The Development Of Family Farm In England From The Sixteenth To The Nineteenth

The family farm with a combination of land ownership and management rights has become the main organizational form of British agricultural economy which has the historical root.Therefore,this paper aims to trace the historical origins of British family farms and explore its development process.Analyzing the development of family farm based on the change of the land ownership in the England from the 16th to the 19th century briefly.The paper consists of four parts:The first chapter mainly shows the common occurrence of family farms.In the late Middle Ages,the peasantry began to divide due to the economic development and change.Around the 16th century,a wealthy peasant class formed.After the establishment of the Tudor dynasty,the rise of the enclosure movement and the development of the land market caused by the sale of the ecclesiastical property made the differentiation of peasants more obvious.Some wealthy peasants owned their own land in this process and became the family farmers.The second chapter mainly discusses the development of family farms from the 17th century to the mid-18th century.After the bourgeois revolution,the number of family farmers further increased.Driven by profits,family farmers actively improved their agricultural technologies and promoted Britain's agricultural revolution around the 18th century,which brought them closer to the markets and accumulated more wealth.The third chapter mainly analyzes that the family farm suffered a setback since the middle of the 18th century,but for the change of the economic form,which got development opportunities and gained flourish.Some of the family farmers accumulated a great deal of wealth by participating in the markets actively and became a number of parliament or be advanced into nobility.In order to maintain their superior status,they actively promoted the parliamentary enclosure and enacted corn laws to protect their interests.As a result,the tenant farms in England possessed absolute advantages,family farms had greatly was weakened.However,after the abolition of the corn laws,free trade was opened and high-cost agricultural production in England was under the brunt of the import of cheap corn,tenant farms began to decline.Family farms,due to their unique advantages,ushered new opportunities for development and flourished in the continual popularization and reformation of agricultural machinery.The conclusion summarizes the full text,and advocate that agricultural operations mixed the ownership and management of family farms is an indispensable factor for the healthy development of agricultural economy.This is why it has become the dominant form of agricultural production in the developed countries in Europe and the United States at present,and the merits of family farm deserve our reference in the agricultural economic reform.