The paper argues that accounting and other evidence supports Marx’s theory that capitalist farmers
drove an English ‘agricultural revolution’ that began in the sixteenth century but took hold from the late
seventeenth century. Historians often say England had an agricultural revolution, but disagree over
what it was, when it occurred, what caused it, and its consequences. Modern historians usually define it
tautologically as ‘revolutionary’ increases in outputand productivity. Early historians argued that a
new ‘commercial’ or ‘capitalist’ mentality drove the revolution, and some modern historians stress the
need for farmers to become ‘businessmen’, but no-one precisely defines this mentality. The paper
defines the capitalist mentality rigorously using Marxand accounting and outlines a testable history of
the genesis of capitalist farmers, who should appear wherever farmers using wage labour participated in
socialised capital. It argues that the historical evidence supports the prediction from Marx’s theory that
the geographical distribution of ship ownership in England should correlate with agricultural
improvement. The paper argues that the published evidence on farmers’ accounts from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuriesdirectly supports Marx’s theory. It concludes that accounting historians can
make a critical contribution to a major debate by testing the theory against the large archive of farmers’
accounts that survives.