Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development--An appreciation and research agenda

Jeremy Atack, Peter Coclanis and George Grantham

Explorations in Economic History, 2009, vol. 46, issue 1, 160-167

Abstract: In their new book, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge, 2008), Olmstead and Rhode offer a radically new interpretation of American agricultural development from the late 18th to early 20th century. While earlier scholars have ascribed a central role to mechanization, Olmstead and Rhode argue that dramatic biological gains were made by an army of improving farmers responding to the challenges of insect pests, biological pathogens, new soils and movement into new climatic zones. These gains remained largely hidden because of the way most statistics have been presented and discussed. By teasing out these advances from the historical record, Olmstead and Rhode not only challenge interpretations about the nature of agricultural development in the United States but also open up a whole new research agenda that promises to revitalize the field of agricultural history here and elsewhere.

Keywords: Agricultural; history; Innovation; Productivity; growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014-4983(08)00043-0
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:46:y:2009:i:1:p:160-167

Access Statistics for this article

Explorations in Economic History is currently edited by R.H. Steckel

More articles in Explorations in Economic History from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().