Agricultural Enlightenment

Download or read book Agricultural Enlightenment written by Peter Jones and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Agricultural Enlightenment explores the modernization of the rural economy in Europe through the lens of the Enlightenment. It focuses on the second half of the eighteenth century and emphasizes the role of useful knowledge in the process of agrarian change and agricultural development. As such it invites economic historians to respond to the challenge issued by Joel Mokyr to look beyond quantitative data and to take seriously the argument that cultural factors, broadly understood, may have aided or hindered the evolution of agriculture in the early modern period ("what people knew and believed" had a direct bearing on their economic behavior Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy]). Evidence in support of the idea that a readily accessible supply of agricultural knowledge helps to explain the trajectory of the rural economy is drawn from all of the countries of Europe. The book includes two cases studies of rapid rural modernization in Scotland and Denmark where Agricultural Enlightenment was swiftly followed by full-scale Agricultural Revolution.

Download or read book The Economic Turn written by Steven Kaplan and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2019-01-16 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mid-eighteenth century witnessed what might be dubbed an economic turn that resolutely changed the trajectory of world history. The discipline of economics itself emerged amidst this turn, and it is frequently traced back to the work of François Quesnay and his school of Physiocracy. Though lionized by the subsequent historiography of economics, the theoretical postulates and policy consequences of Physiocracy were disastrous at the time, resulting in a veritable subsistence trauma in France. This galvanized relentless and diverse critiques of the doctrine not only in France but also throughout the European world that have, hitherto, been largely neglected by scholars. Though Physiocracy was an integral part of the economic turn, it was rapidly overcome, both theoretically and practically, with durable and important consequences for the history of political economy. The Economic Turn brings together some of the leading historians of that moment to fundamentally recast our understanding of the origins and diverse natures of political economy in the Enlightenment.

Download or read book The Enlightenment written by John Robertson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

Download or read book From Savage to Citizen written by Amy S. Wyngaard and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Using methodologies derived from cultural studies, new historicism, and the history of ideas, Amy S. Wyngaard argues that changing ideas of individual, class, and national identity in the eighteenth century were elaborated around portrayals of the peasant."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Enclosure of Knowledge written by James D. Fisher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-21 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land, and wages. This study reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise, challenging the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment' and showing how farming books appropriated traditional knowledge in pre-industrial Britain.

Download or read book Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750-1807 written by Justin Roberts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-08 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on how Enlightenment ideas shaped plantation management and slave work routines. It shows how work dictated slaves' experiences and influenced their families and communities on large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, and Virginia. It examines plantation management schemes, agricultural routines, and work regimes in more detail than other scholars have done. This book argues that slave workloads were increasing in the eighteenth century and that slave owners were employing more rigorous labor discipline and supervision in ways that scholars now associate with the Industrial Revolution.

Download or read book An Anxious Pursuit written by Joyce E. Chaplin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In An Anxious Pursuit, Joyce Chaplin examines the impact of the Enlightenment ideas of progress on the lives and minds of American planters in the colonial Lower South. She focuses particularly on the influence of Scottish notions of progress, tracing the extent to which planters in South Carolina, Georgia, and British East Florida perceived themselves as a modern, improving people. She reads developments in agricultural practice as indices of planters' desire for progress, and she demonstrates the central role played by slavery in their pursuit of modern life. By linking behavior and ideas, Chaplin has produced a work of cultural history that unites intellectual, social, and economic history. Using public records as well as planters' and farmers' private papers, Chaplin examines innovations in rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation as a window through which to see planters' pursuit of a modern future. She demonstrates that planters actively sought to improve their society and economy even as they suffered a pervasive anxiety about the corrupting impact of progress and commerce. The basis for their accomplishments and the root of their anxieties, according the Chaplin, were the same: race-based chattel slavery. Slaves provied the labor necessary to attain planters' vision of the modern, but the institution ultimately limited the Lower South's ability to compete in the contemporary world. Indeed, whites continued to wonder whether their innovations, some of them defied by slaves, truly improved the region. Chaplin argues that these apprehensions prefigured the antimodern stance of the antebellum period, but she contends that they were as much a reflection of the doubt inherent in theories of progress as an outright rejection of those ideas.