IN the following pages an attempt is made to examine the relations between France and England in the second half of the eighteenth century in the sphere of agricultural literature. I have endeavoured in this way to broaden and investigate a field opened up by Wolters in a section of his Agrarzustande und Agrarprobleme in Frankreich von 1700 bis 1790. I venture to hope that the material now available will justify the emphasis thus placed on this aspect of the period. Although the work of the French Agronomes has not been altogether ignored by modern historians, it has not so far been considered as a subject worthy of an independent study. I have done no more than draw attention to it by pursuing the general trend of historical enquiry initiated by the work of such eminent scholars as George Weulersse and Marc Bloch.

There is an important distinction to be made between two parallel movements in eighteenth-century France—that of the Economistes and that of the Agronomes. In fact there was a school of theoretical or, as it was then called, speculative, agriculture with an independent life of its own, a school the existence of which can be traced in the extensive economic literature of the time. It is with this speculative movement, isolated from pure political economy, that this work is considered. It should therefore be considered as a study not of economics, but rather, of the history of agricultural technique. Its scope has, indeed, been limited to the study of a particular influence, the strongest one, on this movement; namely, that of English techniques. It might appear at first sight that, had the Agronomes ignored what was going on in England, they would still sooner or later have arrived at the same conclusions. This however, was not the case and their appreciation of the English agricultural revolution certainly spurred them to action and caused them to introduce remarkable innovations in practices which, it is now generally agreed, had been both backward and static. The fillip given by the study of English agricultural technique to French research in that field may be compared, with all due deference to literature, to the impetus which English writings gave to French pre-romanticism.