HISTORY 1DD3 Lecture 7: Agricultural & Commercial Revolution
19 Feb 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Lecture 7: Agricultural and Commercial Revolution
Dr. Stephen Heathorn – Winter 2019
• Transformation
o Industrialization fundamentally transformed the world
o Unlike political revolutions, change occurred over decades
o Industrial Revolution began around the same time as Atlantic Revolutions
▪ Provided the material advances and social and economic relationships
that define the modern world
• The Agricultural Revolution
o Industrial production requires a large workforce that doesn’t spend most of its
time working to produce food
o Subsistence food production has dominated human history and ancestor’s
work time for years
▪ This changed between the 17th and early 19th centuries
• Pre-modern Farming
o Medieval communal open-field system of cultivation gave way to compact
privately-owned farms
o Direct result of Enlightenment precepts being applied to practical applications
• New Knowledge
o “Improving landlords” experimented using the new knowledge being
developed in the scientific academies
o Found that the use of certain crops relieved the necessity of leaving a third or
half the land fallow (unplanted)
▪ Used crops that didn’t deplete the nitrogen content of the soil, but
“fixed” it into place
• New Techniques
o Meant more land could remain under cultivation
o Nitrogen-fixing crops could be used to feed more livestock
o New techniques led to less wasted seed and more seed germinating & growing
• Implementation
o Practical application of Enlightenment science and rationality = increased
crop yields, and size and quality of livestock
o Britain
▪ General surplus of food and the increased availability of protein
• Better nutrition for more people
• Fewer workers needed in agricultural labour
• More people moving to towns/cities looking for non-
agricultural work
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