Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-8zxtt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T12:24:46.357Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Rail Transport, Agrarian Crisis, and the Restructuring of Agriculture

France and Great Britain Confront Globalization, 1860–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Robert M. Schwartz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

During the late nineteenth century the transport revolution and growing agricultural output, especially in North America, engendered an agrarian crisis (1878–96) when intensifying international competition in foodstuffs led to dramatic price declines, particularly in wheat and other cereals. This comparative study of the process in Britain and France examines regional and local patterns of rural change in relation to the expansion of railways, the agrarian crisis, and the responses to the crisis by the governments and farmers of the two countries. Using spatial statistics and geographically weighted regression (GWR) to identify spatially varying relationships, it offers a new approach and results. Case studies of Dorset County in England and the Allier Department in France show that railways facilitated the shift from cereal production to livestock and dairy farming during the era of agrarian crisis. In Dorset the analysis using GWR provides an explanation for patterns of the agricultural depression that a pioneering article identified but could not explain and thus illustrates the promise of blending narrative and spatial history. Further, it argues that in France railway expansion and the construction of a secondary network reduced regional disparities in rail service and likely in agricultural productivity, too. More broadly, it concludes that the differing political economies of Britain and France led to different trade and railway policies during the crisis and to different agrarian outcomes in which agricultural productivity declined in Britain and improved in France.

Type
Special Section: Railways and Political Economy in Britain, France, and the United States, 1840–1950
Information
Social Science History , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Summer 2010 , pp. 229 - 255
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2010 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahvenainen, J. (1986) “Telegraphs, trade, and policy: The role of international telegraphs in the years 1870–1914,” in Fischer, W. M., Fischer, R. M., and Schneider, J. (eds.) The Emergence of a World Economy, 1500–1914. Part 2, 1850–1914. Wiesbaden: Steiner: 505–18.Google Scholar
Baker, A. R. H. (1999) Fraternity among the French Peasantry: Sociability and Voluntary Associations in the Loire Valley, 1815–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beck, R. (1987) “Les effets d’une plan Freycinet sur une société rurale.” Francia 5: 561–77.Google Scholar
British Parliamentary Papers (1887) “Return by railway companies in the United Kingdom of rates charged for carriage of grain, vegetables, meat, rails, and other goods. Return to an order of the Honourable House of Commons, dated 9 April 1886. T2—Document Type: House of Commons Papers; Accounts and Papers T2—Collection Name: 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers Y1—1887.” (11) T3—House of Commons Parliamentary Papers N1.Google Scholar
British Parliamentary Papers (1909) “Board of Trade, British and Foreign Trade and Industry (Memoranda). Statistical Tables and Charts (1854 to 1908).” Command Papers: Accounts and Papers. CII.693, p. 206.Google Scholar
Caron, F. (1997) Histoire des chemins de fer en France, 1740–1883. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Caron, F. (2005) Histoire des chemins de fer en France, 1883–1937. Paris: Fayard.Google Scholar
Casson, M. (2009) The World’s First Railway System. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Caunce, S. A. (2006) “Mechanization and society in English agriculture: The experience of the North-East, 1850–1914.” Rural History 17: 23–45.Google Scholar
Cherry, G. E., and Sheail, J. (2000) “The urban impact on the countryside: The Uplands,” in Collins, E. J. T. (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Vol. 7, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1695–1715.Google Scholar
Clout, H. D. (1980) Agriculture in France on the Eve of the Railway Age. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Clout, H. D. (1983) The Land of France, 1815–1914. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Cobb, M. H. (2003) The Railways of Great Britain: A Historical Atlas. 2 vols. Shepperton: Allan.Google Scholar
Coclanis, P. A. (2003) “Back to the future: The globalization of agriculture in historical context.” SAIS Review 23: 71–84.Google Scholar
Collins, E. J. T. (2000) “The Great Depression, 1875–1896,” in Collins, E. J. T. (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Vol. 7, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 138–207.Google Scholar
Dobbin, F. (1994) Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dunlavy, C. A. (1994) Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ejrnaes, M. P., and Persson, K. G. (2000) “Market integration and transport costs in France, 1825–1903: A threshold error correction approach to the law of one price.” Explorations in Economic History 37: 149–73.Google Scholar
Federico, G. (2005) Feeding the World: An Economic History of World Agriculture, 1800–2000. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Fotheringham, A. S., Brunsdon, C., and Charlton, M. (2002) Geographically Weighted Regression: The Analysis of Spatially Varying Relationships. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Gonjo, Y. (1972) “Le ‘plan Freycinet,’ 1878–1882: Un aspect de la ‘grande dépression’ économique en France.” Revue historique, no. 248: 49–86.Google Scholar
Grantham, G. W. (1975) “Scale and organization in French farming, 1840–1880,” in Parker, W. N. and Jones, E. L. (eds.) European Peasants and Their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press: 293–326.Google Scholar
Jacks, D. S. (2006) “What drove 19th-century commodity market integration?” Explorations in Economic History 43: 383–412.Google Scholar
Jefferies, R. (1889) Field and Hedgerow: Being the Last Essays of Richard Jefferies. London: Longmans, Green.Google Scholar
Kaukianinen, Y. (2001) “Shrinking the world: Improvements in the speed of information transmission, c. 1820–1870.” European Review of Economic History 5: 1–28.Google Scholar
Koning, N. (1994) The Failure of Agrarian Capitalism: Agrarian Politics in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and the USA, 1846–1919. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lhomme, J. (1970) “La crise agricole à la fin du xixe siècle en France: Essai d’interprétation économique et sociale.” Revue économique 21: 521–53.Google Scholar
London Daily News (1886) April 23.Google Scholar
Meadwell, H. (2002) “The political economy of tariffs in late nineteenth-century Europe: Reconsidering republican France.” Theory and Society 31: 623–51.Google Scholar
Mitchell, A. (2000) The Great Train Race Railways and the Franco-German Rivalry, 1815–1914. New York: Berghahn.Google Scholar
Mutch, A. (1981) “The mechanization of the harvest in south-west Lancashire, 1870–1914.” Agricultural History Review 29: 125–32.Google Scholar
O’Rourke, K. H. W. (1997) “The European grain invasion, 1870–1913.” Journal of Economic History 57: 775–801.Google Scholar
O’Rourke, K. H. W., and Williamson, J. G. (1999) Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
O’Rourke, K. H. W. (2002) “When did globalization begin?” European Review of Economic History 6: 23–50.Google Scholar
O’Rourke, K. H. W. (2004) “Once more: When did globalization begin?” European Review of Economic History 8: 109–17.Google Scholar
Perren, R. (1995) Agriculture in Depression, 1870–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Perren, R. (2000) “Marketing of agricultural products,” in Collins, E. J. T. (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales. Vol. 7, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 953–98.Google Scholar
Perry, P. J., and Johnston, J. (1972) “The temporal and spatial incidence of agricultural depression in Dorset, 1868–1902.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3: 297–311.Google Scholar
Persson, K. G. (2004) “Mind the gap! Transport costs and price convergence in the nineteenth-century Atlantic economy.” European Review of Economic History 8: 125–47.Google Scholar
Planhol, X. de, and Claval, P. (1994) An Historical Geography of France. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Price, R. (1983) The Modernization of Rural France Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: St. Martin’s.Google Scholar
Russell, S. J. (2004) Agriculture, Prosperity, and the Modernization of French Rural Communities, 1870–1914: Views from the Village. Lewiston, NY: Mellen.Google Scholar
Simmons, J. (1978) The Railway in England and Wales, 1830–1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press.Google Scholar
Simmons, J. (1986) The Railway in Town and Country, 1830–1914. London: David and Charles.Google Scholar
Toutain, J.-C. (1994) “La croissance inégales des régions françaises: L’agriculture de 1810–1990.” Revue historique, no. 590: 315–59.Google Scholar
Tracy, M. (1989) Government and Agriculture in Western Europe, 1880–1988. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.Google Scholar
Wolkkowitsch, M. (1992) “Le chemin de fer et le monde agricole en France, 1880–1910.” Revue d’histoire des chemins de fer 3: 27–40.Google Scholar