I think LP's submission regarding Jefferson and the "improvement" of agriculture, particularly slave-based plantation agriculture, is an important contribution to this discussion. But not, perhaps, for the same reason LP might think.
LP (I think) submits this because agricultural "improvement" is so critical to the theory of transition based on agricultural capitalism, that "improvement" distinguishes the practice of agricultural capitalism from pre-capitalist and non-capitalist agriculture. Brenner (and Wood after him) certainly finds "improvement" as being the product, not the producer, of the capitalist social relations in agriculture-- the separation of producers from the means of subsistence, the necessity of specialized production for exchange, the dependence upon the market for realization of value, and the reproduction of the actual terms of the social relation. However, (ah yes, the inevitable "but..."), there is another aspect to this-- and that is the pressure that these changes exert on all other agriculture through the world market, and the responses of the other agricultural systems to the "improvement." This is an area that has not been deeply explored, but (there it is again) certainly is critical to understanding the development of the world markets, and the internal/external conflicts of capitalism. Certainly the technical knowledge of improvements is not segregated, inaccessible to other systems. The social relations, however, that make such improvements a necessary dynamic, a transformative force, are something else again. No doubt Jefferson and other plantation owners utilized techniques of improvement. "Improvement" is not a restricted, hermetic, practice. However (again!), the record of plantation production in the US-- "capital" investment, percent of acreage sequestered vs.cultivated, etc-- shows "improvement" had not achieved the status of compulsory practicce. The Southern economy as a whole exhibits this same lassitude. Compare the expansion, volumes, and technical sophistication of Southern railroads vs. Northern railroads in the period up to and including the US Civil War. Contradictions of plantation based agriculture attempting to incorporate improvement as an economic necessity lead to dramatic upheavals in the 20th (and 21st) centuris. Look at sugar production in the Philippines up to the OPEC 1, and post-OPEC 1 periods. Protected first by US import guarantees, sug ar production in the Philippines was always "labor rich, capital poor." The general and dramatic inflation of commodity prices after OPEC 1, carrot and sticking the sugar producers into attempting rapid expansion through capital purchases, followed closely by the removal of US import guarantees and the collapse of sugar prices, leads to the massive disruption of the plantation structure, migration from the rural areas into the cities, and puts the whole society on the road to the "revolution interrupted" and Corazon Aquino.
