.” 29 The obvious explanation is that reductions in the number of laborers paid by farmers would only bring about an increase in the poor rates. Seen in this light, threshing machines were a zero-sum game, doing nothing to reduce costs while poisoning social relations. In recognition of this, there are some instances of farmers deciding collectively not to employ them.

The tentative conclusion must be that the agricultural revolution did not produce any breakthrough in the adoption of machinery or other labor-saving devices. That said, the cumulative contribution made by seed drills, horse-drawn harrows and hoes, and better carts needs to be taken seriously, even if small and impossible to quantify.

The Totality of Agricultural Production

Our inability to quantify most aspects of the agricultural revolution forces us to adopt a largely qualitative approach. But we need to consider the recent work of Broadberry, Campbell, Klein, Overton, and van Leeuwen in British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 , 30 which provides a quantitative backbone for British agriculture over the long term based on careful estimation from the available datasets. The data is presented only at fifty-year intervals, so it is impossible to derive any close chronology from it.

Fundamental to their work are new estimates of the area under arable and its cropping (Table 30.1 ). This table shows first of all that the total arable area increases progressively after 1700, with the greatest gains after 1800 (and, one supposes, largely achieved by 1815), and second, within the acreage deployed as arable, the area used as fallow—so in a traditional three-course rotation—progressively declines. In short, farmers found better uses for their fallow by sowing it with roots and artificial grasses, thus increasing the amount of feed available to their animals and allowing higher stocking rates.

Table 30.2 gives Broadberry et al.’s estimates as to how this arable land was used. It is suggested that between 1650 and 1750 there was little increase in the area devoted to wheat. In 1800 the area devoted to wheat is a quarter more than in 1750, but then falls back by 1830. Rye, as appears from the table, was never important. There is noticeably less acreage devoted to barley in 1800 than 1700 but a greater acreage of oats (reflecting the demand for horse provender rather than human needs). But these figures reflect only half of the agrarian economy. The estimates for animal numbers (Table 30.3 ) show an increase of between three and four times between the 1700s and the 1800s.

Acreage and numbers do not readily transfer to yields of dry goods such as corn and the volume of animal products. In Table 30.4 we can see how wheat output increases by roughly a half between the 1750s and the 1800s (we would expect the figure to be less if the figures were for the 1750s and 1790s), while the output of rye, barley, and oats remained pretty static. It is in the production of animal products that we see the great leap forward. Milk (meaning ultimately butter and cheese) increased by about 70 percent between mid-century and end of century. Beef, mutton, and pork more or less doubled (Table 30.5 ).

Constant 1700 prices take the computed volumes at each successive datum and calculates the value of those volumes of production in the prices current in 1700. (This is a method to factor out differential commodity price inflation, that is, if the price of, say, meat goes up much more than the price of grain, a calculation based on current prices will exaggerate the scale of growth in the production of meat.)

Broadberry et al. supply a further body of data. Working out the value of the products of the arable and animal sectors, they found that the pastoral sector increased its share over the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth (Table 30.6 ). There are several explanations for their finding. One would be that bread became less of a staple for people who ate more butter, cheese, and meat. But there is also a fundamental shift: that English agriculture over time was less concerned with providing bread grains because the domestic price was disadvantageous to domestic growers who made better profits from supplying meat and valued-added dairy products. Hence a higher proportion of the bread the population ate came from imported grain. There is an argument to be made that the arable sector was in decline even before 1793, by which time the advantages of sourcing wheat from abroad were doubtless clear enough. The prevailing argument in the 1790s stressed self-sufficiency and the balance of trade. The high prices of the Napoleonic wars doubtless concealed the direction of change, but the question after 1813 is that which remains today: how can domestic arable agriculture flourish as a high-cost producer when corn prices in international markets are lower?

The answer, then as now, was to place domestic industry behind high tariff barriers. This was done in a further revision of the Corn Laws in 1815 (and amended subsequently). Having made imports difficult, for a quarter of a century English farmers largely monopolized English markets. In a way, this was a halcyon period in which, as Turner, Beckett, and Afton have argued, low prices forced farmers to be more productive by increasing not only the sown area but also the yield per acre. 31 But the political costs were high, and an increasingly urbanized society resented the favoring of the interests of domestic landlords over consumers. It could not be sustained indefinitely. In 1846 the Corn Laws were repealed, and while this did not bring about any immediate effect, it left British agriculture vulnerable to imports of first American and then Russian wheat.

So these estimates all point to a considerable growth in production in the later eighteenth century and after, achieved first by the extension of the cultivated area by enclosure, the better use of fallows in rotations that integrated cattle into them, and second by the emergence of the specialist dairy farm. There is no great technological breakthrough evident either in these figures or the historiography: power continued to be provided by humans and horses, most farms remained self-reliant in nutrients and soil improvers, and yet there was the constant tread of improvement.

In the end, the agricultural revolution is rather like hill walking. From the flat plain, the first hills look like a great challenge, but from their top a vista emerges of higher hills, and from that second ridge there emerges a view of mountains. The agricultural revolution is like that. From the perspective of the eighteenth century, there plainly was a great deal of change, not least in the reorganization of the landscape (where this had not happened before), perhaps the most visible feature for contemporaries, but also less obvious alterations including the development of rotations that gave higher levels of stocking of animals. Agriculture came to run at new levels of production—if not productivity—before 1815. The second agricultural revolution after 1840 was a second ridge, which again produced new achievements in output brought about by steam technology and imported fertilizers before it was knocked back by imports after 1880. The mountains might well be the revolution in machinery, new strains of plants and animals, and artificial fertilizers that took place after 1945. 32

1.   Joseph Wimpey , “On the Improvements in Agriculture That Have Been Successfully Introduced into This Kingdom within the Last Fifty Years,” in Letters and Papers on Agriculture, Planning etc. Addressed to the Society at Bath (1790; 2nd ed., Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1793), V:1–24 .

2.   Rosalind Mitchison , “The Old Board of Agriculture (1793–1822),” English Historical Review 74 (1959): 41–69 .

Henry Brougham, Parliamentary Debates (Commons) [Hansard], first ser. 33, cols. 1086–1119 (sitting April 9, 1816): the quotation from col. 1094.

4.   J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond , The Village Labourer, 1760–1832 . A Study of the Government of England before the Reform Bill (London: Longman, 1911; repr. 2005) .

5. The most recent work to take this approach is J. M. Neeson , Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) .

6.   M. E. Turner , English Parliamentary Enclosure (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980): 32–34 .

7.   J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay , The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1966) .

8.   G. E. Mingay , ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales , Vol. 6: 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) . E. L. Jones was dismissive of an eighteenth-century agricultural revolution in 1981, regarding change in that century as being “more like a tide, its turn only just discernible, submerging under its waves a group of islands one by one.” E. L. Jones , “Agriculture, 1700–80,” in The Economic History of Britain since 1700 , Vol. 1: 1700–1860 , ed. R. Floud and D. McCloskey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981): 85 .

9. Crafts, in a pioneering assessment, found a lower rate of agricultural growth in the second half of the eighteenth century to the first. N. F. R. Crafts , British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985): 38–44 ; Mark Overton , Agricultural Revolution in England. The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 84–86 .

10.   Susanna Wade Martins , Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes. Rural Britain, 1720 to 1870 (Macclesfield: Windgather Press, 2004) .

11.   Mark Overton , “Re-establishing the English Agricultural Revolution,” Agricultural History Review 44 (1996): 1–20 ; Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England .

  Overton, “Re-establishing,” 20.

13.   M. E. Turner , J. V. Beckett , and B. Afton , Farm Production in England, 1700–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) .

14.   F. M. L. Thompson , “The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815–1880,” Economic History Review 21 (1968): 62–77 .

15. Cited by R. W. Sturgess , “The Agricultural Revolution on the English Clays,” Agricultural History Review 14 (1966): 107–108 .

16.   T. M. Devine , The Transformation of Rural Scotland, Social Change and the Agrarian Economy, 1660–1815 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994) ; Devine , “The Highland and Lowland Clearances,” in Clearance and Improvement. Land, Power and People in Scotland, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006), 93–112 ; but cf. the older work of James E. Handley , The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland (Glasgow: Burns, 1963) .

17.   Donald Grove Barnes , A History of the English Corn Laws from 1660–1846 (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1930) .

18. For references to downland improvement, J. Thirsk , ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales , vol. 6. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), i, 213, 333–34 , 336, n. 81. R. A. C. Parker , Coke of Norfolk. A Financial and Agricultural Study, 1707–1842 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) , ch. 4; also Susanna Wade Martins and Tom Williamson , Roots of Change. Farming and the Landscape in East Anglia, c. 1700–1870 (Exeter: British Agricultural History Society, 1999): 43–46 .

19.   George Turner , General View of the Agriculture of the County of Gloucester (London, 1794): 10–11 .

20.   H. C. Darby , The Changing Fenland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 141–43 .

21.   S. J. Thompson , “Parliamentary Enclosure. Property, Population and the Decline of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Historical Journal 51 (2008): 621–642 .

Board of Agriculture [i.e., Arthur Young], General Report on Enclosures (London: 1808, repr. 1971), ch. 4.

  Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure .

  Neeson, Commoners .

25.   Robert C. Allen , Enclosure and the Yeoman. The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) , is the fullest attempt.

26.   Messrs Rennie , Broun , and Shirreff , General View of the Agriculture of the West Riding of Yorkshire (London, 1794): 33–34 , 97–98.

David Grace, “The Agricultural Engineering Industry,” in Agrarian History , ed. Mingay, 6:520–45.

28.   E. J. T. Collins , “The Diffusion of the Threshing Machine in Britain, 1790–1880,’ Tools and Tillage 2 (1972): 16–33 .

29.   William Mavor , General View of the Agriculture of Berkshire (London, 1809), 129–36 . See too the comments of Wade Martins and Williamson on the slow take-up in Norfolk: Roots of Change , 117.

30.   Stephen Broadberry , Bruce M. S. Campbell , Alexander Klein , Mark Overton , and Bas van Leeuwen , British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) . For an extended review of the chapters on agriculture, R. W. Hoyle , “A Harvest Gathered In: Some Implications of British Economic Growth 1270–1870 for Agricultural History,” Agricultural History Review 66 (2018): 112–131 .

  Turner et al., Farm Production , 221.

32. A case made in Paul Brassley , David Harvey , Matt Lobley , and Michael Winter , The Real Agricultural Revolution. The Transformation of English Farming, 1939–1985 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2021) .

Allen, Robert C. , Enclosure and the Yeoman. The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450–1850 . Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 .

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Beckett, J. V.   The Agricultural Revolution . Oxford: Blackwell, 1990 .

Broadberry, Stephen , Bruce M. S. Campbell , Alexander Klein , Mark Overton , and Bas van Leeuwen . British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 .

Mingay, G. E. , ed. The Agrarian History of England and Wales . Vol. 6: 1750–1850 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 .

Neeson, J. M.   Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 .

Overton, Mark , Agricultural Revolution in England. The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 .

Thompson, F. M. L. ‘ The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815–1880. ’ Economic History Review 21 ( 1968 ): 62–77.

Turner, M. E.   English Parliamentary Enclosure. Its Historical Geography and Economic History . Folkestone: Dawson, 1980 .

Turner, M. E. , J. V. Beckett , and B. Afton . Farm Production in England, 1700–1914 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 .

Wade Martins, Susanna , and Tom Williamson . Roots of Change, Farming and the Landscape in East Anglia, c . 1700–1870 . Exeter: British Agricultural History Society, 1999 .

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The British Agricultural Revolution

How it works

• 1.1 Protestant Reformation
• 1.2 Boston Massacre
• 1.3 Mayflower Compact

Agricultural Revolution

The British Agricultural Revolution, or Second Agricultural Revolution, was the unprecedented increase in agricultural production in Britain due to increases in labor and land productivity between the mid-17th and late 19th centuries The Agricultural Revolution was a period of technological improvement and increased crop productivity that occurred during the 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. In this lesson, learn the timeline, causes, effects and major inventions that spurred this shift in production. The Agricultural Revolution got its start in Great Britain in the early 18th century and spread throughout Europe and America by the 19th century.

This was a period of significant agricultural development marked by new farming techniques and inventions that led to a massive increase in food production.

Historians have often labeled the first Agricultural Revolution (which took place around 10,000 B.C.) as the period of transition from a hunting-and-gathering society to one based on stationary farming. During the 18th century, another Agricultural Revolution took place when European agriculture shifted from the techniques of the past. New patterns of crop rotation and livestock utilization paved the way for better crop yields, a greater diversity of wheat and vegetables and the ability to support more livestock. These changes impacted society as the population became better nourished and healthier. The Enclosure Acts, passed in Great Britain, allowed wealthy lords to purchase public fields and push out small-scale farmers, causing a migration of men looking for wage labor in cities. These workers would provide the labor for new industries during the Industrial Revolution.

Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation was a major 16th century European movement aimed initially at reforming the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. Its religious aspects were supplemented by ambitious political rulers who wanted to extend their power and control at the expense of the Church. The Reformation was a movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe. Although the Reformation is usually considered to have started with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther in 1517, there was no schism until the 1521 Edict of Worms. Because of corruption in the Catholic Church, some people saw a need to change the way it worked. The Protestant reformation triggered the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In general, Martin Luther’s posting of the 95 theses at Wittenberg is seen as the start of the Protestant Reformation. This happened in the year 1517. The major causes of the protestant reformation include that of political, economic, social, and religious background. The religious causes involve problems with church authority and a monks views driven by his anger towards the church. Martin Luther was dissatisfied with the authority that clergy held over laypeople in the Catholic Church. Luther’s Protestant idea that clergy shouldn’t hold more religious authority than laypeople became very popular in Germany and spread quickly throughout Europe Reformation, also called Protestant Reformation, the religious revolution that took place in the Western church in the 16th century. … Having far-reaching political, economic, and social effects, the Reformation became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the three major branches of Christianity.

Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre, known to the British as the Incident on King Street, was a confrontation on March 5, 1770 in which British soldiers shot and killed several people while being harassed by a mob in Boston. The event was heavily publicized by leading Patriots such as Paul Revere and Samuel Adams. The Boston Massacre was a deadly riot that occurred on March 5, 1770, on King Street in Boston. It began as a street brawl between American colonists and a lone British soldier, but quickly escalated to a chaotic, bloody slaughter. The conflict energized anti-Britain sentiment and paved the way for the American Revolution. The Boston Massacre was a street fight that occurred on March 5, 1770, between a “patriot” mob, throwing snowballs, stones, and sticks, and a squad of British soldiers. Several colonists were killed and this led to a campaign by speech-writers to rouse the ire of the citizenry.

Prior to the Boston Massacre the British had instituted a number of new taxes on the American colonies including taxes on tea, glass, paper, paint, and lead. These taxes were part of a group of laws called the Townshend Acts. The colonies did not like these laws. They felt these laws were a violation of their rights. Just like when Britain imposed the Stamp Act, the colonists began to protest and the British brought in soldiers to keep order. The Boston Massacre was a signal event leading to the Revolutionary War. It led directly to the Royal Governor evacuating the occupying army from the town of Boston. It would soon bring the revolution to armed rebellion throughout the colonies.

Mayflower Compact

The Mayflower Compact was the first governing document of Plymouth Colony. It was written by the male passengers of the Mayflower, consisting of separatist Puritans, adventurers, and tradesmen. The Puritans were fleeing from religious persecution by King James of England. The Mayflower Compact was a set of rules for self-governance established by the English settlers who traveled to the New World on the Mayflower. When Pilgrims and other settlers set out on the ship for America in 1620, they intended to lay anchor in northern Virginia. But after treacherous shoals and storms drove their ship off course, the settlers landed in Massachusetts instead, near Cape Cod, outside of Virginia’s jurisdiction. Knowing life without laws could prove catastrophic, colonist leaders created the Mayflower Compact to ensure a functioning social structure would prevail.

Pilgrim leaders wanted to quell the rebellion before it took hold. After all, establishing a New World colony would be difficult enough without dissent in the ranks. The Pilgrims knew they needed as many productive, law-abiding souls as possible to make the colony successful. With that in mind, they set out to create a temporary set of laws for ruling themselves as per majority agreement. On November 11, 1620, 41 adult male colonists, including two indentured servants, signed the Mayflower Compact, although it wasn’t called that at the time. It’s unclear who wrote the Mayflower Compact, but the well-educated Separatist and pastor William Brewster is usually given credit.

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