Great depression of British agriculture

[2][3] Other countries in Western Europe such as the Netherlands experienced the same agricultural crisis (1878–1895) as a result of the market being flooded by cheap grain from the United States and Canada.

[4] In 1846 Parliament repealed the Corn Laws, which had imposed a tariff on imported grain, and thereby de facto instituted free trade.

[7] That period of prosperity was caused by rising prices from the discovery of gold in Australia and California, which encouraged industrial demand.

[11][12] In the opinion of the historian Robert Ensor, the technology employed in British agriculture was superior to most farming on the Continent because of more than a century of practical research and experimentation: "Its breeds were the best, its cropping the most scientific, its yields the highest".

[14] In his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England, Friedrich Engels noted the United Kingdom's aim of being an industrial land supplying manufactures to an agricultural Europe.

Due to the scarcity of hired farm labourers, prairie farmers had to collect their own harvest and the limit of their expansion was set by what one pair of hands could do.

The advent of the reaper-binder in 1873 revolutionised harvesting because it meant the doubling of every farmer's crop as it enabled the reaping to be worked by one man instead of two.

[20][21][22] The Duke of Bedford wrote in 1897 that "Agriculturalists and the nation at large were alike insensible to the real character of the depression...Cheap marine transport had already thrown open the English market to the cereals of four continents...It is easy to be wise after the event, but it is strange that a catastrophe which was no longer merely impending but had actually taken place should have been regarded by those best able to judge as a passing cloud".

[33] According to Sir James Caird in his evidence to the Royal Commission on the Depression in Trade and Industry in 1886, the annual income of landlords, tenants and labourers had fallen by £42,800,000 since 1876.

[42] During the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, the British landed aristocracy were the wealthiest class in the world's richest country.

[43] In 1882 Charles George Milnes Gaskell wrote that "the vast increase in the carrying power of ships, the facilities of intercourse with foreign countries, [and] the further cheapening of cereals and meat" meant that economically and politically the old landed class were no longer lords of the earth.

[45] The Prime Minister at the outset of the depression, Benjamin Disraeli, had once been a staunch upholder of the Corn Laws and had predicted ruin for agriculture if they were repealed.

[51] Robert Blake claimed that Disraeli was dissuaded from reviving protection because the urban working class was enjoying cheap imported food at a time of industrial depression and rising unemployment.

[53][54] Its final report of 1882 recommended changing the burden of local taxation from real property to the Consolidated Fund and the setting up of a government department for agriculture.