There exists a widespread belief that England’s economic achievements were based on its spectacular progress in agriculture, in which primitive peasant cultivation was replaced by far the economically more successful large-scale cultivation by farmers. History, however, has a different tale to tell. Agriculture in England did not achieve any particular efficiency before the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. No particular progress in agricultural techniques was observed before the eighteenth century, during which the entire English peasantry was uprooted to make way for ‘farmers’, employing wage labour.
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