Chapter 7 re-examines the ‘book-farming’ controversy of the late eighteenth century. It first highlights the precarious power of book-knowledge, which offered mastery to an educated landowning class, but was a poor substitute for experience. The analysis distinguishes between a weak and a strong critique of agricultural books. The weak critique expressed by authors themselves condemned an overly theoretical approach or the overly speculative ideas in books. The strong critique was expressed in the reported hostility of working farmers, which was fundamentally suspicious of the value of learning about farming from books and challenged the proclaimed authority of writers. It argues that the strong opposition to book-farming can only be understood by considering the balance of power within agricultural labour relations. Hostility to book-farming was a form of ‘everyday resistance’ to the subordination of customary knowledge and the use of books as tools of management in the running of estates and large farms.

Chapter 2 establishes the context usually neglected by histories of agricultural literature: how farming was learned without books in the prevailing system of knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines the discourse on the ‘mystery of husbandry’ (and closely associated discourse of ‘secrets’), a term denoting the knowledge and skills acquired by experienced practitioners that were inaccessible to amateurs, to both elucidate contemporary beliefs about learning through labour and to indicate the ways in which the publication of husbandry manuals disrupted existing notions of expertise. In doing so, it explores the parallels between craft and farming knowledge and borrows ideas from modern studies to argue that early modern husbandmen and housewives would have possessed a ‘peasant epistemology’ analogous to an ‘artisanal epistemology’. The chapter argues that when linked to broader socio-economic changes in farming, the emergence of the term ‘mystery of husbandry’ in the seventeenth century can be seen as a symptom of tectonic shifts in the social system of agricultural knowledge. In short, the knowledge of husbandry was being commodified in an increasingly competitive commercial environment.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to consider the social effects of the appropriation and codification of the art of husbandry by examining the impact of books on new divisions of labour. It argues that agricultural books facilitated the increasing separation between intellectual and manual labour; a task division between those who exercised knowledge on a specific farm or estate and those who followed instructions, and a social division between those who produced knowledge and those who applied it in practice. The former was manifested in the figure of the gentleman farmer who managed with a pen, and the latter was manifested in the ‘agriculturist’, whose contribution to farming was primarily theoretical. Both were expressions of a new book-based agricultural expertise distinct from local custom and experience. The cumulative effect of print was to shape a new social system of agricultural knowledge in which cultivation was directed by men with such expertise, which we can call agriculturism.

Chapter 6 deals with the activities of German bankers in China during the First World War and the eventual liquidation of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank after 1917 due to China’s entry into the war. The chapter starts with a discussion of the development of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank’s business and the internationalization of the Chinese banking sector in the years before 1914. It then turns to the negative impact the outbreak of war had on commerce and transnational connections in China. Thereafter, it discusses how the German bank tried to use loans to the Chinese government to keep China out of the war between 1914 and 1917. After these attempts failed and China entered the war on the side of the Allies, the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank was liquidated. This liquidation had severe consequences not only for the German bank but also for German business in China more generally.

Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of the early interest of German bankers in the Chinese market, including the failed attempt of the Deutsche Bank to establish branches in East Asia in the 1870s. The chapter then explores the early development of foreign banking in modern China from the middle of the nineteenth century and the growing interest of Chinese reformers and officials in using foreign capital and cooperating with foreign banks. We then return to the German bankers and investigate the activities of a study mission sent to China by a group of German banks and industrial concerns. Finally, the chapter traces the establishment of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank in China by leading German banks in 1889.