Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology and Nature, 1750–1840, by Peter M. Jones

Abstract

This is an impressive and ambitious work of comparative history which draws upon sources in three languages, as well as a range of literatures, in tackling a major historiographical issue. The aim of the author, Peter M. Jones, is to counter economistic interpretations of the revolution in European agriculture c.1750–1850 by making a case for the importance of ideas, knowledge and practices: the ‘agricultural enlightenment’. This broad category embraces theoretical knowledge about the economy (physiocracy, political economy), bodies of largely empirical knowledge (eighteenth-century agronomy, cameralism) and various techniques for the improvement of land-use (e.g., reclamation, enclosure) or cultivation practice (e.g., rotation, new crops). Significantly, the category is not restricted to the printed word but also includes tacit knowledge (‘know-how’). In effect, the author analyses the process by which knowledge may have fostered economic revolution in terms of three processes: invention, diffusion and adoption. ‘Invention’ (unfortunately used interchangeably with ‘innovation’) refers to the emergence of new forms of artefact or practice, and Jones makes the important point that radically new forms were almost certainly much less common than incremental improvements (‘emulation’, as it was known to contemporaries). Since the latter were seldom documented in textual form, however, they remain largely invisible to the historian, making it difficult to assess their importance or to establish who the inventors were.