The agricultural revolution
Enclosure, rotation and selective breeding raise yields and push people off the land.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 200 years
- Known to
- ± 50 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries English agriculture adopts four-course rotation with turnips and clover that eliminates fallow, improved drainage, and systematic livestock breeding. Output per worker rises substantially. Enclosure of common land, accelerating by parliamentary act, consolidates holdings and dispossesses smallholders and commoners — creating both the food surplus and the landless workforce that industrialisation would require.