Indebted in great part to Arthur Young, the traditional view of European agriculture over the long eighteenth century sees rapid technological and institutional changes taking place in England, but stagnation on the continent. Both these views have been challenged over the past decade or two. Today the concept of an ‘agricultural revolution’ in England is rejected by some historians, and others have questioned the contribution to productivity growth of the well-known technical and institutional changes that took place. Likewise most French historians now reject the idea of a ‘société immobile’ and argue that if change was slow, there were usually good economic reasons to continue using traditional farming systems and technology. Despite this change of emphasis, even the most revisionist historians have not challenged the idea that a significant productivity gap existed between Britain and other leading European economies in 1815. This paper tries to suggest a few reasons why this gap existed. The first section examines briefly the recent literature on long-run agrarian change in several European countries. I argue that incentives for investment in British agriculture were considerably more favourable than in most other countries in the period 1650 and 1750. The rest of the paper considers a number of areas where British agriculture developed along different lines to that of two major European economies, namely France and Spain.