Rural History | University of Guelph

Terry Crowley 'Agriculture,' in Pendergast, Tom, and Sara Pendergast, editors; James Eli Adams, editor-in-chief. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era. 4 vols. Danbury, CT: Grolier Academic Press, 2004.

Agriculture expanded worldwide as global population grew during the nineteenth century. Both the extension of farming and its improvement through better techniques and improved machinery gave rise to optimism about agricultural activities in Western countries. New lands in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and South America were brought under cultivation following treaties with aboriginal peoples, their removal to marginal territories, or interminable frontier wars as witnessed in South Africa and the United States. International migrations brought people to settler societies in increasing numbers as transportation advances such as international steamship services and railroads spread after mid-century. Far-flung markets became increasingly integrated to such an extent that agricultural changes in one part of the globe influenced production in another part. Agricultural labor eventually became free in most parts of the world, but slavery and debt peonage remained endemic in places such as British India. Commercialization, abetted by the expansion of railways and the need for credit to support agricultural expansion, served to lessen farm self-sufficiency and the gap that divided rural from urban. As the vogue for scientific approaches to farming developed, governments frequently promoted agricultural improvement through creating educational institutions, subsidizing agrarian organizations, and recognizing the legal status of professional groups like veterinarians. Farming activity changed as new technology was increasingly applied to operations once performed by hand with simple tools. Productivity and output advanced sufficiently that commodity prices for items such as wheat and meat were driven down. Food became less expensive for more people, but insufficiently in places such as South Asia. Elsewhere, farmers as primary producers became enmeshed in commercial systems controlled by others: the banks; transportation companies; machinery enterprises; and merchants and other intermediaries. In Britain, agricultural laborers went on strike and formed unions, but in countries such as the United States farmers organized to better their economic position and impress their political weight electorally.

The agrarian situations in the United Kingdom and its colony in India served as extreme poles that more newly settled societies hoped to avoid. Britain was singular among industrial countries in the degree to which land was concentrated in the hands of a few. Agricultural land had long provided the foundation and framework for the aristocracy that stood at the apex of its governing classes. At mid-century, a small group of some four thousand landowners controlled about four-sevenths of the cultivated land. These owners let the land to a quarter million farmers, both big and small, who employed a million and a quarter laborers, shepherds, and other workers. By 1830 the agricultural sector produced ninety percent of the food consumed by a population that had more than doubled since 1750. The cost of agriculture's protected position came in the form of high food costs, scarcity, inadequate diets for poor people, and frequent poaching of game on land owned by others. The second half of the nineteenth century set in motion processes that eventually hailed the demise of the social and economic structures based on limited access to the land and the primacy of agriculture as a generator of wealth.

Britain's move away from tariff protection through the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 marked the shift from agriculture providing the general frame of reference for Britain's entire economy. Since the Corn Laws had governed when foreign wheat might be admitted into the British market and at what price, the lifting of fiscal protection challenged the British agricultural sector to compete with imports. A Parliament still controlled by rural interests attempted in 1846 to offset the effects of free trade through legislation providing for loans to support field drainage. The invention of cylindrical clay drainage pipe in 1843 and subsequent laws aimed at various agrarian improvements allowed Britain's agriculture to expand during the 1850s and 60s. More land was brought under cultivation, proportionally less was devoted to grain growing, and more given over to orchards and pasture for livestock. As dairying expanded so, too, did the work of women whose activities were particularly associated with the production of milk, cream, butter, and cheese, as well as poultry raising and egg marketing. Skim milk from dairying promoted more extensive hog raising. Changes to the Poor Law in 1865 that spread the poor rate over the entire country, rather than just a single parish, encouraged the large landowners to build better cottages for which they charged higher rents. Wages paid to laborers rose, but insufficiently to compensate for higher rents and other rising costs of living.

The belief that greater profits might be made through 'high farming' rather than reliance on traditional methods expanded among landowners and big farmers. High farming meant enhancing productivity and profits through availing oneself of the benefits of science and the fruits of rational experience. The motto, 'Practice with Science,' that the Royal Agricultural Society adopted after it was founded in 1838 summed up the aspirations of high farming and scientific agriculture. The agricultural experiment (research) station established at Rothamsted by Sir John Lawes in 1843, the Cirencester Agricultural College (1845), the development of an agricultural press, and the host of shows and fairs that spread around the countryside provided means to deepen and disseminate knowledge about informed practice. Fertilizers came into use rapidly: superphosphate was patented in 1842 during a decade that saw the importation of Peruvian guano skyrocket. Some pesticides such as the chemical Paris Green appeared later to control plant diseases and insects. High farming also meant the purchase of agricultural implements to reduce labor costs, although mechanization lagged behind the United States. In 1874 the forty-seven percent of cereal grains harvested by machinery in Britain contrasted with eighty percent in the American republic. Other characteristics of high farming included close attention to field rotations, improved livestock breeding and seed selection, and better feeding of domestic animals to produce the excessively fat creatures envisioned by painters. Rural Britain was peopled by more than novelist Anthony Trollope's worldly aristocrats and dignified gentlemen engaged in trivial pursuits, yet for all the attention devoted to improved farming methods, scientific agriculture generally returned only three and a half percent on investment.

The 1870s marked the beginnings of a significant transition for British agriculture that was largely complete by century's end. The economic depression from 1873 to 1879 brought declining commodity prices, fewer profits, less income for laborers, and an increase in amount of work provided by casual rather than permanent laborers. Labor discontent, particularly in grain growing areas, surfaced in the short-lived National Agricultural Labourers' Union which formed in 1872 but was quickly reduced to impotence by owner lockout and black listing of its supporters. Declining cereal prices accelerated changes in land use, furthering the trend away from grain production that had provided more work than livestock raising. By the 1870s nearly half the wheat consumed was foreign grown. Agricultural imports into Britain rose dramatically with the rise of oceanic steamship navigation. The American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 interrupted the trade in cotton and brought the privations known as the Lancashire cotton famine in the country's northern textile towns. The growth in livestock trade and then of meat shipped when refrigeration became practical during the 1880s further depressed the British agricultural sector. This commerce fostered state regulation of international trade in the interests of public health. The British government's adoption in 1878 of a Foreign Animals Order regulating cattle imports spurred the United States, largely through immediate slaughter orders for sick animals, to eradicate pleuro-pneumonia by 1892.

By 1895 a third of Britain's estimated meat consumption came from abroad. In Ireland, the landed elite was challenged by a revolutionary peasant movement organized in Michael Davitt's Land League, but its challenge was broken by the liquidation of the landlords' powers through legislation. Laws passed between 1885 and 1903 allowed some thirteen million acres of land to change hands. There and in other parts of the United Kingdom small farmers and agricultural laborers left the sector in search of better opportunities in cities or abroad. The Small Holdings Act of 1892 attempted to stem the flow by giving laborers a personal interest in the land, but legislation proved largely ineffectual. Between 1881 and 1901, 60-80,000 agricultural laborers left agricultural occupations. Employment in agriculture fell from a million and a half at mid-century, when the sector comprised a fifth of the Gross National Product, to one million and one-thirteenth by 1901. Agriculture had been disenthroned even though the residual effects of its former pre-eminence continued in Britain well into the twentieth century.

Agricultural experience shaped Britain's approach to India, its largest and most important colony. As land became the basis for taxation under the rule of the British East India Company, the legal land regimes established for tax purposes made property rights absolute rather than customary and shifting as they had been. In most of the country, taxes were collected directly from the tenant-cultivator, but in the huge Bengal presidency of the east and north, the British recognized as landowners intermediaries known as zamindars who had assisted tax collection for earlier Mogul rulers. Initial high taxation rates were scaled down in different regions and at different times, but they tended to bunch in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Following the great rebellion (or Anglo-Indian War) of 1857-8, the British government assumed control of the colony. With the development of canals and other irrigation works, large amounts of land were brought under cultivation and agriculture greatly commercialized. The cultivated area in the Punjab in the northwest grew by fifty percent between 1867 and 1892, while to the south, in the Mumbai ( Bombay)- Deccan region, land devoted to agriculture increased by sixty-seven percent between 1843 and 1873. Agricultural output expanded along with population growth, at least until the economic depression of the 1890s and a major famine in 1896. Agricultural productivity also grew in some areas, although less within the rice growing culture of the Bengal region.

In a vast and varied sub-continent, agriculture differed greatly by region. Trade in opium and indigo became less profitable, especially after the Indigo Revolt in Bengal in 1860 and the discovery of mineral dyes. India's three main cash crops emerged as cotton, wheat, and rice, but other exports included oil-seeds, tobacco, ground-nuts, sugarcane, tea, and jute. Cotton production also fed the textile mills of Mumbai beginning in the1860s. Transportation improvements, including the construction of extensive railroad networks and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, facilitated the colony's exports. The closing of trade with the United States during its Civil War created a cotton boom in India that ended in a crash in the late1860s. As India became integrated into world trade, regional and local markets responded. Wheat exports to the United Kingdom accounted for fourteen percent of British wheat imports in 1883. The value of Indian exports increased by five hundred percent between 1870 and 1914, with non-manufactured goods accounting for a share of seventy to eighty percent of the total.

The benefits of commercialization of so much Indian agriculture have been hotly debated, particularly in light of recurring famines that killed millions of people during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such catastrophies resulted principally from agriculture's dependence on the monsoon, but commercialization worked its greatest effects within India's social and economic structures. The Indian experience shows that the much loved academic dichotomy between peasant and farming cultures more generally appears to have been largely a chimera. Studies in the colony revealed a positive correlation between the amount of acreage cropped and the relative prices of crops. People whom scholars have characterized as peasants were really farmers responding to prices in the manner that profit-maximizing producers are expected to do.

Commercialization created rich peasants and consolidated dominant cultivators, but benefitted small peasants less through placing a premium on access to credit to finance expansion. Credit, commerce, inequality and growth were interrelated. In the north, debt peonage known as kamiuti might create bond slaves temporarily or in perpetuity. The Deccan Riots of 1875 expressed peasant resentment of moneylenders, but they also resulted from falling prices, heavy taxation, and a sense of political deprivation. The taxation system changed after the 1860s away from its former objective to consolidate property rights and moved towards protection of cultivators' rights. The proportion of agricultural laborers increased within a growing population. The British largely turned a blind eye to slavery and the extensive slave trade of southern India. Many laborers came from the lower castes; in the vast Madras (Chennai) presidency, a fifth of the population were said to be 'untouchables.' Agricultural laborers were often attached to the land like serfs, but customary bondage tended to decrease during the colonial period. Despite social improvements, there was no substantial long-term advance in real wages. Agricultural developments undermined the communalism that lay at the heart of traditional Indian village life, despite its occupational and caste-based divisions. Access to common resources declined steadily because various forms of joint use were misunderstood by the British, access to forests was restricted, and the British redefined the state's relationship to pastoral communities. The feudal landlord-tenant relations that emerged in India in conjunction with the uneven development of commercial agriculture resembled those in Britain but also differed substantially.

International trade in agricultural commodities between industrial countries and Africa increased during the nineteenth century because the cost of manufactured goods fell more rapidly than the prices of agricultural commodities such as palm and peanut oil for which they were exchanged. In the years before 1870 changes were particularly apparent in the coastal areas of West Africa such as Senegal-Gambia, Gold Coast ( Ghana), and the hinterland of Lagos ( Nigeria). New markets for agricultural produce provided a bridge from the former slave export economies. For the first time, African agriculture reflected international influence through such things as the planting of palm trees in places like the Gold Coast. The expansion of white South Africa's frontiers through interminable wars with the region's native peoples brought an increase in the early export of hides, skins, tallow and ivory from its Cape Colony. Later, sugar cane and wool became South Africa's major agricultural exports, with wool placing second only to Australia among British imports. British land policies, the abolition of slavery in 1834, and government intervention in labor relations concerning Hottentot employment led Afrikaners to venture on the Great Trek of 1836-46 that resulted in the creation of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. In these areas and on the west coast of the continent the reproductive principles of agriculture, including cropping and animal husbandry, overtook hunting-gathering as the basis of exchange production for external markets. In places such as Kenya in East Africa, the expansion of European farming was heavily dependent on access to land gained at aboriginal expense. Agrarian peasant production in this region was facilitated by Indian merchants who often worked with European firms to get agricultural commodities to market. Growing demand in Europe and North America for rubber led to an incredibly inhumane exploitation of Congo's peoples in efforts to tap rubber trees and other natural resources by Belgian King Leopold II after1884.

Britain's Emancipation Act of 1833 officially ending slavery within its domains produced no greater effect than on the sugar producing islands of the Caribbean. Former slave owners were indemnified, but just as the emancipated were provided with no land from which to make a living, so the abolition of Quebec's seigneurial land tenure system in 1854 brought compensation to seigneurs (landlords) while leaving farmers as tenants continuing to pay rent. In the West Indies, a period of apprenticeship of six years (later reduced to four) was instituted for former slaves to avoid economic disaster in regard to sugar production. Many of African descent, particularly in areas such as Trinidad, Jamaica, and British Guiana, fled the plantations. The sugar output of the British West Indies fell dramatically from 1839 to 1846. The United Kingdom's Sugar Duties Act of 1846 ended tariff protection for its West Indian colonies by placing all sugar entering Britain on an equal footing. The West Indies also had to contend with the expansion of sugar production in Cuba where slavery remained until 1886, two years before it was abolished in Brazil. Traditional family-run and resident-owned plantations gradually gave way to metropolitan-based corporate entities with greater commercial expertise, access to credit, and interest in agricultural technology. Labor shortages were remedied through the immigration of Indians and, to a lesser extent, Chinese. Some 400,000 East Indians emigrated to the British West Indies between 1851 and 1917, many as indentured laborers for agriculural purposes. As Mauritius, British East India, Louisiana, Java, and Hawaii also became major sugar producers, the Caribbean share (including Cuba) of worldwide production dropped from fifty-one percent in1859-60 to forty-one percent by 1894-5.

What galvanized the Western world was the vast untapped potential of North America's virgin lands, particularly in the United States. Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina were also attractive for agricultural purposes, but distances were greater and transportation costs that much higher. America became the foremost beacon for those who hoped for better material prospects for their offspring and desired the independence that farming appeared to provide. Nineteenth-century America presented a series of constantly rolling frontiers that moved westward as migrants and the ambitious of various ethnic backgrounds sought land to put under the plow, most often at the expense of immense ecological damage to forests, other flora, and water systems. The aspirations of new settlers to liberty were flatly contradicted by the presence of slavery, but slavery had been reduced to the bondage based on one skin color.

Slavery heavily influenced production in the ante-bellum South where slaves were overwhelmingly agricultural laborers It allowed large-scale plantations to produce such commodities as cotton, sugar, and rice, but it also encouraged food crops such as corn and wheat to feed its labor force. By 1860 four million slaves (about one-eighth of the American population) lived in the fifteen states that permitted slavery and that stretched from Delaware and Maryland in the northeast to Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas in the west. Slaves were distributed unevenly, with the highest concentration in the areas known as the black belt (the cotton lands from South Carolina through central Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and into eastern Texas). Field work was often exhausting, and as hours were long, plantation slaves generally preferred domestic work. Slave women were worked so hard even when pregnant that infant birth weights were low and infant mortality rates high.

The Civil War stimulated an interest in agriculture that found expression in four pieces of legislation passed by Congress in 1862: a Pacific Railroad Act to complete a connection with California where agricultural production would assume unique characteristics; legislation creating the United States Department of Agriculture to oversee and promote farming; the Morrill Land-Grant College Act that provided for thirty thousand acres of federal land for each of a state's senators and representatives to create and support at least one college specializing in the instruction of the agricultural and mechanical arts; and the Homestead Act that made provision for 160 acres of public land free upon payment of a fee.

Railroads and the provision of free land (copied in Canada by the Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1886, and the Dominion Lands Act of 1872) provided the basis for the settlement of the Great Plains once war ended in 1865. Between 1870 and 1900 the number of farms in the United States more than doubled. New farms were typically joint ventures between husbands and wives. Families were large because children's hands were needed for a multiplicity of tasks. While domestic and field work were apportioned to each sex, gender barriers were not immutable. Just as women in Europe had engaged in a variety of farm tasks, so North American women assumed this double burden until family finances permitted some greater focus on domestic rather than farm work.

New settlement moved into the vast region of grasslands stretching from the western edge of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana on the east to the Rocky Mountains on the west, and from the north of Mexico to the Dakotas and Montana. In 1870 there were only about 50,000 farms in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, but within thirty years the number had increased eight-fold. Dryland farming techniques were developed that involved summer-fallowing and land tillage designed to conserve soil moisture. The Hatch Act of 1887 furthered research into new agricultural practices by providing federal funds to create and run agricultural experiment stations in the states. Population rushed in when rainfall was adequate and wheat prices good, but fled when either condition changed. As land availability became restricted during the 1890s, sights shifted north to the Canadian prairies that were billed as 'The Last Best West.'

Between the 1860s and 1880s open-range cattle ranching, often pursued by companies, spread across the Plains. During the 1870s the ranching frontier reached Montana, the northern Dakota territory, and southern Alberta. By the middle of the 1880s when two dry summers were followed by bitterly cold winters, cattle died in droves. By then the market for grass-fed beef had largely been saturated and ranchers turned to claiming land, often using their hands in fraudulent applications under the Homestead Act, and fencing what they obtained. Experience on the Plains recalls how dependent agriculture remained on the vagaries of weather, particularly in vulnerable areas such as the Great Plains or much of Australia. Severe drought there between 1864 and 1869 completely decimated Australia's sheep herds, killing 235,000 out of 270,000 sheep in the colony of South Australia alone, but that country did not experience its worst extended drought until 1895 to1903.

Although greater provision was made for American Blacks in the wake of emancipation than had been provided in the British West Indies, the South presented a bleak picture even with expansion of cotton production by 170 percent between 1870 and 1900. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 made land available for entry by former slaves, but white racism, black poverty, and inferior land greatly restricted the legislation's advantages. Freed slaves, no more than other people without financial resources, could not meet farm establishment costs unless they managed access to credit that was largely denied to Blacks.

Two key features came to characterize the South's agriculture in the post-emancipation period: sharecropping and usurious credit arrangements that worked against Black people and small farmers more generally. Both practices were supported by discriminatory state legislation designed to protect the wealthy at the expense of the impoverished. In sharecropping agreements, one party brought the land and perhaps things such as buildings, seed, and equipment, while the other supplied principally his and his family's labor, but perhaps a team or other items. In some states, those who brought only their labor into sharecropping were considered as laborers who might not enjoy the portion of the crop that share tenants received. Similarly, laws in some states allowed agricultural labor contracts (and hence laborers) to be sold by the courts to other employers - a veil so thin on the other side of slavery as to be almost non-existent. Merchants frequently filled the void in the need for credit, but in the system of crop liens that developed, they profited both in extending the loan and then in marketing the crop to satisfy payment. Interest rates were often above forty percent and as high as sixty percent.

Other than in the South, North American agriculture above the Rio Grande River avoided the extremes seen in Britain and India by placing ownership in the hands of numerous farmer-owners. Access to credit proved fundamental to the development of such farms, but on the Great Plains interest rates of ten percent were common. Despite incurring debts, farmers clung to the concept of independence. As late as 1900, sixty percent of what was consumed on American farms was produced there. As labor was relatively expensive and frequently inadequate, particularly during critical junctures in the agricultural year, farmers bought a great variety of machinery manufactured in the East and mid-West. The most expensive and important of the early machines was the reaper that was patented by Cyrus McCormick in 1834. A worker (often a woman) with a sickle could crop an acre of grain a day, while a man using the much heavier scythe rigged with a cradle might cut two or three acres. The reaper allowed cutting twelve to fifteen acres a day.

Machinery represented only one of the commercial processes that engulfed farmers and challenged their independence. Most were highly sensitive to the rates charged by railroads for transport of their produce. The advent of mail order businesses such as that of Aaron Montgomery Ward in the United States after 1872, or Timothy Eaton's in Canada, increased the availability of goods that might be purchased with savings from farm operations. The mammoth extension of farming in so many places of the world carried the contradiction that agricultural commodity prices fell. American meat had to compete with Canadian, Argentinian, Australian, New Zealand, and Danish products. Wheat from North America stood in competition with that from the Argentine pampas, the Ukrainian steppes, and India.

Disillusioned with their inability to challenge corporate America, farmers organized in a series of movements during the late nineteenth-century. The Grange in the 1870s, the Farmers' Alliance in the next decade, and the Populist party during the 1890s exerted unprecedented farm influence on political and economic structures. Agriculture's influence stood at its height, but the revelation contained in the 1890 census that the total value of manufactured goods exceeded that of agriculture for the first time suggested that new adjustments would be increasingly necessary during the twentieth century.