Alternative Agriculture – A History from the Black Death to the Present Day

This study is rigorously researched, wide-ranging and largely aimed at the reader who is already pretty well versed in agricultural history. It is fluidly written in a style which is both congenial and lucid. * Karen Sayer, Southern History, Vol 19/20 1999. * there is a sense of fidelity which protects her work against the vagaries of academic fashion. Nowhere are these qualities clearer than in Alternative Agriculture. Firstly, there is the sheer scale and learning of the book ... it moves easily and with elegance from an England traumatized by the Black Death to an England learning to live with BSE ... this is not only a broad-sweep history but also a complex and minute examination of the processes of agricultural change ... Alternative Agriculture is a marvellous justification of the historian's craft - a book which is both a careful and engrossing account of our past and a text which speaks into current debates and arguments. I wish I had written it. * Alun Howkins, History Workshop Journal, vol 47, 1999 * bristles with such fascinating details which challenge notions about what is traditional and what is innovative in English agriculture ... Thirsk's stimulating and often entertaining account is partly a work of history and partly a manifesto on the future of agriculture. * Clare Griffiths, Wadham College, Oxford, EHR June 1999 *