Thesis Graphs

I'm pleased to say that, early on Thursday morning, I finished Chapter I of my thesis!  It's nice to know that the goal of being entirely finished by early April seems far more possible, now.  I'm still, unfortunately, behind schedule, but now, at least, I know that I'm more than 3/4 done with my writing.
I've made more than a dozen graphs thus far for my thesis, mostly for Chapter I, using a website called ChartGo.  This has mostly been in order to convey quantitative information in as simple and understandable a way as possible.  I thought that I would share a few of these with you; some of them are rather interesting.

This first graph depicts the world agriculture market from the time of the great stock market crash of 1929 (i.e. the beginning of the Great Depression) until 1938, the year before war broke out in Europe.  The purpose of this graph is to show the sort of economic pressure from which French farmers suffered leading up to the war.  Hundreds of thousands of French young people were emigrating from the countryside during these times, and the rural population was steadily aging.  It was not easy to work in agriculture during these times, and an increasing number of foreign workers (mostly from Belgium, Italy, and Spain) were needed to ensure that there would not be a labor deficit when harvest came.

This second graph depicts crop yields of the various European countries throughout the 1930s, leading up to World War II.  (The unit measured on the y-axis is quintals per hectare.)  For those of you who don't know, yield in agriculture means the mass of crops harvested in a given area of land.  It's land efficiency, in other words.  Notice how low France is, with just over half of the yield of such countries as the Netherlands and Denmark?  France during this time was lagging, technologically, behind the rest of Europe.  There was not even running water in many rural French districts, let alone the kind of highly mechanized agriculture that was quickly catching on.  However, if you break France into districts over this time period, you will find that various regions of France have yields in excess of 30 quintals per hectare, the highest in all Europe!  How could this be, when the average is so low?  In fact, French farming was becoming increasingly divided, during this time, between a large class of peasant smallholders, and a small class of large landowners.  The former group was too poor to purchase many of the more expensive imported agricultural inputs (fertilizers and pesticides), and had fairly conservative mentalities regarding new agricultural techniques, preventing them from deepening their level of mechanization.  The large landowners had some of the highest-yielding and best-equipped farms in the world, whereas the peasants were barely managing to eke out a living.

 This third graph gives some idea of just what the French were producing during these year.  I needed to leave out rye and wine, the next two largest crops.

This fourth and final graph is cultural rather than strictly economic, although it has economic causes.  Quite simply, it shows the trend we are seeing everywhere in the world: as people become wealthier, they eat more meat.  This trend is as evident for 21st-century Africa as it is for 19th-century Europe.  Here I trace food consumption from shortly after the dawn of the Third Republic (established 1871) until just a few years before World War II began.  You may notice that there is no figure for 1914-1919 here.  Those of you who are students of history will understand this anomaly: World War I lasted 1914-1918, and 1919 wasn't a wholly normal year, either, for that matter.  There therefore aren't data available for these years.

This is literally only a fraction of the graphs that I've made so far, and I'll probably construct several more before my thesis is finished.  I hope that these data and my explanations have been entertaining.
~JD