Arthur Young

Arthur Young (London, 1741 – 1820) was an English agriculturist and writer, one of the most influential authors on farming of his time and an early contributor to agricultural economics. He was not a successful farmer himself, but he built a considerable reputation as an expert on agricultural improvement through a wide network of contacts and a busy career as a publicist. He is also remembered for his firsthand accounts of the French Revolution, which gave weight to his views as an opponent of British reformers.

After a youth marked by lung disease and the management of the family estate at Bradfield Hall, he took up farming in Essex and Hertfordshire. There he tried out methods that he later described in A Course of Experimental Agriculture. Most of the experiments failed, but they gave him practical knowledge that fed his writing. From 1784 he edited the Annals of Agriculture, which ran to 45 volumes, and in 1793 he was appointed secretary of the Board of Agriculture. His tours of England, Wales and Ireland produced widely read and translated books, while his visits to France between 1787 and 1789 gave him a close view of the country on the eve of the Revolution.

After the Revolution broke out, Young moved from a reformist outlook to a defence of order against violence, and he published Travels in France alongside pamphlets warning Britain against the French example. His figures for the cultivated area of the country proved to be overestimates, as Henry Beeke later showed. His legacy is divided between that of a pioneer of agricultural statistics and that of a political witness whose opinions are now read with caution.