Contextual Lecture: Two Hundred Years of Farming Change, 1817 – 2017
Part of the Contextual Lecture Series: London: The Making of a Global City
If a farmer who died in 1817 had been magically resurrected in 1947 he would have known more or less what to do on his old farm; if he came back today, seventy years later, he would be totally baffled. Where are the horses? Why are the cereal crops so short? What are these big noisy things?
This talk examines the changing products of agriculture over the last two centuries, the differences in the labour and machinery used, the resultant landscape changes, and surveys the different political, economic and scientific contexts within which the changes occurred.
Paul Brassley is an Honorary University Fellow in the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute at the University of Exeter, UK. Since 2009 he has been working there on a project to investigate the process of technical change in English agriculture between 1935 and 1985. He has previously produced studies on rural issues in the Second World War, the interwar period, and the later nineteenth century. His most recent books are Agriculture: A Very Short Introduction (with Richard Soffe, published by Oxford University Press, 2016), and (as editor with Jeremy Burchardt and Karen Sayer) Transforming the Countryside: the electrification of rural Britain (Routledge, 2016).
Join the Friends and receive a discount on this event.
