Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
tion, giving cereal farmers a reprieve not enjoyed by their British coun-
terparts. To examine this, we mapped the pertinent atributes: percent-
age change in wheat cultivation by canton (comparable to the British
registration district) and the distance from the centers of communes
(comparable to British parishes). In figure 1.6 the gray lines connected
to station nodes represent the closest distance from any given commune
to a station. As for wheat acreage and catle density, a strict comparison
with Britain at the parish/commune level is not feasible, because the
data needed for the communes of the Côte-d'Or are incomplete. Our
data pertain to the next higher French administrative unit of the canton.
An examination of the percentage change in cereal production be-
tween 1881 and 1905 across the cantons of the Côte-d'Or shows what one
would expect. Protected by tariffs, wheat production remained fairly
stable from the 1880s to the mid-1890s, even during the great fall in wheat
prices internationally. By 1905, however, the shit from wheat to catle
raising and to other uses of agricultural land was marked in all thirty-
three cantons of the department except those of Dijon and Beaune,
where the two largest cities of the department are located. Centered on
the cities of Dijon and Beaune, these two cantons saw wheat production
rise in that decade (see figure 1.6). However, beyond the Dijon region
and the major vine-growing districts running from Dijon to Beaune,
an increase in pasture and catle numbers atests to the expansion and
intensification of livestock farming (see figure 1.7).
W hen this information is combined with data on railway accessi-
bility, the results suggest that rail service proximity was one factor that
influenced changes in wheat production not in the 1880s, as was true in
Dorset, but in the 1890s. By 1905 the building of branch lines and the
opening of new stations in underserved areas was well under way, much
as the Freycinet program had envisaged. Consequently, more farmers in
the Côte-d'Or and elsewhere had rail service closer to hand. To describe
the efect of improved accessibility, scater plots depict the relationships
between proximity to a station and the change in cereal production and
catle raising.
34
The decline of wheat cultivation and the proximity of rail transport
were inversely related: from 1892 to 1905 the percentage decline in wheat
