Nature or Nurture? Explaining English Wheat Yields in the Agricultural Revolution

Liam Brunt

No _019, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: We estimate a model of wheat yields for eighteenth century England using village-level data. This is an entirely new approach to quantifying progress during the Agricultural Revolution and enables us to consider both environmental and technological inputs. We find that climate was a crucial factor but soil quality was much less important, thus throwing doubt on traditional explanations for England’s high productivity. Traditional technologies such as drainage were effective in raising yields, but the technological innovations of the eighteenth century were much more effective. We find that turnips and seed drills were by far the most important innovations, contrary to the received wisdom.

Date: 1997-10-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/

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:oxf:esohwp:_019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).