Abstract
The second half of the nineteenth century was marked by the concomitant and entangled processes of the rise of agricultural chemistry and that of the fertiliser trade. Yet, while the two were undoubtedly related, the work of agricultural chemists was not necessarily characterized by the uniform and unequivocal promotion of fertilisers. This article looks at some of the complex ways in which chemists participated in the development of the fertiliser trade by studying how their work was used to ascribe a commercial price to a chemical element. It analyses the contested development of the idea that nitrogen, in particular, could be given a price, and shows how the rise of this quotation lay at the intersection of scientific and commercial considerations. More broadly, it argues that the importance of the new artificial fertilisers primarily lay not so much in yield increases as in inaugurating a new regime marked by a more comprehensive quantitative assessment of inputs and outputs, thereby playing a key role in the industrialisation of agriculture.
About the authors
Arnaud Page is Assistant Professor in British History at Sorbonne Université. His work focuses on environmental history and in particular on the history of fertilisers in Great Britain and the British Empire. This is part of a project entitled “Rational feeding: a history of nitrogen, 1840-1914”, which studies how nitrogen played a key role in turning agricultural and food chemistry into quantitative sciences, and how this was used to rationalize the nutrition of plants, but also of cattle and of men.
Laurent Herment is Researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris (Centre de recherches historiques, UMR 8558). His recent works focuses on the emergence of the agro-industry during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, particularly on the use of fertilisers in nineteenth-century France and Belgium and on the recycling of urban waste in agriculture.
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