Identify features of the 18th century agricultural revolution and analyze its social and economic consequences?

Answer 1

#1 Identify the features of the 18th century Agricultural Revolution and analyze its social and economic consequences

Thesis: The technological advances in the eighteenth century slowly allowed for the advancement of people's lives economically, but social injustice remained.

1.Crop Rotation

a.Eliminated fallow season by alternating grain with nitrogen-storing crops

i.Peas, beans, turnips (Charles Townsend), potatoes, clovers, and grasses

b.New crops made ideal feed for animals

i.Build their herds of cattle

1.More animals mean more meat, better diets, and more manure for fertilizer (which means more grain).

2.The Low Countries and England

a.Farming in the Low Countries was already developed

b.English learned their farming techniques from the Netherlands

i.Drainage and water control

c.Jethro Tull

i.Horses instead of oxen

ii.Sowing seed with drilling equipment

d.Robert Bakewell

i.Animal husbandry and selective breeding

e.By 1870 English farmers were producing 300% more food than in 1700 and their working population only grew by 14%

f.Produced food for England's rapidly growing urban population

3.Enclosures

a.Agricultural scientists realized the peasants needed to consolidate their holding to be more efficient.

b.The poor didn't want to: common rights were very important to them

c.The noble landowners didn't want to risk it b/c it required large investments.

d.Large landowners controlled English Parliament.

i.Passed enclosure acts that fenced off and divided the common pasture

1.Heavy legal and surveying costs. Peasants had to sell out to pay expenses

2.landless cottagers lost access to the common pasture w/o compensation

e.Three groups of landownership and production

i.Few large landowners

ii.Large amount of landless cottagers

iii.In the middle, small independent farmers and tenant farmers.

1.Small independent farmers declined in number since early enclosures. Couldn't compete w/ the tenant farmers

f.Enclosures didn't force people off the land by eliminating jobs

i.But eliminating common rights and reducing the access of poor people to the land had two developments:

1.market-oriented estate agriculture

2.emergence of a landless rural proletariat (proletarianization)