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The Nitrogen Hypothesis and the English Agricultural Revolution: a Biological Analysis Author(S): Robert C Economic History Association The Nitrogen Hypothesis and the English Agricultural Revolution: A Biological Analysis Author(s): Robert C. Allen Source: The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 182-210 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40056780 Accessed: 19-07-2016 06:56 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40056780?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Cambridge University Press, Economic History Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Economic History This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Tue, 19 Jul 2016 06:56:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Nitrogen Hypothesis and the English Agricultural Revolution: A Biological Analysis Robert C. Allen A biological model of nitrogen in agriculture is specified for early modern Eng- land and used to analyze the growth in grain yields from the middle ages to the industrial revolution. Nitrogen- fixing plants accounted for about half of the rise in yields; the rest came from better cultivation, seeds, and drainage. The model highlights the slow chemical reactions that governed the release of the nitrogen introduced by convertible husbandry and the cultivation of legumes. However efficient were England's institutions, nitrogen's chemistry implied that the Eng- lish agricultural revolution would be much more gradual than the Green Revolu- tion of the twentieth century. literature on the Agricultural Revolution is vast, and yet funda- mental questions remain. This article is concerned with two of these: Why did grain yields rise between the Middle Ages and the nine- teenth century, and why was the agricultural revolution so slow? We have considerable information about grain yields both at the be- ginning and end of the period. Between 1300 and 1800, the yield of wheat rose from about 12 bushels per acre to about 20 bushels.1 The yield of peas and beans grew similarly, while barley and oats realized even greater increases. Regional variation was important, of course, and, in particular, some parts of eastern England had already achieved 1800 yields by 1300. The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 68, No. 1 (March 2008). © The Economic History Association. All rights reserved. ISSN 0022-0507. Robert C. Allen is Professor of Economic History at Oxford University and Fellow of Nuf- field College, New Road, Oxford OX1 INF, U.K. E-mail: [email protected]. I thank Liam Brunt, Michael Edelstein, Knick Harley, John Hatcher, Fridolin Krausmann, Joel Mokyr, Patrick O'Brien, Robert Shiel, Colin Thirtle, and the editor and referee of the Jour- nal for very helpful discussions and comments as the work progressed. An early version of the article was presented to the Economic History Society Annual Conference in 2004, and I am grateful to the participants of that session for the observations. All remaining errors and omis- sions are mine. For research support, I thank the Team for Advanced Research on Globalization, Education, and Technology (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) and Global Price and Income History Group (funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation). 1 The wheat yield of 12 (more exactly 1 1.6) bushels per acre includes seed and tithe. In north- eastern Norfolk and a few other localities, the yield of wheat was considerably higher. I inter- pret 12 bushels per acre as the yield outside of these high yielding districts and also as close to the national average because they did not account for a large share of production. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, pp. 312-13, 332-34, summarizes yields from many medieval demesnes. See Turner, Beckett, and Afton, Farm Production, pp. 163-64, for yields 1700-1914 derived from a large sample of farm account books. 182 This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Tue, 19 Jul 2016 06:56:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Nitrogen Hypothesis 1 83 Explaining the secular rise is a long-standing problem that has been tackled in many ways. A recent approach has been the statistical analy- sis of microdata drawn variously from probate inventories, Arthur Young's tours of the 1760s, and similar survey material.2 Although much has been learned from these investigations, they have not estab- lished the causes of rising yields since the Middle Ages. For instance, when the technology variables in Liam Brunt's regression analysis of Young's farm sample are set to their most "backward" values, the equa- tion predicts a wheat yield of 16.45 bushels per acre.3 This is halfway between the medieval and the nineteenth-century yields. What else was going on? For a long time, historians have tried to pinpoint a particular half cen- tury or century between 1300 and 1800 to call the "agricultural revolu- tion." This looks increasingly fruitless because most productivity indi- cators - output, crop yields (inferred in various ways), labor productiv- ity, real rents - advanced at slow rates over very long periods.4 The pertinent question is not when did the agricultural revolution happen, but why was it so slow? The scientific analysis of agriculture goes a long way towards an- swering both questions. Since the days of Justus von Liebig, Sir John Bennet Lawes, and Sir J. Henry Gilbert, agronomists have studied the growth of plants to improve their yields. Nitrogen plays a pivotal role in this research. Economic historians have appreciated the importance of the knowledge acquired, and some historical work has utilized formal, scientific models of nitrogen. P. Chorley, for instance, used a nitrogen- based analysis to explain the rise in continental cereal yields between 1770 and 1880, Robert Shiel discussed the nitrogen cycle and applied it to some aspects of English agriculture, and Gregory Clark analyzed convertible husbandry in terms of soil nitrogen as a kind of capital.5 I will extend this analysis by working out the dynamics of nitrogen ad- justment and use a model to explain the slow pace of the agricultural revolution and gauge the impact of nitrogen enhancing practices on yields in premodern English agriculture. Plant growth requires water and nutrients - notably, nitrogen, potas- sium, and phosphorous. Plants use them in roughly fixed proportions, 2 Allen, "Growth"; Overtoil, "Determinants" and Agricultural Revolution', and Brunt, "Na- ture." 3 Brunt, "Nature," p. 217. 4 Allen, "Growth," "Tracking the Agricultural Revolution," and "Economic Structure"; Clark, "Yields," "Labour Productivity," and "Farmland Rental Values"; Karakacili, "English Agrarian Labor Productivity Rates"; and Overton, "Determinants" and Agricultural Revolution. 5 Chorley, "Agricultural Revolution"; Shiel, "Improving Soil Productivity"; and Clark, "Eco- nomics." This content downloaded from 130.64.11.153 on Tue, 19 Jul 2016 06:56:08 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 184 Allen which means that there is usually a shortfall of one, which then limits production. In early modern agriculture, nitrogen was the limiting nutri- ent: More nitrogen meant more plant growth, whereas increased provi- sion of potassium and phosphorous had little effect.6 Only in modern times, when the heavy application of artificial fertilizers has remedied the nitrogen deficit, has it become important to provide grains with other nutrients as well. Nitrogen does not explain all of the growth in early modern yield, but it explains a great deal, and, at the same time, bounds the possible contribution of other improvements in farming. The analysis of nitrogen is particularly helpful in understanding the importance of livestock and land management. Many historians have emphasized the role of animals in explaining both the low yields of the Middle Ages and the increases between 1300 and 1800. Indeed, the most common explanation of rising yields is "mixed husbandry," that is, the combination of grain and livestock into a unified system. "The spread of integrated mixed husbandry has now been marked out as the core element of Europe's agrarian transformation since the middle ages."7 Usually, the emphasis in this explanation is on dung. More ani- mals meant more manure, and more manure meant higher grain yields. The high productivity of the nineteenth century is explained in this way - "agricultural development depended upon the accumulation of ever increasing numbers of animals per unit of cultivated land" - as is the low productivity of the Middle Ages.8 "Dung was the only real fer- tilizer . The main restriction on the use of manure depended on the sufficiency of animals." Before the Black Death, population growth meant a continual conversion of pasture to arable, and less grass threat- ened "the viability of arable cultivation itself."9 In this view, arable and pasture formed a positive feed-back system with nitrogen at its center: Manure contains nitrogen, so more animals meant more nitrogen and higher yields. But was medieval agriculture really held back by an in- sufficiency of animals and did more animals cause the agricultural revo- lution? A second explanation of rising productivity is convertible (or up-and- down) husbandry. In this system, land was alternated between grass and arable at regular intervals.
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