Agriocliometrics and Agricultural Change in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Before the industrial revolution, agriculture was the most important economic activity of traditional societies. The spread of industrialisation processes, first throughout a large part of the western world and later across many more countries, gave rise to an abundance of literature on the role of agriculture in these processes. The initial perspectives offered by economic history, particularly for the British case, and the approaches of development economics specialists, largely based on previous studies by economic historians, became subject to reconsideration when numerous studies emerged that, from a cliometric point of view, sought to evaluate the changes experienced by agriculture and their contribution to economic growth. In this context, the objective of this study is to use these contributions to analyse the profound transformations that have occurred in agriculture around the world over the last two centuries.