The agricultural revolution

Abstract

Students of economic growth in today's underdeveloped countries are well aware of the fact that the route to sustained economic growth lies through an industrial revolution. What is still a matter of controversy in connection with the strategy of industrialization is the role that agriculture should play in the process. Opinion ranges from those, at one extreme, who believe that all that is required of agriculture is that it should efficiently contract and so release labour and resources for modern industry: and, at the other extreme, those who claim that a revolution in agricultural techniques and methods of organization is an essential prerequisite to modernization of the manufacturing and transport industries. Professor Rostow, for example, in elaborating his theory of the stages of economic growth has claimed that ‘revolutionary changes in agricultural productivity are an essential condition for successful take-off’. According to this view it is on agriculture that the pre-industrial economy must depend for the additional food, the raw materials, the markets and the capital, which permit industrialization to proceed. In this controversy the historical experience of the first country to undergo an industrial revolution assumes a special topical interest. It is well known that the British industrial revolution was associated with an agricultural revolution. What was the character of this association? To what extent did it precede, reinforce or arise out of the process of British industrialization? There were four salient features of the British agrarian revolution.