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Nathaniel Wolloch, Peter M. Jones. Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 296–297, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.296
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In Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840, Peter M. Jones investigates the Enlightenment roots of the agricultural revolution—how the eighteenth-century accumulation of agricultural knowledge enabled subsequent technological progress in agricultural practices. Jones makes a consistent point that the Agricultural Enlightenment was pan-European. He claims that it was the pluralization of the interpretation of the Enlightenment(s) in the 1980s that enabled investigations of this sort. Ironically, however, Jones’s discussion validates the view of the Enlightenment as a unified phenomenon, one of the manifestations of which was to impel progress in agricultural knowledge and production, just as progress in other fields, political, social, and technological, was induced. Yet however one interprets this point, this is an interesting, original, and timely book.
Jones notes the difficulties in gathering precise information on agricultural production in the eighteenth century, but nonetheless pieces together an inquiry that vindicates the notion of an Agricultural Enlightenment propelled by a “knowledge economy” (9), institutional developments, and technological capabilities. The Enlightenment idea of mastery of nature was coupled with a view of agricultural progress as a patriotic duty of the elite. Yet this progress also spread further, and “how to” knowledge propagated in agricultural treatises and manuals became another avenue of development. Despite the difficulty involved in determining how exactly this knowledge impacted practice, Jones painstakingly manages to show that this indeed happened. He depicts this development up to the mid-nineteenth century, at which point the age of informal knowledge ended and was replaced by institutionalized natural sciences.
