ENGLISH AGRICULTURE, 1500-1850: A CASE STUDY OF LONG RUN TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

This study investigates the economic forces that determine technology advancing activity in the long run. My concern for this springs from interest in economic growth, which depends upon productivity growth, which in turn depends largely upon creation and adoption of technology.; I have compiled data on publications in agricultural technology in Britain from 1523 to 1900 as a measure of knowledge advancing activity. These data come from catalogues of major collections and bibliographies of early agricultural literature. I also use data on agricultural patents issued in Britain.; I model the production of technological literature using a supply and demand format. Demand for titles of books on agricultural technique, essentially a demand for knowledge, is a derived demand based on the maximization of the stream of income yielded by application of acquired knowledge. Long run supply of titles of books is modeled using standard economic production theory.; The model leads to a reduced form equation that I estimate. The number of titles published is explained by the price of agricultural goods, wages, population, and total accumulated books published.; Results show that 1550-1650 and 1750-1850 were periods of accelerated technological advance. The importance of these results lies in the fact that the technology of agriculture did not grow at some constant rate but responded to economic factors. An important explanatory variable for the number of titles published is the English population.; Periods of rapid population growth in England were also periods of accelerated inventive activity in English agriculture. I argue that there is a technological response of an economy to changing demographic circumstances and therefore analysis of demographic and economic interaction must include technology as a central aspect.