518 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution
gave way to the plow. Between 1750 and 1850 in Britain, 6 million acres—
or one-fourth of the country’s cultivatable land—were incorporated into
larger farms.
Farm yields increased in most of Europe. England produced almost three
times more grain in the 1830s than in the previous century. The elimina
tion of more fallow land (land left untilled for a growing season so that the
soil could replenish itself) helped. Some farmers raised cattle or specialized
in vegetables and fruits for the burgeoning urban market. Farmers
increased yield by using more intensive agricultural techniques and fertiliz
ers, which, in turn, accentuated demand for sturdier manufactured agricul
tural tools.
During the first half of the century, continental visitors to England were
surprised to find that, in contrast to the world they knew, relatively few small
family farms remained. With the ongoing consolidation of plots, the number
of rural people dependent on wage labor for survival rose. Farm work in
1831 remained the largest single source of adult male employment in
Britain, employing almost a million men. Thus, the English countryside was
peopled by a relatively small number of “gentlemen”—including British
nobles—of great wealth who owned most of the country, landed gentry of
considerable means, many yeomen (independent landowners and tenant
farmers of some means), and landless laborers, who moved from place to
place in the search for any kind of farm work. The tough lives of the latter
reflected a too-often forgotten human dimension of the agricultural revolu
tion, which increased the vulnerability of the rural poor.
On the continent, there was not as much consolidation of land as in En
gland, but there, too, productivity rose as more land was brought into
cultivation and fertilizers became more widely used. French agricultural pro
duction rose rapidly after 1815, as northern farmers with fairly large plots
began to rotate their crops three times a year. In the south, where the soil
was of a generally poorer quality, the land more subdivided, and much of it
rocky, peasants planted vineyards, although the wine they produced hardly
caused the owners of the great vineyards of Burgundy or the Bordeaux
region to lie awake at night worrying. Farmers terracing hillsides, goats
climbing up steep slopes, and the sounds of silkworms munching mulberry
leaves as peasants anticipated the harvest of raw silk characterized some
Mediterranean regions.
In Central Europe and parts of Eastern Europe, too, a modest increase
in agricultural production occurred. In the German states, agricultural
productivity rose more than twice as fast as the population between 1816
and 1865. Prussian agricultural productivity jumped by 60 percent during
the first half of the century, partly because of improved metal plows and
other farm implements, as well as because of information disseminated by
new agricultural societies. As in Britain and France, root crops, such as
turnips and the potato, added nutrition to the diet of the poor. Even in the