A History of 18c Agricultural Societies
Hudson, Kenneth. Patriotism with Profit: British Agricultural Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. London: Hugh Evelyn Limited, 1972.
I only read about half of this book since it made its way to the nineteenth century very quickly, but I found it enormously helpful in understanding how agricultural societies figured into advancements made in 18c agriculture. Hudson has this theory that many British social problems get dealt with according to the following pattern: 1. A private individual puts forth some amount of time and/or funds to put people along the road to a solution. 2. A group of like-minded individuals form a private organization in order to pool and organize resources. 3. Eventually the private organization becomes too big and difficult to manage and the government/crown steps in and makes the institution public. Such was the case with many of these agricultural societies, most of which were started more or less by one person and many of which ended up with a royal charter. While Hudson’s narrative is–purposely, I imagine–rough, it does provide some insight into how clubs and societies entrenched themselves in British society.
The first society that Hudson examines in detail is the Dublin society, which was founded in 1731 and whose early development was very much influenced by a man named Thomas Prior, who was a close friend of Bishop Berkeley the philosopher. This is particularly interesting in that the Dublin Society’s work was published in a volume called Weekly Observations that is available through ECCO. While most of these agricultural societies included benevolence as the key part of their mission statement (i.e. helping farmers to create more efficient and profitable farms), the Dublin Society operated under a particularly dire set of conditions since the Irish government was bankrupt and their people, as Swift noted repeatedly, were not well-fed. There is another ECCO-able book referenced called Experiments in Agriculture: Made Under the Directions of the Right Honourable and Honourable Dublin Society in the Year 1765…
Hudson also explains the history of the Royal Society of Arts, an organization that one might expect to overlap somewhat with the Royal Academy. Hudson argues that sometime in the middle of the 18th century the Royal Society became, de facto, an academic body while the Royal Society of Arts was more concerned with the practical application of the new science. This information could prove useful in justifying why to talk or not talk about one or the other in a particular context.
As Hudson book exits the period with which I am concerned, he pays a considerable amount of attention to the Bath and West Society, which was founded in 1777, and the Scottish Highland Society, which was founded in 1784. Both fit nicely with Hudson’s interests, which are practically-minded societies whose leaders are no-nonsense scientist types. However, those are exactly the aspects of these institutions that I am not interested in, so it’s off to check his references…
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