Mid-Victorian Investment in Land

Abstract

OF the three main agricultural classes, landowners, farmers (all except 12 per cent of farm occupiers were tenants by the end of the period), and labourers, it is surprising that we know least about the economic condition of the middle group. Firsthand studies of income movements have been made as they affected landowners (partly as a tribute to their political influence) and farm workers (partly as a tribute to our political conscience), but almost none for the farming community, despite its central economic function in the countryside. Something may of course be deduced of the swings of fortune for farmers from general accounts of agricultural prosperity and distress, but only indirectly. What is reasonably plain is that although some sections of the farmer class managed to make satisfactory profits during downswings like that after the Napoleonic wars, others barely kept their heads above water. The commonsense view prevails that total net farm income was higher and more widely diffused when product prices were rising. This was very significant for the economy as a whole. Professor J. R. T. Hughes has stressed, for example, just how much the rise in farm incomes contributed to industrial expansion in the ‘fifties, through a welling-up of purchases of machinery and other producer goods.¹