From Thrift to Improvement

Abstract

This article studies how agrarian management was reimagined in the context of emerging agrarian capitalism between the sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries in England by examining the development of discourses of thrift, industriousness, and improvement among agricultural writers. It demonstrates that agricultural writers' approach to farm, land, and labor management moved from a localized context of thrifty householding in the sixteenth century to a national context of industriousness and improvement by the mid-seventeenth century. This change in discourse, as this article will show, was an attempt to provide management advice and establish managerial power over the agricultural labor process within an increasingly connected, competitive, and impersonal agrarian economy.