Roundtable: environmental histories of agriculture in early modern Britain and Ireland

In this roundtable, three early-career historians discuss relationships between early modern agricultural and environmental history in Britain and Ireland. The discussion focuses on how the growing field of environmental history can both contribute to and ask new questions of agricultural history, particularly through an attention to each subdiscipline’s history, sources, methods and key debates. Britain and Ireland provide the geographical focus due to their rich traditions of early modern agricultural history, which contrast with the relatively recent development of early modern environmental histories of the region. The contributors bring their varied disciplinary training in environmental, social and intellectual history and archaeology to bear on questions that trace and blur the boundaries of environmental and agricultural history and offer fresh perspectives on their future intersections.