gentleman farmer

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The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

Educating girls, Laura believed, could end this and ensure that women in China and elsewhere would no longer be “kept secluded and like prisoners.” Horace and Lawrence were preparing for their university-level education in England. Elly was strict, but Laura oversaw family matters. Lawrence wanted to attend Lincoln’s Inn and become a barrister in England. Horace contemplated entering agriculture and becoming a gentleman farmer, perhaps in Canada, where the family enjoyed vacationing. “You would be surprised if you could see our boys now,” Laura wrote in her diary. “It is wonderful how quickly boys outgrow their fathers.” In the fall of 1918, the family spent six weeks in Japan, hiking and fishing. Laura spent “many happy hours sketching.”

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” * * * • • • REELING FROM LAURA’S DEATH, a despondent Elly Kadoorie, back in London, pondered what to do. Moving back to Shanghai started to seem like a good option. He had already enrolled Lawrence, then twenty, at Lincoln’s Inn, the prominent London law school. Horace, a few years younger, talked about studying architecture or perhaps agriculture and becoming a gentleman farmer. Elly was a wealthy man and had the backing of his wife’s family, the rich and socially well-connected Mocattas. But Elly’s horizons in Britain felt limited. He didn’t have British citizenship. Elly’s British rivals looked down on him and mocked the death of his wife. Describing the fire that had killed Laura, Jardine executive J.

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Upon returning to Shanghai in 1924, Elly put Horace in charge of the Kadoories’ social calendar—overseeing management of Marble Hall, arranging the lavish parties, and supervising the charity work that had been started by his mother. Horace gave up his dream of studying agriculture and becoming a gentleman farmer in the West. He had an eye for fine things and good food, and his shy temperament made him unlikely to challenge his father. Lawrence was more conflicted. He resented the way his father sometimes turned him into an errand boy and secretary. “I didn’t have much of a boyhood,” Lawrence recalled later.

FreeCAD [How-To] by Daniel Falck

Debian, gentleman farmer

These are two heavyweights of the open source CAD world, and no book about FreeCAD could have had better authors. Yorik van Havre FreeCAD developer About the Authors Brad Collette once designed software for a big company but doesn't like to remember that. These days, he is an entrepreneur, hobbyist, jack-of-all-trades, and a gentleman farmer. He is engaged in a multi-year project to raise two hacker sons. He has contributed to numerous open source projects and is an organizing member of Columbia Gadget Works, central Missouri's finest hackerspace. Daniel Falck has always been interested in how things work. As a boy, he learned to play the guitar and decided to learn how to build guitars.

The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat: How to Buy, Cut, and Cook Great Beef, Lamb, Pork, Poultry, and More by Joshua Applestone, Jessica Applestone, Alexandra Zissu

back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, gentleman farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, mass immigration, McMansion, refrigerator car, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration

We are breed-centric and we prefer to stick with what we know, but here’s a short list of other breeds you may come across when shopping for pastured meat. BELTED GALLOWAY We call these Oreo Cookie Cows; they are black with a white band running around their middle. Sweet and docile, they seem to be a favorite among gentleman farmers (farmers who are not dependent on their farm for their livelihood)—after all, who wouldn’t want a hillside dotted with these cuties. Belted Galloway Known to gain well on 100 percent grass, this steer is very popular among pasture-based farmers. They were probably the first purebred cattle to come to North America.

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Your “fresh” turkey could be three weeks dead— bleached and vacuum-sealed to make it appear fresh—and you would be none the wiser. Yet another reason to have a butcher you trust. Admittedly we’ve gotten better at this turkey mishegas over the years—we had to, after our rst year, when we commissioned a pair of novice gentleman farmers to grow four di erent kinds of heritage turkeys. The idea was that each kind would grow to a di erent size, so we’d be able to get everyone their preferred poundage. Big. Mistake. We wound up giving a 28-pounder to a woman who had ordered a 12-pounder. Incredibly, she didn’t freak out, which is why she’s a friend (and loyal customer) to this day.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Despite efforts at improving efficiency on his farms, he failed to turn a profit or rescue himself from mounting debts. In a 1796 letter, he sadly admitted that his farms were in a “barbarous state” and that he was “a monstrous farmer.” Things continued downhill from there.3 Though we associate Jefferson with agrarian democracy and the yeoman class, his style was that of a gentleman farmer. As a member of the upper class, he hired others or used slaves to work his land. He did not become an engaged farmer until 1795, prompted by his growing interest in treating agriculture as a science. He experimented with new techniques taken from his reading, and kept meticulous records in his farm and garden books.

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It was common for large planters and small farmers alike to deplete acres of soil and then leave it fallow and abandoned. “We waste as we please,” was how Jefferson gingerly phrased it.5 Jefferson knew that behind all the rhetoric touting America’s agricultural potential there was a less enlightened reality. For every farsighted gentleman farmer, there were scads of poorly managed plantations and unskilled small (and tenant) farmers struggling to survive. How could slaves, who did most of the fieldwork on Virginia plantations, assume the mantle of “cultivators of the earth”? For Jefferson, it seems, they were mere “tillers.” Tenants, who rented land they did not own, and landless laborers and squatters lacked the commercial acumen and genuine virtue of cultivators too.

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Jefferson’s husbandmen were of a new kind of birthright station, passed from parents to children. They were not to be an ambitious class of men on the make.26 Jefferson’s idealized farmers were not rustics either. They sold their produce in the marketplace, albeit on a smaller scale. There was room enough for an elite gentry class, and gentleman farmers like himself. Using the latest husbandry methods, improving the soil, the wealthier farmers could instruct others, the less skilled beneath them. Education and emulation were necessary to instill virtue. American farmers required an apprenticeship of a sort, which was only possible if they were planted in the right kind of engineered environment.

The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village by Gillian Tindall

gentleman farmer, gentrification, ghettoisation, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, means of production, New Urbanism, profit motive, Right to Buy, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Davenport, urban sprawl

He also drew a carved mantelpiece, apparently Tudor work, from ‘Nell Gwyn’s room’. These papers now repose in a small wallet among a collection of his pictures in the Guildhall Library. Along with them is even a piece of ‘the parlour wallpaper’, which looks like a late eighteenth-century ‘Chinese’ pattern: just the thing for an aspirant gentleman farmer. It was probably laid on the walls when the Morgan family, who farmed extensively in the district, took the place over. Crosby wrote in his notes: ‘Kentish Town Old House. Mr William Morgan carried on the farming business there about 58 yrs. He left in October 1831. Held of Christ Church College Oxford.

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The large Mansfield dairy farm covered much of what is now Parliament Hill, so perhaps the smoothness of its slopes, on which people now play football, fly kites and take their dogs and children for runs, owes something to the late eighteenth-century use of garden rollers. Just as, in our own day, the ‘gentleman farmer’ with an interest in the stock market as well is a feature of the Home Counties commuterlands, so was he a phenomenon in Kentish Town, Hampstead and Islington in the late eighteenth century. Indeed the term was then current: in 1801 a ‘gentleman’s farm’ was advertised for auction, complete with stock, including not only cows but also books.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis by Ruth Defries

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, food miles, Francisco Pizarro, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jevons paradox, John Snow's cholera map, out of africa, planetary scale, premature optimization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, social intelligence, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

But we can put more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by burning forests and deep stores of carbon for fuels, creating the current global warming problem. Geologists did not always appreciate the dynamism and cycling in nature. The prevailing view in the 1700s was that floods dumped rocks on the surface. The much-maligned Scottish gentleman farmer, naturalist, and geologist James Hutton argued that soils, rocks, and mountains were destroyed and created in a perpetual cycle. “We find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end,” he wrote. These words were as true in the 1700s as they were for the previous millions of years and as they will be for millions of years hence.

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A similar story applies to the Russian wheat aphid, which accidentally moved into the Great Plains in the mid-1980s, causing millions of dollars in damages to the wheat crop, and to the Mediterranean fruit fly, which traveled on imported fruit from its native sub-Saharan Africa, first to Hawaii and then to the continental United States in the early 1900s. Likewise, the Hessian fly hitchhiked on a ship from England to New York during the American Revolution. The devastation on farms around the city was so profound that entire wheat fields were ravaged within a few days. George Morgan, a New Jersey gentleman farmer and colonel in the Revolution, named the insect to demonstrate disdain for both the pest and the German mercenary soldiers who were fighting for the British. The Hessian fly pesters wheat farmers to this day. The list goes on of troublesome species that have slipped in to new places with trade and the movement of goods around the world.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski

California gold rush, City Beautiful movement, clean water, cotton gin, David Brooks, fail fast, gentleman farmer, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, joint-stock company, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, New Urbanism, place-making, scientific management, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban renewal

James Benkard volunteered a letter of introduction to his father-in-law, who owned a farm in Newburgh. Olmsted stopped at the Sailor’s Home for news of old shipmates. He played tourist, visiting the new Trinity Church and browsing in bookstores. He treated himself to a breakfast at the Astor House, a fancy haircut, and a new plaid summer cap. In the evening, the dapper gentleman-farmer-to-be boarded a steamboat, the Santa Claus, for the first leg of his journey. The editorial offices of The Cultivator were in Newburgh, and Olmsted had an appointment to meet its publisher, Luther Tucker, from whom he hoped to get advice about model farms. By coincidence, Olmsted arrived as Tucker was conversing with an intense young man he had recently hired to edit a new magazine, to be called The Horticulturist.

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His father had been a prominent engineer who had surveyed the course of the Erie Canal. Although George had studied law, he, too, had been engaged in civil engineering: railroad construction, coal mining, and land drainage. Olmsted had never met anyone like him. David Brooks and Joseph Welton had been accomplished farmers, but Geddes was a true gentleman farmer. That is, he combined scientific farming with a gentlemanly way of life. The latter involved maintaining genteel standards at home—tea was served each afternoon, and “silver forks every day,” Olmsted boasted to his father. Being a gentleman also meant a responsibility to the common good. While Olmsted was with him, Geddes was overseeing the construction of the first plank road (a wooden precursor of paving) in the United States.

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Perhaps it is a combination of “toss” and “amock,” which would mean “flinging oneself headlong,” a good characterization of Olmsted’s frame of mind. CHAPTER TEN A Walking Tour in the Old Country FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS Olmsted devoted himself to farming. He is sometimes described as a gentleman farmer. He was certainly a gentleman and his landscaping improvements did have a purely aesthetic purpose, but Tosomock was hardly a hobby farm. He grew corn, hay, cabbages, turnips, and potatoes. After one season he concluded that he could not make a living growing ordinary crops. It cost him more to improve the fields than he could earn from selling the produce.

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, mortgage debt, spinning jenny, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman

These fifty square miles or so of Somerset, bounded by the red-brick villages of Clutton in the west and Combe Hay in the east, Priston in the north and Kilmersdon in the south, lie on top of a score of complex, broken, twisted, and contorted seams of coal, which until as late as the 1970s were worked by as independent and militant a band of English mining men as might ever have stepped out from beneath the winding gears of the coalfields of Durham or Lanark. Maybe their militancy had arisen because of the unusual proximity, in these parts, of their class enemies—all around them the great limestone houses and mannered city terraces were occupied by soft-handed gentleman farmers and sportsmen, philosophers and squires, artists and divines. There was no other local industry to provide brotherly support: In the fifty square miles of country that unrolled itself around where the twenty-two-year-old William Smith came to live and work, the laboring classes were coal miners, to a man.

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Partly a record, partly an allegory, it shows eighty-eight “agricultural personalities” grouped around the base of a massive limestone column capped by the “Ship of Commerce.” The duke is there, top-hatted and, suitable to both his gravitas and dignitas, the only figure on a horse. Around him are the great and the good of the English rural universe: smocked farmers and shepherds, impeccably dressed gentleman farmers, roughly dressed blacksmiths and farriers, men fat and thin, jolly and severe, ill-born and noble, of practical or professional appearance, all busy in conversation, or gazing in rapt attention at the tups being shorn in a pen before them, or at the elongate cattle standing patiently at center stage.

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents by Gary Ginsberg

affirmative action, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, SoftBank, Ted Sorensen, traveling salesman, two and twenty, urban planning

On November 11, 1771, John Wayles finally gave his permission and only two months later, on New Year’s Day of 1772, the young couple wed. When John Wayles died a year later, Jefferson and his new bride found themselves with even greater riches: 11,000 additional acres and 142 slaves. With this massive inheritance, Jefferson now was set for life, free to be a gentleman farmer and needing only his family, his fields, and his books. At the very moment the world opened itself up to his brilliance and ambition, Jefferson retreated. At heart a homebody, Jefferson became deeply ambivalent about being a lawyer, preferring instead to remain a farmer. The irony is that while the reserved Madison steadily ascended the ranks of Revolutionary leaders, the more sociable Jefferson often preferred a simpler, quieter existence.

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For Jefferson, such prosecutions amounted to a “reign of witches,” with Federalists exercising monarchical powers to suppress free speech and press. Meanwhile, Madison had recently retired from Congress, tired of the constant infighting and deflated by what he viewed as Federalism’s constitutional abuses. After twenty-three years in public service, he was enjoying life at Montpelier as a gentleman-farmer. But the uproar over the Acts—which Madison denounced as “a monster that must for ever disgrace its parents”—roused him back to action. While both deplored the Alien and Sedition Acts, the friends did not blindly agree on how to undercut them. In October 1798, Jefferson invited Madison to Monticello and showed him drafts of what would become known as the Kentucky Resolutions.

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction by Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd

Atul Gawande, David Sedaris, demand response, gentleman farmer, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Joan Didion, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Soul of a New Machine, Yogi Berra

The other day, for instance, he mentioned that he had met a mutual friend of ours while hitchhiking, and I was astonished. “You were hitchhiking?” “I was a hitchhiker,” he said. “I once hitched across the country.” I couldn’t reconcile the two pictures that entered my mind: my enduring picture of Todd the gentleman farmer in a rumpled tweed jacket, and this picture he drew of himself, lifting a thumb by the side of a road—though he allowed as how he had not worn a knapsack but had carried a leather valise. I was amused, of course, and I sensed a small unease under my amusement. I had the same feeling about his writing.

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

David Sedaris, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

And by dangerous I don’t mean thought-provoking. I mean: might get people killed. Take the Reverend John Cotton. In 1630, he goes down to the port of Southampton to preach a farewell sermon to the seven hundred or so colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Company. Led by Governor John Winthrop, a gentleman farmer and lawyer, these mostly Puritan dissenters are about to sail from England to New England on the flagship Arbella and ten other vessels in the Winthrop fleet. By the time Cotton says amen, he has fought Mexico for Texas, bought Alaska from the Russians, and dropped napalm on Vietnam. Then he lays a wreath on Custer’s grave and revs past Wounded Knee.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Wine offered one way to resolve this paradox, for the cultivation and consumption of wine provided a way to bridge Greek and Roman values. The Romans were proud of their origins and saw themselves as a nation of unpretentious farmers turned soldiers and administrators. After successful campaigns, Roman soldiers were often rewarded with tracts of farmland. The most prestigious crop to grow was the vine; by doing so, Roman gentleman farmers could convince themselves that they were remaining true to their roots, even as they also enjoyed lavish feasts and drinking parties in Greek-style villas. Cato himself agreed that viticulture provided a way to reconcile the traditional Roman values of frugality and simplicity with Greek sophistication.

The Lost Art of Gratitude by Alexander McCall Smith

gentleman farmer, Higgs boson, Philippa Foot

“I never imagined Minty in cramped accommodations, but all the same …” The house was several hundred yards back from the farm track, which meandered off towards a low byre and a huddle of sheds in the distance. A driveway led from the track to the house; this was lined with rambling rhododendron bushes, flowering in clusters of pink and pale red. Beyond the bushes, a lawn swept up to the house itself, which was Georgian and far more imposing than the larger gentleman-farmers’ houses of the area. At the time of its construction this would have been the house of a family on its way up; not quite in the league of those who aspired to a country mansion, but heading in that direction. They turned off the farm track and made their way up the somewhat smoother driveway and to the parking place at the side of the house.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, William J. O'Neil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, British Empire, business process, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, clean water, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Glass-Steagall Act, Hernando de Soto, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, refrigerator car, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, short selling, short squeeze, technology bubble, tontine, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, yellow journalism

Union Pacific led, and on huge transactions made a new high-record price. Some of the room traders made fortunes in an hour and I remember later hearing about a rather dull-witted specialist who made a mistake that put three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in his pocket. He sold his seat the following week and became a gentleman farmer the following month. Of course I realised, the moment I heard the news of the declaration of that unprecedented 10 per cent dividend, that I got what I deserved for disregarding the voice of experience and listening to the voice of a tipster. My own convictions I had set aside for the suspicions of a friend, simply because he was disinterested and as a rule knew what he was doing.

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On occasion, he would team with Jay Gould and James Keene. He was close to William Travers, with whom he shared an office on 23rd Street in Manhattan.17 Cammack was born in 1826 in Kentucky in what was then America’s western frontier. His father was of Scottish descent and had grown tobacco in Virginia before becoming a gentleman farmer. At the age of 16, Cammack went to New Orleans to become an office boy. By 1861, he had become a senior partner in the firm, which changed its name to Cammack & Converse. During the Civil War, the firm relocated its headquarters to Havana and controlled a fleet of blockade runners that penetrated the Union navy’s First, I put in orders to buy five hundred thousand bushels of corn every eighth of a cent down.

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

American ideology, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, low earth orbit, low interest rates, mass immigration, megastructure, Monroe Doctrine, pink-collar, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, working poor

The old founding class didn't vanish, but the balance of political power shifted from them to the poorer (but much more numerous) settlers heading west. Jackson's predecessors had favored a stable currency to protect investors. Jackson championed cheap money to protect debtors, the people who voted for him. Where Washington, the gentleman farmer, soldier, and statesman, was the emblematic hero of the first cycle, Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin in Kentucky, was the emblematic hero of the second. By the end of this cycle, after the Civil War, the West was no longer characterized by the hardscrabble subsistence farming of first-generation pioneers.

Against the Grain: Extraordinary Gluten-Free Recipes Made From Real, All-Natural Ingredients by Nancy Cain

gentleman farmer, young professional

Cover the cake with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight before serving. The longer the banana melds into the filling, the creamier and more flavorful the cake becomes. biscuit shortcake MY BEST FRIEND growing up was from a family of nine children. Her father had retired from the federal government to become a gentleman farmer, and his passion was strawberries. They grew acres upon acres of strawberries, and every one of her siblings who was old enough to handle a hoe had a summer job weeding, maintaining, and planting more strawberry beds. Living right down the road from their farm was such a treat—fresh-picked strawberries every day for nearly a month.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America by Christopher Wylie

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, chief data officer, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, deep learning, desegregation, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fake news, first-past-the-post, gamification, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, growth hacking, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Julian Assange, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Valery Gerasimov, web application, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

For the focus groups in smaller villages, there were often no addresses. I’d show up and be told, “We’re meeting in the cottage up on the hill. Just walk past the pub, through those fields with the daffodils, and after a while you’ll see it.” Random townspeople would show up, and perhaps Clive the local barman or Lord Hillingham the gentleman farmer would amble by. Sometimes I would just go to the village pub and chat with people there. British people were whimsical, nuanced, and often fun to chat with, and the focus groups reminded me of the town halls I had loved so much back in B.C. People would talk, and I’d just listen and take notes on what they had to say.

The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman

air gap, British Empire, clean water, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, period drama, trade route, upwardly mobile

(Profligate heirs, grand building projects and backing the wrong side on the political stage tended to result in major felling programmes.) In good times, a prudent landowner encouraged tree growth as a form of dynastic insurance. Consider that the late seventeenth-century writer Joseph Blagrave advised his gentleman-farmer readers to plant ‘Fuell and Firewood sufficient to maintain many families, besides the Timber which may be raised in the Hedgerows, if here and there in every Pearch be but planted an Ash, Oak, Elm’. Since a perch is a length of 16½ feet (5 m), fitting a full-sized timber tree into every perch of hedgerow was pretty dense planting.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

“The emails were intriguing,” said Charity, “but as soon as Carter started talking, I knew I had found my person.” His idea of that moment was something she’d not heard from anyone else: not health care experts, not the CDC, not the armchair epidemiologists on Twitter and cable television, who reminded her of gentleman farmers who had never actually plowed a field or milked a cow. Carter proposed using the patients with flu-like symptoms who turned up in emergency rooms across the United States as a quick and dirty tool to figure out where the virus was. Take those numbers and compare them to the seasonal averages and they might lead you to outbreaks, where you could test for the virus.

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939 by Adrian Tinniswood

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Etonian, gentleman farmer, land reform, off-the-grid, plutocrats, spinning jenny, upwardly mobile

Factions from all parties in Parliament still came to solicit support or sound him out on their plans for palace revolution. As Frances confided to her diary in 1934, her lover and employer “now sits at Churt and welcomes all and sundry, and in this way gets a very fair account of all that is happening in the outside world whilst remaining far from it.”17 Lloyd George played the part of gentleman farmer at Bron-y-de with enthusiasm, installing modern irrigation systems and bringing in a giant mechanical gyro-tiller on caterpillar tracks to turn parts on the farm into a market garden. He went for long walks with Frances, hunting for holly in the woods near Christmas time. Occasionally, the gardens were opened to the public for charity: one year Edward Fitzroy, Speaker of the House of Commons, came down to discuss the political situation and found he had to pay a shilling admission to come in.

Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

At the age of nineteen, Thompson made a massive leap up the social ladder by marrying one of the wealthiest women in the colony, a thirty-two-year-old widow named Sarah Rolfe. She had inherited land and property in a town known as Rumford in New Hampshire. His marriage provided him with a living as a gentleman farmer and he was soon appointed major of the New Hampshire militia. When the Revolutionary War broke out in 1775, Thompson abandoned his wife and infant daughter to spy for the British. With the fall of Boston, he sailed for London where he managed to set himself up as a consultant responsible for recruiting and equipping the British army fighting the Revolutionary War.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

As Francis wrote, ‘if private property be not once for all secured on a permanent footing, the public revenue will sink rapidly with the general produce of the country’. Such ideas conformed with the eighteenth-century Whig belief in the importance of a hereditary landed aristocracy. The zamindar, according to this vision, was an Indian version of the English gentleman-farmer; once his property rights were secure, he would be as enterprising as his English counterpart. The scheme took legislative shape in 1793, under the Whig grandee Lord Cornwallis, when the Bengal Permanent Settlement, with enduring consequences for the region, vested in the province’s zamindars a full proprietary right in their estates with a revenue assessment fixed in perpetuity.

Cyclopedia by William Fotheringham

Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed-gear, flag carrier, gentleman farmer, intermodal, Kickstarter, Northern Rock, safety bicycle, éminence grise

He made a point of ignoring conventional wisdom about diet—champagne, oysters, and whisky were among his favorites—posed for cigarette ads, and was notoriously open about his use of DRUGS, which he viewed as being no more than what it took to do the job he was paid to do. He refused a drug test after his second hour record—which was not ratified—and led a riders’ strike against drug tests in 1966. His domestic life was also unconventional (see SEX). A television commentator and gentleman farmer in retirement, as well as director of the Paris–Nice stage race, he died of stomach cancer in 1987 and is remembered with an ornate gravestone in the cemetery in his home village of Quincampoix, just outside Rouen. (SEE ALSO MEMORIALS) ANTARCTICA Not the most hospitable of cycling environments, but during Sir Ernest Shackleton’s abortive attempt to cross the continent in 1914–15 one of the more eccentric members of his crew, Thomas Orde-Lees, got on a bike and rode on the pack ice while the expedition’s ship Endurance was frozen in the Weddell Sea.

Falling to Earth by Al Worden

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, California energy crisis, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, lost cosmonauts, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, scientific mainstream, Silicon Valley

This softhearted, jovial guy always had a twinkle in his large blue eyes. Orphaned at the age of four when his parents died in a car accident, my dad was raised by his gruff Uncle Dick on a pig and apple farm in northern Michigan. He’d had enough of farm life by the time I was born. Growing up, I saw him as a gentleman farmer, the type who owns a farm but never works on it. Dad was more technically oriented; his life revolved around electronics. He owned a small repair shop in Jackson and was good at fixing radios. In fact, my dad built the town’s first radio station, and worked for a while as the late-night talk host.

Dawn of Detroit by Tiya Miles

British Empire, classic study, European colonialism, food desert, gentleman farmer, gentrification, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, profit motive, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight

Like the hunted beaver, enslaved people could be trapped and traded, their best parts—intellect, feeling, strength, and versatility—extracted to further what was then a model mercantile experiment. Straining to live worthwhile lives and contributing to the cultural mosaic that characterized this rough-hewn trading post town, enslaved residents of Detroit shared close quarters with those who exploited them like animals. Their owners ran the gamut of society: merchants, traders, gentleman farmers, political leaders, belles of the balls, and even priests.29 Piecing together a composite picture of enslaved people’s experience in Detroit has depended on scant documentation. Unlike many locales in the American South (and even some places in the Midwest, such as Indiana), Michigan has yielded no full-length slave narratives or WPA slave interviews recorded by employees of the Federal Writers’ Project.

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, laissez-faire capitalism, offshore financial centre, sensible shoes, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, the market place, three-masted sailing ship

No matter that task forces and battle fleets were even at that moment assembling at the two ends of the Atlantic Ocean, and satellites were being interrogated hourly for information on troop movements and diplomatic messages, no matter that the world’s spying community was working overtime, and that presidents and prime ministers were engaging in urgent late-night telephone calls for advice and support—of all of these events that history now insists were taking place that day, the plane’s passengers were quite insensible. I had lengthy conversations with three men aboard who had come to the Falkland Islands to buy land. One was a minor Spanish count; one was a High Tory gentleman farmer from Shropshire; the third was a Scotsman who lived in Egypt. Each one had the fullest confidence in the ability of the mother-country to prevent any unpleasantness: no one in the plane was thinking of war, except perhaps the uniformed men in the cockpit, who may well have known what we did not.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

banking crisis, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentleman farmer, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, means of production, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker

The letter explained that Ford’s French division—which was then building trucks for the Nazis—had established a new company in Algiers, that at least one person involved in the new arrangement was said to be “unscrupulous” and “100 percent pro-German,” and that the local commercial circles were “pointing an accusing finger” at the new African Ford company, questioning where its loyalties lay—with America or with Germany. The news of the new company, Ford-Afrique, made it to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau’s office. Morgenthau was an upstate New York Jewish gentleman farmer turned diplomat who mistrusted major corporations and their executives, whose judgment was easily clouded, the Treasury secretary believed, by a lust for profit. He had been quietly crusading to expose corruption and war profiteering over the past year. During the war, his office, along with others in Washington, would conduct either formal or informal investigations into major American powerhouses with financial ties to Nazi Germany, such as Standard Oil and Chase National Bank.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Understanding why this is the case helps to demystify Aceh’s miraculous recovery and illuminates the most important measure used in economics. SHAKING THE FOUNDATIONS The first attempt at a systematic measure of the size and strength of an economy was set out by William Petty in the 1650s. Petty was a polymath: a surgeon and professor of anatomy at Oxford, a gentleman-farmer, an agricultural and maritime inventor (he designed an automatic grain planter and an early catamaran, and came up with a proposal for attaching engines to boats), and a leading civil servant. (He would have known about Aceh, since during his lifetime the English and Dutch were pitched in major battles for control of the seas, including the Malacca Strait.)

Ayn Rand Cult by Jeff Walker

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, buy and hold, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Elliott wave, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, Jane Jacobs, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Tipper Gore, Torches of Freedom

Rand’s own letters from the 1940s make clear what a trauma the transition from ranch to downtown apartment would later be for her husband. “Frank has gone wild about working the soil. . . out with his chickens and rabbits all day . . . I don’t remember ever seeing him” so “chronically . . . happy . . . ardently enthusiastic . . . busy, and glowing . . . a complete gentleman farmer.” Hating the ranch was the least of Rand’s delusions about Frank. By the 1940s, because both were so alienated from their emotional lives, they no longer really communicated. Still, in letters to fans she wrote the following accolades: “Who is Frank O’Connor? Howard Roark, or as near to it as anyone I know.”

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Several engineering people left Pertec to work for a local electronics company. Even Ed Roberts, after five months, became fed up with Pertec. “They told me I didn’t understand the market. I don’t think they understood it.” Roberts bought a farm in Georgia and told everyone he intended to become a gentleman farmer or go to medical school. Eventually he did both, with the same concentrated energy he had brought to MITS. Pertec gradually came to regard the MITS operation as a bad venture and eventually abandoned it. According to Eddie Curry, who stayed on longer than any other MITS principal, Pertec continued making Altairs for about a year after the acquisition, but within two years MITS was gone.

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, operational security, precision agriculture, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Yom Kippur War

The Big Safari sensor operator died of diabetes and liver damage on September 3, 2005, at age forty-five, in Hampton, Virginia, where he had moved after retiring from the Air Force on May 31. Wry to the end, Guay told his younger brother, Scott, that he was moving back to a suburban house he had bought years earlier, while stationed at Langley Air Force Base, to “be a gentleman farmer.” The backyard had room for a small vegetable garden at best. Guay’s service record included a Bronze Star and nine oak leaf clusters for his work on the Predator. During the WILD Predator project, Guay had been the first sensor operator to lase targets for fighter aircraft from the drone. During the Summer Project, Guay had been at the controls of the Predator’s cameras when they spotted Osama bin Laden.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

“We are hopeful that over time, they will embrace our product.”93 But five years later, neither the environmental groups supposedly worried about the future of wild fish, nor Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Costco, Kroger, and Target, had changed their minds.94 8. Class War Today, Cesare Marchetti is in his early nineties and lives as a “gentleman farmer near Florence,” says his friend and coauthor, Jesse Ausubel, “with olive groves, grapevines, goats, black cats,” and his typewriter collection.95 Ausubel, who works at Woods Hole Research Institute and Rockefeller University, has been friends with Marchetti since they met in the 1970s at IIASA.

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

He relied mainly on family hands, claiming ownership of two horses, five milk cows, three sheep, seven swine, and considerable stores of wheat, rye, oats, corn, and tobacco. J.D.’s mother, Nancy Spencer Bassett, was thought to be the brainy and driven one; John Henry, a Civil War veteran turned gentleman farmer, “sat around and grinned a lot,” said Spencer Morten, who married into the family in 1949 and become a company executive. A former journalist, Morten was eighty-nine when we first met, but his memory was razor sharp. And after sitting on the family’s periphery for so many decades, he was ready to describe all the dramas he’d witnessed in the boardrooms, in the factories—and behind the scenes at family dinners.

Star's Reach: A Novel of the Deindustrial Future by John Michael Greer

deindustrialization, gentleman farmer, peak oil

I sipped whiskey and said, “Well enough to wonder what somebody with a name like that is doing digging up radio plans over here in Troy.” He smiled a little lopsided smile. “Three older brothers, and every one of them has pupped his own brats. I don’t use that last word lightly.” He laughed, and so did Berry and I. “I could have gone to sea, or I could have settled down on our estates near Ammers and done the gentleman farmer, or I could have gone up to Lebnan to mix with the politicians and drink myself to death like my uncle Raymun.” A shrug. “None of those appealed much. So I went to Rutlen instead. That’s where we have our Versty, the way you have yours down at Melumi.” This time it was my eyebrows that went up.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, bank run, barriers to entry, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, creative destruction, desegregation, feminist movement, financial independence, gentleman farmer, George Gilder, Herbert Marcuse, invisible hand, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, side project, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, The Wisdom of Crowds, union organizing, urban renewal, We are as Gods, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

The house was encircled by a goldfis-filled moat, lined by Japanese hyacinths. “Elemental in form, dynamic in color . . . designed for sun, steel and sky,” enthused House and Garden in a four-page spread about the property that prominently featured Ayn and Frank.20 The house meant far more to Frank than an investment. Reinventing himself as a gentleman farmer, he grew lush gardens on their land and raised a flock of peacocks. In true individualist fashion the birds were not shut up in cages but flew shrieking about the property. Frank’s agricultural dabbling soon revealed a true talent for horticulture. The fields filled with bamboo, chestnuts, pomegranate trees, and blackberry bushes.

The Teeth of the Tiger by Tom Clancy

airport security, centralized clearinghouse, complexity theory, false flag, flag carrier, forensic accounting, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, information security, Occam's razor, operational security, sensible shoes

One further flamethrower statement at the entire congressional process had burned whatever bridges might have remained open to him. His current home was a farm dating back to the eighteenth century, where he raised Appaloosa horses-riding and mediocre golf were his only remaining hobbies-and lived the quiet life of a gentleman farmer. He also worked at The Campus seven or eight hours per day, commuting back and forth in a chauffeured stretch Cadillac. Fifty-two now, tall, slender and silver-haired, he was well known without being known at all, perhaps the one lingering aspect of his political past. "You did well in the mountains," Jim Hardesty said, waving the young Marine to a chair.

My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS by Abraham Verghese

contact tracing, gentleman farmer, gentrification, index card, Mason jar, medical residency

Maple and pine trees lined the side of the road, forming a shady canopy. We drove past sea-green pastures with mares and foals grazing freely. Essie pointed out a driveway that sprang on us suddenly; the driveway led to a mansion on top of a knoll. She told me the name of the owner: a doctor from India, who was now also a gentleman farmer. The road became twisty and I took the curves carefully, staying clear of the median. The traffic coming round the curves in the opposite direction was hidden by the overhanging foliage and the hedges that spilled onto the shoulder. We seemed to be descending, plunging down into a basin. Suddenly, as we rounded another curve, the trees dropped away and the whole world seemed to open up: I saw ahead of me a breathtaking valley, huge in its expanse, gradually rising on all sides to towering mountains, the shadow of one range thrown onto the other.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

Home, who later took the title Lord Kames,6 may have inherited his ancestor’s fire and spirit, but the Kirk’s legacy of pessimistic moral austerity left no discernible trace. Instead, he was raised an Episcopalian and learned early on the importance of a good income, as well as the pride and pleasure of being a gentleman farmer (especially when others do the heavy lifting). He attended no school or university, but was tutored at home. Since he showed a predilection for books and learning, it was decided that the perfect profession for this heir to a modest country fortune was the law. In 1712, just the year after Francis Hutcheson arrived at Glasgow, sixteen-year-old Harry Home set off for Edinburgh to start his legal education in the chambers of John Dickson, a so-called writer of the Signet, or what the English would call a solicitor.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Biofuels Goal Using Less Land than Corn or Switchgrass, University of Illinois News Bureau, 30 July 2008, http://news.illinois.edu/NEWS/08/0730miscanthus.html 26 Jansen (2000b), op cit. 27 Crutzen, P J (1986), ‘Methane Production by Domestic Animals’, Tellus B Chemical and Physical Meteorology, Vol 38, p 271. 28 Kendell, C (2005), ‘Economics of Farming with Horses – Operational Cost for Horses’, Rural Heritage, Spring 2005, http://www.ruralheritage.com/back_forty/economics_cost.htm 29 Pinney (n.d.), op cit.16. 30 Williams, Michael (n.d.), The Living Tractorhttp://www.foxearth.org.uk/oxen.html 31 Ibid. 32 Kames, Lord H H (1776), The Gentleman Farmer, Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture, by Subjecting it to the Text of Rational Principles, W. Creech, http://www.foxearth.org.uk/oxen.html 33 Williams (n.d.), op cit. 30. 34 My reference for this item has gone missing; for information on open fields in Anatolia see Stirling, P (1965), Turkish Village, 1965, University of Kent, Chapter 4; http://anthronexus.org/Era_Resources/Era/Stirling/StirlingContents.html 35 Speiss, Hans (1994), Report on Draught Animals under Drought Conditions, in Central, Eastern and Southern Zones of Region 1 (Tigray), United Nations Development Programme Emergencies Unit for Ethiopia, 1994, http://www.africa.upenn.edu/eue_web/Oxen94.htm 36 Gandhi, M K (1946), How to Serve the Cow, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1954, p 51 (originally in Harijan, 15 Sept 1946). 37 Panin, Anthony and Brokken, Ray F (1989), Economic Analysis of Cow Traction Farm Technology in the Ethiopian Highlands, FAO, http://www.fao.org/Wairdocs/ILRI/x5483B/x5483b1g.htm#results%20and%20discussion 38 McKibben, Bill (2005), ‘The Cuba Diet: What Will you be Eating when the Revolution Comes?’

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebastian Mallaby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, capital controls, clean water, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, export processing zone, failed state, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, guns versus butter model, Hernando de Soto, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, microcredit, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, the new new thing, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Yom Kippur War

• • • THE WORLD BANK was conceived six decades before the terrorist attacks, in the teeth of another violent threat to American security. In December 1941, scarcely a week after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s long-time friend and treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, commissioned a blueprint for the postwar economic order. Morgenthau was incapable of designing such a thing himself—he was a gentleman-farmer, not a financier—so he turned to Harry Dexter White, a driven, brilliant Harvard PhD whose service was later rewarded with persecution at the hands of Senator Joseph McCarthy. White’s brief was nothing less than to prevent another war, and to do so by forestalling the kind of economic storm that had brought about the current one.

Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

Half a century later on the deck of Minerva, that’s all Daniel can remember about their Classical education; they took the exams, did indifferently (Daniel did better than Isaac), and were given new titles: they were now scholars, meaning that they had scholarships, meaning that Newton would not have to go back home to Woolsthorpe and become a gentleman-farmer. They would continue to share a chamber at Trinity, and Daniel would continue to learn more from Isaac’s idle musings than he would from the entire apparatus of the University. ONCE HE’S HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to settle in aboard Minerva, Daniel realizes it’s certain that when, God willing, he reaches London, he’ll be asked to provide a sort of affidavit telling what he knows about the invention of the calculus.

…

You’d been busy doing the work God put you here to do—instead of the work that Trinity College expected of you—consequently, your prospects seemed bleak—wouldn’t you agree?” “I have always placed my faith in—” “In God, of course. But don’t tell me you weren’t worried you’d be sent packing, and live out your days as a gentleman farmer in Woolsthorpe. There were other candidates. Men who’d curried favor in the right places, and memorized all of the medieval claptrap we were expected to know. Do you remember, Isaac, what became of your competitors?” “One went insane,” Isaac recited like a bored scholar. “One passed out in a field from too much drink, caught a fever, and died.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

Then there were the small tenant farmers; the captains of the Kynsna-based ships, Scotsmen and Irishmen chiefly and powerful drinkers; the local tradesmen and merchants, the apothecary, the chandlers; and there were the grander gentlemen settlers, the Barringtons, the Duthies, the Nelsons, the Sutherlands, the Botterills, or the widow Fauconnier and her children, in whose parlour, in the absence of a church, the Reverend Charles Bull used to take Sunday services, and Captain Duthie, Justice of the Peace, held his periodic courts. And at the top was Mr Rex, who had personally approved all the original settlers. Rex lived like a polite English gentleman-farmer upon a large scale, but rumour suggested that he was something rather more: and what capped the ineffable Englishness of his village, and made it so unutterably alien to the harsh republicanism of the Voortrek laagers over the mountains, was the fact that, if what one heard was true, the Squire of Knysna was the natural son of George III—Queen Victoria’s uncle.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The Airfield of Dreams The next morning I set out with my mother to retrace my steps. We found my uncle Chuck in his tractor, tilling the fields. He’d been making some calls on my behalf, searching for one of the ringleaders of STAND: Shut This Airport Nightmare Down! The silhouette and slash was their insignia. He urged me to find Jim Berdyne, a gentleman farmer who still had a convert’s zeal for the land. Berdyne was working in his yard when we pulled in the drive, and while my mother and uncle waited in the car, I joined him for a glass of lemonade. He was well acquainted with Rick Bryant, he growled, and wasn’t having any of his arguments. A new airport would never work, he claimed, because the airlines would never stand for it, let alone serve it.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol by Iain Gately

barriers to entry, British Empire, California gold rush, corporate raider, Day of the Dead, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, imperial preference, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Louis Pasteur, megacity, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Peace of Westphalia, post-work, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, vertical integration, working poor

Whereas enlightened educational methods preserved the ancient British habit of giving alcohol to children, when the same spirit of improvement was applied to agriculture, it had a negative impact on traditional drinking practices. Nature was perceived of as a resource “for the being and service and contemplation of man,” and the Enlightened farmer was “like a god on earth” who “commands this species of animal to live and that to die.” Numerous technical manuals, such as The Gentleman Farmer; Being an Attempt to Improve Agriculture by Subjecting It to the Test of Rational Principles, by the Scottish Lord Kames (1776), were published, and with the assistance of the Enclosure Acts, vast quantities of common lands were rationalized and improved, displacing large numbers of common people.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Etonian, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invisible hand, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, plutocrats, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, rolodex, scientific management, the market place

As the stresses of raising money for the war mounted, tensions between the Bank and the government escalated, finally coming to a head in 1917. The governor was then Walter Cunliffe, a tall barrel-chested, John Bull sort of character who sported an imposing walrus mustache, was a renowned big game hunter, and looked more like a gentleman farmer than a City grandee. Over the years, he had become increasingly autocratic and erratic in his judgments and had developed an exaggerated sense of his own importance as governor to the point of insisting that his status required him to deal with the government through the prime minister alone, not even through the chancellor of the exchequer.

The Eternal City: A History of Rome by Ferdinand Addis

Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, Defenestration of Prague, friendly fire, gentleman farmer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land reform, moral panic, New Urbanism, Peace of Westphalia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, plutocrats, the market place, trade route, wikimedia commons

And smallholders had to survive in the face of constant and aggressive competition, for while Roman peasants fought Rome’s wars, their commanding officers were discovering the advantages of large-scale slave-powered agriculture. Cato the Elder had been a great enthusiast for the new agriculture. His pamphlet on the subject is the oldest surviving work of Latin prose and is full of good advice for the gentleman farmer: what crops to grow; how many animals to buy; how many wine vats and olive presses. Above all, how to manage slaves, Carthaginians, Numantines, Greeks, Libyans, Lusitanians, the captive populations of a hundred tribes, a hundred conquered cities, now toiling in the fields of Italy, backs bent under the whip.

The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World by Oona A. Hathaway, Scott J. Shapiro

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, bank run, Bartolomé de las Casas, battle of ideas, British Empire, clean water, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, false flag, gentleman farmer, humanitarian revolution, index card, long peace, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, power law, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, spice trade, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

To justify the recall, the Jacobins accused Genêt of being a British agent insufficiently loyal to France.41 Genêt was not so foolish as to return to France at the height of the Terror. He stayed in the United States and soon married the daughter of George Clinton, the governor of New York. Genêt retired from public life and settled down as a gentleman farmer along the Hudson River three miles from Albany.42 In his spare time, he dreamed up new inventions, such as a cigar-shaped hydrogen balloon with stabilizers and rudders, detailed in a book he published in 1832.43 It may come as no surprise that Genêt’s inventions were hopeless, based as they were on a complete ignorance of the laws of physics.

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Bolshevik threat, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Future Shock, gentleman farmer, greed is good, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Milgram experiment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, open borders, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, wage slave, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Aretha told their mutual friend that she would wake him at four, so that he wouldn’t be late for dinner at the ranch. More than once, she said, he sighed as he rose and headed home. Rand never met Aretha and may not have known where Frank spent his afternoons. It was another one of the many satisfactions he found in his life as a gentleman farmer. In any case, Nathaniel’s looks and manner reminded Rand of the dynamic and determined Howard Roark. Like Frank, the young man had her “kind of face,” she later said. She also quickly concluded that he possessed the best mind of anyone she had ever met. From his first visit, she ranked him as a genius, she told Barbara in 1961, “and I really mean genius.”

O Jerusalem by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, land bank, lateral thinking, Mount Scopus, union organizing

He had himself already made his personal contribution to the conflict, a gesture of a dimension appropriate to the land he represented in Cairo. Over his wife's furious objections, he had helped convert his next-door neighbor's print shop into a miniature arms plant to make bullets for the Palestinians. Beside Solh sat his close friend and political ally, a gentleman farmer whose passionate devotion to Arab independence had earned him too half a lifetime in jail or exile. Syria's Jamil Mardam had, in fact, been one of the first members of the Al Fatat secret society founded to win Arab independence from Ottoman Turkey before World War I. He too was a passionate advocate of opening an immediate guerrilla campaign in Palestine.

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The trial that had just finished made front-page headlines for days across Britain, and there were fears of a minor riot when the guilty men were led outside. They included a young peer of the realm, Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, known as Lord Montagu of Beaulieu; a Daily Mail journalist called Peter Wilde-blood; and a gentleman farmer, Major Michael Pitt-Rivers. Montagu had just been sentenced to twelve months in prison and the other two, eighteen months. Their crime had been conspiring to induce two RAF men to commit indecent acts – in other words, they were homosexuals. There was a great purge of homosexuals going on in the Britain of the fifties, whipped up by the newspapers and by a clique of politicians and officials.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson

British Empire, centralized clearinghouse, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Islamic Golden Age, operational security, Potemkin village, Scramble for Africa, zero-sum game

The key to that secret began with the family surname, which wasn’t really Lawrence. Thomas Lawrence’s real name was Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman, and in his prior incarnation he had been a prominent member of the Anglo-Irish landed aristocracy. After being educated at Eton, the future baronet had returned to Ireland and, in the early 1870s, took up the pleasant role of gentleman farmer of his family’s estate in County Westmeath. He married a woman from another wealthy Anglo-Irish family, with whom he soon had four daughters. But Chapman’s gilded existence began to unravel when he started an affair with the governess to his young daughters, a twenty-four-year-old Scottish woman named Sarah Junner.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon

active transport: walking or cycling, book value, British Empire, business cycle, City Beautiful movement, classic study, conceptual framework, credit crunch, gentleman farmer, it's over 9,000, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, New Urbanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, short selling, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, zero-sum game

In the twentieth century, the body of theory which analyzes urban-rural systems of the sort that both Turner and the boosters were trying to understand goes by the name of central place theory. Curiously, it traces its roots back to a contemporary of the boosters, writing in Germany at about the same time. Johann Heinrich von Thünen, an educated gentleman farmer in Mecklenburg, published the first edition of his book The Isolated State in 1826. In it, he tried to produce a rigorous mathematical description of the spatial relationships and economic linkages between city and country. Neither Turner nor the boosters appear to have read it, and yet it may offer a way to resolve the apparent differences between them.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

Beethoven was a transitional figure, beginning firmly in the Classical tradition and breaking free of it in his late works, whose inspiration followed Romantic principles by eschewing rule-bound forms (for example, in the number and length of different movements) and expressing emotion in seemingly spontaneous and unfettered fashion. The Romantic hero as emotional being was expressed most dramatically perhaps in the character of Heathcliff, the protagonist of Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë (1818–48): a ‘dark-skinned gypsy’, as she described him, who is adopted as a child by a Yorkshire gentleman farmer, is spurned in love by his daughter, and, consumed by rage and despair, spends the rest of his life in pursuit of revenge upon the family. Critics preferred the novels of Emily’s more famous sister Charlotte. In her best-known work, Jane Eyre (1847), she described the eponymous heroine’s growing independence and her rejection of the constricting conditions of governessing and teaching.

The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles

book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Edward Glaeser, gentleman farmer, informal economy, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, public intellectual, risk free rate, short selling, Snow Crash, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, working poor

20 Vanderbilt seemed to be nothing but energy as he burned through the year on the hunt for every possible source of profit. On summer Sundays, when William had the Thistle sitting idle, Vanderbilt leased the Bellona to take New Yorkers to the Union Garden on Staten Island. He even arranged to sell the manure from Bellona Hall's stables to James Neilson, a self-styled gentleman farmer. Meanwhile he supervised the construction of a new vessel for the Union Line. Christened the Emerald, it was a “splendid new steam boat,” as it was advertised, and he proudly took command. But not for long.21 At half past one o'clock in the morning on November 5, 1826, Vanderbilt awoke in his bed at Bellona Hall to the cries of his crewmen.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

He later described the period of his youth and early manhood as one of ‘coarse dissoluteness, employed in the service of ambition, vanity, and, above all, lust’, but he was not much different from other young Russian aristocrats of his time.2 His later anarchist morality called for the repression, not the liberation, of his strong and unruly sensual desires. At this time Tolstoy still wanted to follow a rigorous course of self-study but he played the gentleman-farmer for a while on his estate. He then enjoyed the pleasures of Moscow for several years, before turning his back on polite, frivolous society in 1851 to accompany his brother Nikolai to the North Caucasus, where he joined an artillery regiment. He was stationed in a Cossack village, and went on expeditions to subdue the mountain tribes, on one occasion nearly being killed by a grenade, and, on another, narrowly escaping capture.

Eastern USA by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, the built environment, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

PLANTATIONS Hermitage MUSEUM, GARDENS (www.thehermitage.com; 4580 Rachel’s Lane; adult/child $18/12; 8:30am-5pm Apr-Oct, 9am-4:30pm Oct-Mar) The former home of seventh president Andrew Jackson lies 15 miles east of downtown. The 1000-acre plantation is a peek into what life was like for a Mid-South gentleman farmer in the 19th century. Tour the Federal-style brick mansion, now a furnished house museum with costumed interpreters, and see Jackson’s original 1804 log cabin and the old slave quarters (Jackson was a lifelong supporter of slavery, at times owning up to 150 slaves; a special exhibit tells their stories).

Frommer's California 2007 by Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert, Matthew Richard Poole

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

THE SANTA YNEZ VALLEY The Santa Ynez Valley presents a soothing and intriguing blend of Arabian horses standing beside pristine vineyards, rolling pastures dotted with spreading oaks, graceful Victorian farmhouses and barns beside cutting-edge wineries, all surrounded by imposing mountains. This is beautiful country, where the clear blue sky achieves a brilliance rarely seen in the smog-clogged cities to the south. In the Santa Ynez Valley the pace is slower and the locals friendlier, but don’t expect to find yokels gnawing on hay—this is gentleman-farmer country, where some of the nicest ranches are gated and have video surveillance, and even Disney’s Davy Crockett is a respected winemaker. This balance of old-fashioned living and modern amenities is what makes the area so enjoyable: You can read in the shade of an oak tree one day and go on a wine tasting adventure the next.

The Complete Novels Of George Orwell by George Orwell

British Empire, fixed income, gentleman farmer, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, pneumatic tube, the market place, traveling salesman, union organizing, white flight

It was lucky that the owners of the two farms which adjoined Animal Farm were on permanently bad terms. One of them, which was named Foxwood, was a large, neglected, old-fashioned farm, much overgrown by woodland, with all its pastures worn out and its hedges in a disgraceful condition. Its owner, Mr Pilkington, was an easy-going gentleman farmer who spent most of his time in fishing or hunting according to the season. The other farm, which was called Pinchfield, was smaller and better kept. Its owner was a Mr Frederick, a tough, shrewd man, perpetually involved in lawsuits and with a name for driving hard bargains. These two disliked each other so much that it was difficult for them to come to any agreement, even in defence of their own interests.

Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

THE CENTR AL COAST 448 T H E C E N T R A L CO A S T W I N E CO U N T R Y 13 THE SANTA YNEZ VALLEY The Santa Ynez Valley presents a soothing and intriguing blend of Arabian horses standing beside pristine vineyards, rolling pastures dotted with spreading oaks, graceful Victorian farmhouses and barns beside cutting-edge wineries, all surr ounded b y imposing mountains. This is beautiful country, where the clear blue sky achieves a brilliance rarely seen in the smog-clogged cities to the south. I n the Santa Ynez Valley, the pace is slower and the locals friendlier, but don’t expect to find yokels gnawing on hay—this is gentleman-farmer country, where some of the nicest ranches ar e gated and have video surveillance, and ev en D isney’s D avy C rockett is a r espected winemaker . This balance of old-fashioned living and modern amenities is what makes the area so enjoyable: You can read in the shade of an oak tree one day and go on a wine tasting adventure the next.

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

The petty nobility, which was particularly numerous in Spain and in Poland, was squeezed into the retinues of the magnates, into military service, or into foreign employment. In England, in the absence of serfdom, the Enclosure movement could capitalize on landholding most effectively. A prosperous stratum of yeomen and gentleman farmers developed at the expense of peasants driven from the land. In all the great cities of Europe there was a wealthy commercial and professional class, alongside the artisanate, the urban poor, and, in two or three localities, the beginnings of an industrial work-force. Generally speaking, however, the old institutions of the social Estates remained intact.

USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

PLANTATIONS Hermitage MUSEUM, GARDENS (www.thehermitage.com; 4580 Rachel’s Lane; adult/child $18/12; 8:30am-5pm Apr-Oct, 9am-4:30pm Oct-Mar) The former home of seventh president Andrew Jackson lies 15 miles east of downtown. The 1000-acre plantation is a peek into what life was like for a Mid-South gentleman farmer in the 19th century. Tour the Federal-style brick mansion, now a furnished house museum with costumed interpreters, and see Jackson’s original 1804 log cabin and the old slave quarters (Jackson was a lifelong supporter of slavery, at times owning up to 150 slaves; a special exhibit tells their stories).