Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 5 - Dividing Head and Hand

  • James D. Fisher, University of Exeter
  • Book:
    The Enclosure of Knowledge
    Published online:
    07 July 2022
    Print publication:
    21 July 2022, pp 170-204

  • Summary

    Chapter 5 shifts focus to consider the social effects of the appropriation and codification of the art of husbandry by examining the impact of books on new divisions of labour. It argues that agricultural books facilitated the increasing separation between intellectual and manual labour; a task division between those who exercised knowledge on a specific farm or estate and those who followed instructions, and a social division between those who produced knowledge and those who applied it in practice. The former was manifested in the figure of the gentleman farmer who managed with a pen, and the latter was manifested in the ‘agriculturist’, whose contribution to farming was primarily theoretical. Both were expressions of a new book-based agricultural expertise distinct from local custom and experience. The cumulative effect of print was to shape a new social system of agricultural knowledge in which cultivation was directed by men with such expertise, which we can call agriculturism.