Managerial failure in late Victorian Britain?: Land use and English agriculture

This article focuses upon the neglected role of agriculture in Britain’s relative economic decline. Landlords and farmers stand accused of responding inadequately to the flood of American cereal imports. Land-use changes are analysed by soil type and access to urban markets, revealing a range of opportunities and restraints, and an appropriate variety of responses. Other aspects of agriculturalists’ responses to depression remain to be examined, but this exercise finds no evidence of significant managerial shortcomings. Rather, the interim verdict is similar to that on the performance of those British industrialists whose once-savaged reputations have been partly redeemed by the researches of McCloskey, Sandberg, et al.