Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 1.2.
W heat acreage in the United Kingdom, France, the United States,
and Germany, 1867-1895
Country
Years
1867
1872
1877
1882
1887
1892
1895
UK
1,458,000 1,539,000
1,336,500 1,296,000 972,000 931,500 607,500
France
7,249,500 6,925,500
6,966,000 6,966,000 6,966,000 7,006,500 7,006,500
United
4,991,500 8,464,500 10,651,500 15,025,500 15,228,000 15,633,000 13,770,000
States
Germany
1,882,500 1,903,500 1,984,500 1,944,000
Sources:
France, Ministère de l'Agriculture.
Statistique agricole de la France: Résultats
généraux de l'enquête décennale de 1892
(Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1897), 94-95.
Statistics from Maj. P. G. Craigie, Director of Statistics of the Board of Agriculture
(Great Britain), originating from his “Communication faite au Congrès de l'Institute
internationale de statistique” (St. Petersburg, 3 September 1897).
Proximity to a station, of course, was only one aspect of convenient
shipping and passenger travel. Poor station facilities, high shipping rates
and ticket prices, infrequent trains, delays, and inefficient connections
from branch to trunk lines all produced higher costs and more aggrava-
tion for the farmer. In this respect, Jefferies was right on the money. But
in terms of distance, the accessibility of rural rail service had improved
substantially since the late 1860s, when Jefferies's career as an agricul-
tural journalist was beginning.
In France improvement of this kind came later and at the different
scale of a much larger territory. In the 1860s, when “iron roads” were
reaching farther into the British countryside and opening remote min-
ing and agricultural districts, the sound of a whistling locomotive was
almost unknown in rural France. The major arteries of the national
system were in place, but the modernizing benefits of rail transport in
agricultural regions, so active in the minds of visionaries and govern-
ment planners, had yet to materialize in most of the country. As shown
in igure 1.3, the situation had changed for the beter by the 1890s. hirty
years later, in the 1920s, the aims of the 1878 Freycinet program of rail-
way expansion came to fruition, and the size of the main and secondary
networks reached its zenith. There were regions in the southern uplands
and mountains still not well served, but in two-thirds of rural France it
was no more than half a day's walk to catch a train - less than that for
