By arguing for an earlier development of the research university, this book questions previous accounts that have seen the state or the corporation as the main drivers of the making of research. Whereas other accounts see a turn toward useful knowledge as a corrective to the overly bookish or pedantic knowledge of professors, academics themselves reformed scholarly approaches both in opposition to their academic forebears and to the entanglement of knowledge with use. Both theory and practice could be a bias. This book highlights the research university as a place to cultivate and protect critical thinking from political and economic pressure. Even proponents of useful knowledge adopted academic techniques because by improving the quality of knowledge they made it more useful. The early modern development of dynamic epistemic superstructures suggests approaches to interdisciplinarity and continuing knowledge change today. The book encourages academics to participate in knowledge reforms from a position of epistemic humility and a self-critical search for biases. It proposes how curation of knowledge still represents a viable approach, but one that could be reformulated to address the biases of the past.

A pragmatist approach to methodology can foster insightful and impactful research. It can create knowledge that is useful, provide a framework for overcoming the qualitative–quantitative dichotomy, and conceptualize how to make the most of big qualitative data.

This introduction sketches the main arguments about the contribution of farming books to the development of agrarian capitalism and lays the groundwork for the detailed argument in later chapters. It first offers a critique of the standard research paradigm, the enlightenment model, which only evaluates the role of books with respect to technological change and is insensitive to early modern social relations. It then explains the research method and scope, focused on British agricultural books printed between 1660 and 1800. Since the structure of the book is thematic, it presents a broad survey of agricultural books and authors to serve as a reference for the rest of the book. It ends by summarising how the core argument is developed over seven chapters.