Rachel Laudan

Note. If you’ve been to this page before, I’ve now (pm 5 december) edited the figures. Many thanks Larry.   I’ve just been reading E.A. Wrigley‘s Energy and the English Industrial Revolution which I highly recommend if you are interested in the transformation wrought by fossil fuels. In passing, he gives these figures for the [...]

I’ve edited this piece, added a few things, and changed the title. Wikipedia has a short and clear article on agribusiness, contrasting two ways in which it is used. The first is neutral. Within the agriculture industry, agribusiness is widely used simply as a convenient portmanteau of agriculture and business, referring to the range of [...]

Jeremy Cherfas over at Agrobiodiversity mentioned that I thought there were traces of the agricultural techniques of Medieval Islam in Mexico (and presumably the rest of Latin America). I don’t think there is any doubt about this.  Quite a few scholars, both English- and Spanish-speaking have looked at this.  Here’s just a start. Irrigation and [...]