On industry and 18th century Britain.........

"The English, before anyone else, believed industry was the answer to all problems.  Agro-industry, which abandoned the goal of producing the best food and strived to produce the most per acre, was an English invention.  Wheat crops increased enormously.  New feed, such as turnips, kept livestock eating all year.  Starting with Jethro Tull's seed planting drill of 1701, which planted three rows at once, a new agricultural invention, a new crossbred plant, a new strain of livestock, or a new tool was invented almost every year in eighteenth-century Britain.  This was the beginning of modern agriculture, a system that would produce enormous surpluses of food in industrialized nations and still fail to end hunger in the world."

-Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History