This month’s crop is – unlike the 2026 harvest, perhaps – a bumper one.

We have for you a range of books on agricultural and rural conditions in the years before the First World War which complement the works by Rider Haggard and Hall we posted some time since. We have Jesse Collings’ The colonization of Rural Britain (2 vols, 1914); Sir W. E. Cooper, The murder of agriculture (1908), Bevil Tollemache, The occupying ownership of land (1913) and the Lincolnshire landowner Christopher Turnor, Land Problems and National Wealth (1914). And then Edwin A Pratt, Transition in Agriculture (1906), perhaps the most sober of them all. To a greater or lesser extent, all of these works are charged as their titles show (and their sub-titles more so).  They all share the belief that there was something wrong with agriculture which needed to be addressed. All contain a mass of information about domestic conditions: some look abroad for prescriptions (much here on Denmark). To differing degrees they advocate co-operation and smallholding for solutions.

For later periods we have the Horace Plunkett Foundation’s survey of co-operatives in Scotland and Wales (1932: the parallel English volume will follow) and one of the most comprehensive accounts of a rural area, with prescriptions for the future: the survey of north Oxfordshire by the Agricultural Economics Research Institute at Oxford under the direction of C. S. Orwin (1944).

We have added five years of the Agricultural Returns (1867-71) and again more will follow.

General View of the month is Worgan on Cornwall.

Scanning goes faster when the nights are long and dark so expect more soon.

New on LIBRAL in October 2026

New on LIBRAL in July 2026