Negotiation

Abstract The Board of Agriculture remained a deeply unpopular institution—both in the eyes of the public and with Pitt’s government. Why were state-sponsored efforts to increase food production and to encourage the spread of agricultural science so contested and unpopular during an era of food insecurity? In this chapter, I argue that the Board of Agriculture failed to position itself in the press, and that it allowed itself to be marginalized by other committees and personalities within government—however, the aims of the Board were not merely to extend its influence within the agriculture of Britain. I show that the Board of Agriculture sustained an evolving relationship with the East India Company from its inception, with different personalities in the Board attempting to establish varied and sometimes contradictory relationships between Board and Company. For Sinclair, the goal was to petition the Company to sponsor the creation of a Board of Agriculture in India—bringing the sub-continent under the same powers Sinclair was attempting to establish in Britain. The Board’s efforts to negotiate a position within the British Empire reveal the scale of the vision of its members to develop agricultural science through confronting famine and scarcity in Bengal and Madras as well as in Britain. The chapter explores how naïvety in dealing with the power and influence of the Church in agricultural concerns provided a death blow to the larger ambitions of the Board of Agriculture, but not before it had established the communication of agricultural samples, seeds, and ideas between Britain and the sub-continent.