A repost from Unenumerated, July 2014:
Progress
in the Malthusian isocline in England from the 13th through 19th
centuries, as, among many other factors, horses slowly replaced oxen for
farm work and transport, the ratio of draft animals to people
increased, and more arable land was devoted to fodder relative to
food.(click to enlarge)
I have previously discussed Great Britain's unprecedented escape from the Malthusian trap.
Such escapes require virtuous cycles, i.e. positive feedback loops
that allow productive capital to accumulate faster than it is destroyed.
There are a number of these in Britain in the era of escape from the
Black Plague to the 19th century, but two of the biggest involved
transportation.
One of these that I've identified was the
fodder/horse/coal/lime cycle. More and better fodder led to more and
stronger horses, which hauled (among other things) coal from the mines,
initially little more than quarries, that had started opening up in
northeastern England by the 13th century. Coal, like wood, was very
costly to transport by land, but relatively cheap to ship by sea or
navigable river. As fodder improved, horses came to replace oxen in the
expensive step transporting goods, including coal, from mine, farm, or
workshop to port and from port to site of consumption. Many other
regions (e.g. in Belgium and China) had readily accessible coal, but
none developed this virtuous cycle so extensively and early.
Among
the early uses of coal was for heating, fuel for certain industrial
processes that required heat (e.g. in brewing beer), and, most
interestingly, for burning lime. Burned lime, slaked with water, could
unlike the limestone it came from be easily ground into a fine powder.
This great increase in the surface area of this chemical base, which
let it de-acidify the soils on which it was applied. The soils of
Britain tend to be rather acidic, which allows poisonous minerals, such
as aluminum, to absorb into plants and blocks the absorption of needed
nutrients (especially NPK -- nitrogen,
phosphorous, and potassium). The application of lime thus increased
the productivity of fields for growing both food and fodder, completing
the virtuous cycle. This cycle operated most strongly during the
period of the consistent progress in the English Malthusian isocline
from the 15th through 19th centuries.
Another, related, but even more important cycle was the horse/transport and institutions/markets/specialization cycle....MUCH MORE
