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Farming and the Environment in Interwar Britain
| The period from the 1870s to the outbreak of the Second World war is often characterised by historical ecologists as a ‘golden age’ for wildlife in Britain: with agriculture in depression, and farmland exploited less intensively, the ‘natural world’ flourished. This paper argues that such an interpretation is too simple, and based on a failure to appreciate the complex character of the social and economic processes which mediated the fate of the country’s varied environments, in this as in other periods. The decline of large landed estates, expansion in systematic game shooting, changes in farming systems, the collapse of traditional management on heaths, moors and other marginal land, and a range of other developments all had major impacts on the character of flora and fauna. Past environments needs to be understood in historical context: much historical ecology is simply insufficiently historical.
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