Rail Transport, Agrarian Crisis, and the Reorganization of Agriculture: France and Great Britain Confront Globalization, 1860‐1900
Robert Schwartz Mount Holyoke College South Hadley, Massachusetts The Role of Railways in Globalization and the Agrarian Crisis? Reading The Daily News (London) in April 1883 delivers the goods.
Minching Lane (London) the markets in sugar from Russia & Trinidad; in coffee, cocoa, Chinese tea, rice, etc.
Prices of imported butter Loading American cattle bound for English markets
News of Stock Markets from Paris to Bombay & Calcutta
Calcutta Economic Depression
The industries most affected: coal, iron, textiles, transport, and agriculture Price of wheat, tariff rates, and the production of wheat in the American Midwest.
Wheat harvest in South Dakota, 1888 The expansion of railways in England and Wales The expansion of railways in France Rail transport and the spatial Ligne de reorganization of agriculture chemin de fer , beginning in the 1860s. 1876
London & the Home Counties: Middlesex et al. The evolving geography of stock raising in France (density of animals per hectare in 1882) Regional disparities in rail service, 1890
l’Allier The Freycinet program for the expansion of the secondary rail network in France was introduced in 1878.
Lines of local interest (kilometers), 1850 à 1930
Year The secondary railways and rural communities in the Allier, ca. 1911
Source: S.tephen J. Russell, Agriculture, Prosperity, and Modernization of French Rural Communities, 1870-1914 (Lewiston NY, 2004) Rural communities in the Allier and Rail transport, 1881-1911 Smaller farms tended to be closer to rail stations than larger farms
Distance from rail station and average farm size: y = 10.5716 + 0.4187*x; r = 0.41, p = 0.04; r2 = 0.17
Data for the analysis: Russell, Agriculture, chapter 3. Farms closer to rail connection tended to add more dairy cattle than those at a greater distance
Distance from rail connection and change in the number of dairy cattle kept: y = 28.9855 - 1.4478*x; r = -0.38, p = 0.12; r2 = 0.16
Data for the analysis: Russell, Agriculture, chapter 3. Farmers closer to urban markets or rail connections tended to reduce their grain production to a greater degree than farmers further away, 1891-1911
Distance from a urban market or rail connection and grain production : y = -20.6911 + 1.538*x; r = 0.44, p = 0.04; r2 = 0.20 with the outlier Chamblet excluded
Data for the analysis: Russell, Agriculture, chapter 3. The Country in the City Poster advertising the pure, sterilized milk of a dairy farm in rural Burgundy, 1894
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, 1894 Conclusion
Whereas Great Britain responded to the agrarian crisis by affirming open markets in food stuffs, France introduced protective tariffs and a major progam of rail construction to help modernize its larger agricultural sector.
As in Britain—but even more dramatically—the later decades of the ninetheenth century saw a marked shift from cereal production and mixed farming to cattle raising and dairy farming, accentuating the spatial restructuring of agricultural production.
The effects of expanding the French secondary rail network in the Department of the Allier in central France are suggestive: accessible rail service facilitated the shift from cereal production to cattle raising by smaller farms.