[PDF] Agricultural Research In Britain 1850 1914 Failure Success And Development eBook

Author : Edward John T. Collins
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 994 pages
File Size : 13,6 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Agriculture
ISBN : 9780521329262

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The unifying theme of this volume is the changing role of the countryside in national life, and the impact upon it of the social and economic forces unleashed by industrialisation and the growth of towns.

Author : Paul William Brassley
Publisher :
Page : pages
File Size : 46,10 MB
Release : 2001
Category :
ISBN :

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Four published papers and several parts of a book are presented herein, together with a previously unpublished short paper explaining the intellectual background against which they were written and summarising their findings on the development of agricultural teQmology in England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outlines the contribution of economic and sociological the pries to the study of technical change, but makes the point that historical studies, although clearly influenced by these theories, tend to use a multifactorial approach which avoids privileging any single explanation. Nevertheless, several themes arising in all of this material are identified, especially the gap between innovation and the adoption of technology, and the influence upon it of scientific, systemic, and socio-economic changes. Brassley (1995a) exaiftmes the criteria against which the success of agricultural science should be judged, and concludes that for most of the nineteenth century in Britain it was a failure. It identifies the establishment of the university departments of agriculture in the 1890s, and the Development Commission in 1910, as the main factors which reversed this trend, and, in an appendix, examines the impact of changing output prices upon the supply curve. In Brassley (1995b) the life of a single farmer, Primrose McConnell, is considered. In adoptiondiffusion theory terms, McConnell is a classic example of an innovator, and this paper reveals the various ways in which, as a writer and a practising farmer, he influenced the agricultural industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Brassley (1996) concentrates on a single example of technical change, in this case silage, and explains why its widespread adoption took about a hundred years. The principal conclusion is that silage, like many examples of agricultural technology, is not a single change but a complex system of interacting individual components, all of which need to be available or in place before widespread adoption can occur. The significance of this process is studied in Brassley (2000a), which examines the relationship between technical change and output in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and concludes that innovation was not necessarily as important as the adoption of pre-existing technology in accounting for output expansion. Brassley (2000b) is divided into three parts. The first introduces the concept of farming systems in late nineteenth century England and Wales and analyses the principal arable and pastoral systems of the period; the second examines individual aspects of farming technology, with the exception of farm buildings and machinery; and the third traces the development of agricultural science and education in England and Wales between 1850 and 1914. Clearly these three are inter-related, in that science and education had some impact on techniques, which, in turn, influenced farming systems, but one of the main themes to emerge from this study, as from the other papers in this collection, is the restricted rate of change and the gap between technical leaders and laggards.

Author : Roland Jackson
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 50,65 MB
Release : 2023-11-14
Category : Science
ISBN : 0822990059

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In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime minister. But at the end of the eighteenth century, when Roland Jackson’s account begins, things were very different. With this book, Jackson turns his attention to the men of science of the day—who derived their knowledge of the natural world from experience, observation, and experiment—focusing on the essential role they played in proffering scientific advice to the state, and the impact of that advice on public policy. At a time that witnessed huge scientific advances and vast industrial development, and as the British state sought to respond to societal, economic, and environmental challenges, practitioners of science, engineering, and medicine were drawn into close involvement with politicians. Jackson explores the contributions of these emerging experts, the motivations behind their involvement, the forces that shaped this new system of advice, and the legacy it left behind. His book provides the first detailed analysis of the provision of scientific, engineering, and medical advice to the nineteenth-century British government, parliament, the civil service, and the military.

Author : Anna Neima
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 323 pages
File Size : 34,62 MB
Release : 2022-04-28
Category : History
ISBN : 1009058789

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Dartington Hall was a social experiment of kaleidoscopic vitality, founded in Devon in 1925, where ambitious ideals were turned into a reality. Practical Utopia explores its compelling history, through the lives of its founders and participants, and opens a window onto British and international social reform between the wars.

Author : Anthony S. Travis
Publisher : Springer
Page : 169 pages
File Size : 30,64 MB
Release : 2015-07-03
Category : Science
ISBN : 3319193570

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This concise brief describes how the demands of World War I, often referred to as the Chemists’ War, led to the rapid emergence of a new key industry based on fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. Then, as now, nitrogen products, including nitric acid, and nitrates, were essential for both fertilizers and in the manufacture of modern explosives. During the first decade of the twentieth century, this stimulated research into and application of novel processes. This book illustrates how from late 1914 the relations and developments in the first modern military-industrial complex enabled the great capital expenditures and technological advances that accelerated massive expansion, particularly of the BASF Haber-Bosch high-pressure process, that determined the direction of the post-war chemical industry.

Author : Anthony S. Travis
Publisher : Springer
Page : 411 pages
File Size : 40,20 MB
Release : 2018-04-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 3319689630

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This monograph provides an account of how the synthetic nitrogen industry became the forerunner of the 20th-century chemical industry in Europe, the United States and Asia. Based on an earlier SpringerBrief by the same author, which focused on the period of World War I, it expands considerably on the international aspects of the development of the synthetic nitrogen industry in the decade and a half following the war, including the new technologies that rivalled the Haber-Bosch ammonia process. Travis describes the tremendous global impact of fixed nitrogen (as calcium cyanamide and ammonia), including the perceived strategic need for nitrogen (mainly for munitions), and, increasingly, its role in increasing crop yields, including in Italy under Mussolini, and in the Soviet Union under Stalin. The author also reviews the situation in Imperial Japan, including the earliest adoption of the Italian Casale ammonia process, from 1923, and the role of fixed nitrogen in the industrialization of colonial Korea from the late 1920s. Chemists, historians of science and technology, and those interested in world fertilizer production and the development of chemical industry during the first four decades of the twentieth century will find this book of considerable value.

Author : Charles Lawson
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 255 pages
File Size : 32,59 MB
Release : 2016-03-09
Category : Law
ISBN : 131711499X

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Taking a global viewpoint, this volume addresses issues arising from recent developments in the enduring and topical debates over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and their relationship to Intellectual Property (IP). The work examines changing responses to the growing acceptance and prevalence of GMOs. Drawing together perspectives from several of the leading international scholars in this area, the contributions seek to break away from analysis of safety and regulation and examine the diversity of ways the law and GMOs have become entangled. This collection presents the start of a much broader engagement with GMOs and law. As GMO technology becomes increasingly more complex and embedded in our lives, this volume will be a useful resource in leading further discussion and debate about GMOs in academia, in government and among those working on future policy.

Author : Abigail Woods
Publisher : Springer
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 31,54 MB
Release : 2017-12-29
Category : Science
ISBN : 3319643371

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This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book breaks new ground by situating animals and their diseases at the very heart of modern medicine. In demonstrating their historical significance as subjects and shapers of medicine, it offers important insights into past animal lives, and reveals that what we think of as ‘human’ medicine was in fact deeply zoological. Each chapter analyses an important episode in which animals changed and were changed by medicine. Ranging across the animal inhabitants of Britain’s zoos, sick sheep on Scottish farms, unproductive livestock in developing countries, and the tapeworms of California and Beirut, they illuminate the multi-species dimensions of modern medicine and its rich historical connections with biology, zoology, agriculture and veterinary medicine. The modern movement for One Health – whose history is also analyzed – is therefore revealed as just the latest attempt to improve health by working across species and disciplines. This book will appeal to historians of animals, science and medicine, to those involved in the promotion and practice of One Health today.