Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
often helped farmers adapt to the new market conditions of the global-
izing world of the late nineteenth century. Jefferies was unable to see
this, even though he accurately depicted the general crisis of confidence
in European farming.
Historical GIS and Spatial History
Farmers of the period knew very well that their fortunes increasingly
depended upon railways and their freight charges. Today, few scholars
doubt that railways and agriculture were linked and interdependent, and
yet historians concern themselves almost exclusively with one or the
other subject. Rare exceptions to this offer valuable insights that we can
improve upon in several ways. GIS and spatial analysis make it possible to
study larger and more complex bodies of evidence at different scales and
over time. Here, our georeferenced evidence comes from large databases
on railways, population, and agriculture for Great Britain and France
from the 1830s to the 1930s. Another improvement is our use of a com-
parative approach to investigate paterns of change within and between
states the beter to identify and explain both similarities and diferences
in countries that had differing political economies, a difference reflected
in agricultural policy by British free trade and French protectionism. In
this period of globalizing markets, comparative history is all but indis-
pensable for understanding the position of any geographical area and its
producers in its relation to the shifting international division of labor - a
need underscored by its absence in much of the literature on the agrarian
depression of the late nineteenth century.
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Among historians of British agriculture there is a consensus that
the depression in Britain was not a “general crisis” in agricultural output
but one that varied by region and that struck the cereal-growing regions
of the south and southeast much harder than elsewhere in England and
Wales. Debate continues, however, as to whether or not British agricul-
ture “failed” to meet the challenges of intensifying foreign competition.
“Pessimists” point to the demise of large, more productive farms, a lack
of innovation and entrepreneurial savvy, and the government's compla-
cent dependence on imports from the bountiful agricultural resources
of the United States and Britain's colonies.
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As more regional research is
