Since the 1950s much attention has been paid to the effect of rapid population growth on the rural societies of the Third World. Yet it is often forgotten that Europe faced similar problems in the past. This book, first published in 1980, suggests some ways of looking at the interrelationships between population growth and agrarian change, and uses these approaches to consider the demographic and agrarian problems of various parts of Europe in the past - in the fourteenth century, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and in the early nineteenth century. These places are then compared with rural societies in the developing world at the present time.

This work is about the characteristics and distribution of the major agricultural systems of the world - shifting cultivation, wet rice cultivation, pastoral nomadism, Mediterranean agriculture, mixed farming, dairying, plantations, ranching and large-scale grain production. In part one some major periods and processes which have affected modern agriculture are discussed. Chapter 2 deals with the origins and early diffusion of agriculture and its significance for the present. Chapter 3 deals with the subsequent diffusion of crops and livestock, particularly since the discovery of the New World, and Chapter 4 with the effect upon agriculture of industrialization and urbanization since 1850. In part two of the book some description of each type of agriculture is given. But it is the author's belief that there can be no adequate account of the present character of world agriculture without recourse to the evolution of agricultural systems. Thus each chapter in Part two is an essay on the historical development of each of the major systems.