Sorry, what follows is truly dreary, unexciting stuff. The ultimate
objective is much less to show that P misreads (or uses too few
sources) than to show that he does not follow through correctly the
important distinction he otherwise makes between labor-saving and
land-saving innovations.
Last post I said that for a book which examines every quantitative
aspect of the sugar industry (making us wonder whether P really
believes that it was England's fortunate consumption of candies
which saved it from a Malthusian dead end) very little is said about
the agricultural revolution. The basic statistical source he offers is
the first one I cited in my last post:
> i) "English agricultural productivity seems not to have changed much
> between 1750 and 1850...per acre and total yields from arable land
> remained flat and the threat of decline constant..." (216).
The two sources P uses to support this particular claim are Greg
Clark's article "Yield's per acre in English agriculture 1250-1860:
*evidence from labor inputs*" (EHR, 1991), and pages 367, 374,
392-95, and 412 of Ambrosoli's, The Wild and the Sown (1997).
Let's provide a proper context to this claim by checking, first, the
method Clark uses to reach his estimates. Simply stated, he uses
a labor input method, that is, he looks at the labor input that went
into achieving given levels of yields per acre Thus, eventhough he
talks about wheat yields per acre, he is actually measuring *labor
productivity*. He writes: "Of the gains in yields from 1300 to 1860
only about 15 per cent had occurred by 1600. The gain in the 17th
century was about 30% of the total, that in the 18th century about
40%. From 1800 to 1860 there remained a further gain of only
about 15% of the total increase from 1300 to 1860. Thus the
evidence about labour inputs in reaping suggests that there were
increases in yields in the 17th century which were almost as great
as those in the 18th, and that the gains of the 17th may have
exceeded those from 1800 to 1860" (p454).
He further writes (though I need to recheck this article again to be
sure if in the following estimates he is measuring labor productivity
or total productivity) : "In the period around 1600 yields were about
13.5 bushels per acre, slightly above the medieval level of 12
bushels. Yields rose substantially in the period 1600 to 1700 to
about 19 bushels per acre. They rose again in the 18th century by
a slightly greater absolute amount. *From the end of the 18th to
1860, however, there was little further increase in yields.* Indeed,
from 1770 to 1860 the rise in yields may have been no more than
3.5 bushels per acre" (1991, p455).
Clark, then, calculates that the greatest gains in yields per acre
were in the 18th century, and that "there was little increase in
either grain or grass yields after 1770 ...the substantial rise in
agricultural productivity which occurred between 1300 and 1850 is
located in the years before 1770" (p459). These findings, he says,
warrrant the conclusion that "the agricultural revolution thus pre-
dates the industrial revolution rather than complementing it..."
Now, Pomeranz does not examine the question whether there was
an "agricultural revolution" prior to the industrial revolution, or
whether there were any substantial gains in productivity prior to
1770, but he does follow correctly Clark's estimation that after 1770
(well, P prefers to say after 1750) English "agricultural
productivity" (or crop output per acre) did not change much or
"remained flat". **He does not, however, specify the fact that Clark
is measuring labor productivity**. Why is this important?
Answering this question in detail requires more lifeless textual
analysis. Let's start with what P says of Ambrosoli. In the very
page in which he cites Clark (p216), he writes "Ambrosoli's work
indicates that though the English studied continental practices,
classical agriculture manuals, and their own experiments very
intently, much of what they learned about how best to maintain
soil fertility while increasing yields was not actually applied in
England, because it involved **highly labor-intensive methods and
English capitalist farmers...were intent on labor-cost minimization**
and profit maximization. The methods they adopted instead, which
**raised labor productivity**, represented a fundamental break with
much of the literature on best farming practices and actually
interfered with preserving *soil fertility* in many cases..."
Had we not read Clark himself we would never have known that
Clark's estimation is precisely the opposite, that yields per acre
were minimal after 1770 and that these increases in yield were not
achieved through increases in labor productivity, since they involve
higher labor inputs in agricultural work. That is, Clark's point is
*not* that agricultural productivity did not increase substantially
after 1770 due to problems in soil fertility (or in attempts to
increase land productivity). Rather, his point is that the increases
in agricultural productivity achieved after 1770 were not as
significant (as scholars before had argued) once we consider the
fact that the amount of labor each person was performing was
increasing.
