Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Zanden labelled
which was initially fostered by inno-
vative responses to the European agrarian crisis experienced between 1870 and
1914,
39
when the cheap wheat and corn exported from the United States, Canada,
Australia, Argentina or Russia
'
the
rst green revolution
'—
ooded European markets.
40
From then onwards
organic manure started to be supplemented by increasing amounts of external inputs
of mineral and fossil origin. However, up until the 1950s they remained very small,
as long as the diffusion of industrial fertilizers, the adoption of tractors or newly
selected seeds and animal varieties served as a complement rather than as a full
substitute for organic sources, crop rotations and animal work. Therefore, the radical
turnaround in the agrarian sector did not occur until the second half of the 20th
century (see the differences between schemes b and c in Fig.
2.4
). Before the massive
use of fossil fuels within the agrarian system, the main means of increasing agrarian
outputs in the various European bioregions still lay in the development of several
types of
fl
.
41
'
advanced organic agricultures
'
2.5 Why the Industrial Revolution Began in a High Wage
and Cheap Energy Economy
How did a Schumpeterian-type of modern economic growth began? A long-lasting
historiographical tradition has been collecting data on agricultural land usages and
yields from medieval times onwards, and has shown two main features: (1) up to
1800, yields and labour productivity remained low but stable in the long run in most
European and Asian regions which had experienced comparatively old agrarian
colonization and attained high population densities; and (2) only a few regions seem
to have been able to overcome the Malthusian-Ricardian constraints, taking
advantage of all existing possibilities to optimise traditional low-input organic
systems in order to achieve higher agrarian yields per unit area without diminishing
agricultural labour productivity at the same time. As far as the ongoing debate on
the Great Divergence between Western Europe and Eastern Asia allows to tell for
the moment, prior to 1800 these upper outlying cases were the Dutch and English
economies, the only ones where wages and standards of living seem to have
increased above the rest of the World at the time.
42
Why did these changes develop in some regions whilst not in others? Why did it
take so long to be adopted or emulated by other regions of the World? These
questions raise two sets of issues: (1) which kind of land entitlements and insti-
tutional settings created an incentive structure that encouraged a long run increase
39
Van Zanden (
1991
).
40
Koning (
1994
).
41
Leach (
1976
) and Naredo (
2004
).
42
Pomeranz. (
2000
) and Allen et al. (
2005
).
