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Railways and Agrarian Change in Rural Britain and France, 1850-1914
| The arrival of rapid, rail transport in the countryside offered new opportunities for the marketing of local agricultural products and, eventually, intensified competition at regional, national, and international scales. This paper uses GIS and spatial analysis to examine the ways in which this process led to a restructuring of agriculture and population change over time and geography in rural Britain and France. In adjusting to changes in transport, market demand, and competition, farmers pursued a number of alternatives, including a shift from cereal growing to stock-raising and dairy farming, from mixed agriculture to labor intensive market gardening, and, significantly, a return to small farming. The consequent “rural exodus” was a great concern to contemporaries even though the extent of depopulation was often exaggerated. The use of historical GIS brings the temporal geography of these interconnected changes in rail transport, agrarian restructuring, and rural population movements into sharper focus.
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