Talk:British Agricultural Revolution

message: In the first paragraph we need an accurate statement for just when the Agricultural revolution was happening? Obviously the historiography gives us different perspectives: 
* Marx described the proletariat's perspective, running approx from mid-18th Century to mid 19th. 
* although Poor relief was put on a formal national footing from 1601, displaced workers were being controlled through settlement laws from 1666 
* the big Union systems were changed to deter the large number of claimants (1722) or take on huge numbers of dispossessed ag. labs from 1782, throughout the 19th. 
* Individual Inclosure Acts were being passed during the C18th & C17th. 
* Inventions for mechanization started to arrive from 1701
I'd therefore say from mid C17th through 19th. Anyone advise better?  Ephebi (talk) 08:52, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd expected the article to cover say c. 1750-1850. Johnbod (talk) 21:25, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

text: The period dating has been revised based on Overton (1996).Phmoreno (talk) 18:27, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Timing 

message: The major revision seems to be underway with much inappropriate and unsourced material already removed.  I added a major changes and innovations section after the lede and hopefully will be able to start a subsection on each bullet item in the next few days.Phmoreno (talk) 15:10, 1 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Update: Finished a rough first pass.  Planning to rewrite Enclosure, which is going to be complicated and may take several days, possibly a week, depending on my schedule.  Also will sort through and revise crop rotation and incorporate some parts of it into other sections where it now belongs after the section title change.Phmoreno (talk) 03:05, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major revision 

message: A disclaimer was added to the lede regarding the much higher crop yields in China. When the more important crop rotation and enclosure sections are updated I will add a short section comparing British agriculture with the Chinese system.Phmoreno (talk) 14:41, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparison with China 

message: I started using this article as a reference for innovations in british farming in January 2014. Returning to it today in March 2014 I'm shocked at how much material has been removed. 
I understand that this is done for the most part to improve the accuracy but the devastation to the section on "Advances that helped the Agricultural Revolution" seems to me, as a reader, unnecessary. The section provided a good context for how the change was driven by inventions in both tools and processes. While many of the milestones were not referenced, and I assume that is the problem, they could easily be checked by the reader. The almost complete removal of this section seems like overkill - in the form that the section was presented in January 2014 it appeared to me as a neophyte a good starting place and very relevant to topic of the page.
Dorich123 (talk) 16:06, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I read the section "Advances that helped the Agricultural Revolution" carefully to see if anything was salvageable.  The problem with it in general is that it discussed a lot of topics that were not related to agriculture.  Also, many of the technologies mentioned post dated the 1700-1850 period.  Some were invented pre 1850, like the railroad, telegraph, guano and Chilean nitrates, but did not become widespread by 1850.  This is especially true of farm implements like horse drawn reapers, binders and harvesters and the threshing machine. If you read the entire article you will see many of the technologies from the deleted section listed in their appropriate new sections.  I would also add that my edit is based on Overton (1996), which is one of the standard sources for this topic.  If the writer of the deleted section had at least one good reference relating any claim to the British Agricultural Revolution, that claim would not have been deleted.Phmoreno (talk) 19:43, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Reader Comment, shocked at changes

message: I've deleted the utterly ludicrous population table under "British agriculture 1800–1900". The "Britain" figures were absurd - England alone to 1851, England, Wales, Scotland and all Ireland in 1901, Great Britain and Northern Ireland thereafter, and incredibly with annual growth rates inserted between entirely different areas, at least one of which didn't even relate remotely to the two (bizarrely compatible) numbers it was supposedly referring to. The estimate of 700,000 for London's population in 1700 was far in excess of any estimate I've ever seen, and I've seen most of the intelligent ones and some that weren't. But the crowning idiocy was the "rural" population - England was 64% urban in 1801? Obviously it's an incompetent garbling of the agricultural share of the labour force (though the percentages for 1500 and 1600 didn't even plausibly indicate that, and even the broadly sound 36% in 1801 is now thought a minimum counting family members engaged in production). It's annoying because a few of the numbers were valid and clearly mangled from reputable sources (Mitchell/Deane/Cole and Wrigley/Schofield). Deletion may seem drastic, but am I really to wade through each indicated source (at least one of which was defective, but scarcely claiming academic pretensions for it to be named & shamed), reassemble each aggregate or recalculate each rate or percentage? I doubt anyone has the time to repair this awful mess, which is why it's gone. Chiffrephile (talk) 17:58, 23 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Table deletion

message: I have moved old discussions to Talk:British Agricultural Revolution/Archive 1 to make this page more usable. Catfish Jim and the soapdish 14:21, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Material archived 

message: Re.  Section on major developments and innovations: An unsupported synthesis tag for the following passage:
The British Agricultural Revolution was the result of the complex interaction of social, economic and farming technology changes.  Major developments and innovations include:
I'm not sure which sentence the tag addresses; however, Overton (1996) essentially says this.  The social-economic change is refers to the ending of feudal relationships, the legal details of land ownership (which are complex), the enclosure movement, the development of a market economy, the elimination of trade barriers, etc. and other changes.  I haven't read Marx but he was a good historian who discussed social and economic changes from feudalism to capitalism and perhaps some of his work would be suitable for reference to these points.  However: "Marx was incorrect about enclosure driving the proletariat off the land. It was only one factor. The proportion of the workforce engaged in agriculture had been declining." (Overton, 1996, p-192)
If you have a better way to describe this and would like to expand on the short description, then by all means please do so.  Anything in the list of technologies/changes not referenced in Overton (1996) should have another reference in a separate section.  If not, then a reference needed tag is appropriate.Phmoreno (talk) 12:50, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unsupported synthesis tag  

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: No mention of increased exosomatic energy inputs via the use of steam engines with wood and then mass quantities of coal in Britain? The biggest contributing factor in the exponential rise in human population since 1800 is the access to immense stores of dense fossil Carbon energy and Carbon feedstocks. Energy/ economy/ human population are highly corelated at nearly 1:1:1.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sendler2112 (talk • contribs) 18:11, 1 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Exosomatic energy 

message: Article says "The British origins of the revolution is the view shared by the British historians. The Dutch historians disagree" – I struggle to believe that, in this day and age, 100% of British historians take one view on a disputed question and 100% of Dutch historians take the opposite. Maybe each group has a consensus that amounts to less than 100% – but then we should seek to clarify how big the consensus on each side is, and whether it is constant or changing over time. SomethingForDeletion (talk) 04:36, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dubious claims about British vs Dutch historians