Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day.

By Joan Thirsk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. x plus 365pp. $47.50).

This ambitious book is the masterwork of a distinguished English agrarian historian, written from (and influenced by) her retirement in the agriculturally diverse southeastern county of Kent. It offers a new and stimulating way of looking at more than six centuries not only of English agricultures and rural societies, but also of food consumption and associated cultures. It emphasizes what has been grown and how it has been brought to market and used, rather than the systems and technologies which have been deployed in the growing, although where appropriate it talks about rotations, fertilisers and machinery. It gives sympathetic attention to variety, diversity, local specialities, flexibility and the virtues of the small farm alongside the large; and it offers an alternative periodization of the history of English agriculture which divides it into periods of uniformity when grain and cattle are profitable and rule the roost, making alternatives seem unimportant and irrational, and periods of diversity when problems of demand or labour supply undermine the hegemony of corn and horn and offer opportunities for the enterprising or the idealist to pursue alternative crops, methods and social systems and to supply new products to the open-minded consumer. This, for Thirsk, is what constitutes alternative agriculture, and she sees it as flourishing during the century after the Black Death, the century after 1650, the so-called late Victorian agricultural depression, and at the end of the twentieth century. This is where her agrarian social history links up, overtly, with public history, and she issues what amounts to a manifesto for smallness, flexibility and diversity against the depressing and distorting monocultures fostered by agribusiness in alliance with governments and the European Community. She is, clearly though not aggressively or extravagantly, on the side of changes welling up from below and working with the grain of half-identified wider logic, and against the straitjackets of vested interests that include those agrarian historians who celebrate the mainstream agriculture which maximises the productivity of a narrow range of products. The book comes close to providing a manifesto for practical anarchism, or a manual for the working out of chaos theory through the articulation of underlying patterns beneath an infinitely complex array of surface phenomena. All this is achieved in accessible prose, without an intrusive overlay of formal theorising, and with an enticing array of detail and anecdote. This is, in short, a wonderful book.

Thirsk's compelling overview is founded on deconstruction and the celebration of the local. She points out that most of the innovations she highlights were hidden from statistical overviews and mainstream commentaries because, as one might expect, they were developed in obscure corners of the country, on marginal land, and were not thought important enough to be included in whatever official statistics were being compiled. Many were identified with women, located on the fringes of the national market economy, and regarded as trivial and not worthy of the official record. Many more were the preserve of small proprietors whose market gardens occupied less than an acre and were therefore, individually and collectively, ignored by government returns which defined them out of existence. Thirsk recovers for us an agriculture which has been largely hidden from history and from which we can, and must, learn. She insists on the need to encourage rather than suppress diversity and what looks like eccentricity, and the importance of leaving options open rather than closing them off. She commands attention and conviction.

This is not to suggest that this impressive overview is perfect. It would be astonishing if such an open, wide-ranging text were immune to criticism. My own angle of vision finds vulnerabilities most in evidence in Thirsk's treatment of aspects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which have not been central to a career whose focus has been on the early modern period, and in her concentration on southern and midland England at the expense of the very different, and still underdocumented, experiences of the northern uplands. These reservations come to a head when we consider the neglected but important patterns of small farming in symbiosis with industry which developed in the Pennine hills, and which Winstanley's article in Past and Present (1996) explored in time to appear in Thirsk's bibliography but not to be incorporated into her analysis. Relatedly, she makes assumptions about the lack of fruit and vegetables in Victorian working-class diets in northern England which are open to challenge on the basis of Roger Scola's work on Manchester's food supply, which is not cited, and Debbie Hodson's current research (now emerging in print in Manchester Region History Review and Business History) on the vitality of fruit and vegetable markets in northern England. But this kind of criticism by calling up venial sins of omission merely reinforces Thirsk's call, which echoes Pat Hudson's regional deconstruction of the Industrial Revolution, for due attention to be given to regional and local specialism and diversity.

This book not only recovers past dimensions to agricultural history (with knock-on effects for our understanding of other aspects of economy and society) such as the importance of crops like woad, hemp and oilseed rape in seventeenth-century England: it also makes us look at partial successes and enterprising failures (such as the attempts to turn madder into a successful cash crop in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and provokes counterfactual questions (such as my current favourite, the problem of why England failed to emulate France and especially Spain by returning to late medieval initiatives for the making of ewes'-milk cheese). It offers new angles not only on economic and social but on political and military history: the Civil War, for example, emerges as a forcing-house for agricultural innovation to feed the ravenous armies. It illuminates aspects of society which go far beyond its ostensible remit. It is the crowning triumph of an academic career. It deserves the widest possible readership.

John K. Walton

University of Central Lancashire