As time passed, specific laws were introduced to deal with particular situations as they were judged to require intervention, most particularly alongside the rise of mechanisation and urbanisation during the Industrial Revolution.
The World Bank has said the agriculture sector is unlikely to achieve high rates of growth because of limited use of inputs, such as fertilisers, lack of irrigation systems and low levels of mechanisation.
It achieves this miracle of abundance by a combination of mechanisation and careful management.
Moholy-Nagy thrived on ideas of dynamic progress, of mechanisation, the inherent possibilities of new materials.
It's Gibbons who locates that sense of power, of mechanisation, in Lynch's work.
Mr Touré, a champion of mechanisation, wants to increase Mali's output of cereals from 3m tonnes today to 10m by 2012.
From the luddites of the 19th century to print unions protesting in the 1980s about computers, there have always been people fearful about the march of mechanisation.
For example, fast food has become cheaper, in part because of mechanisation and in part because the workers producing it are paid less and less.
Social activists and enlightened professionals had brought about legislative reforms; and the benefits of mechanisation, plus wages pushed up by trade unions, had enabled the poor to start buying the sort of cheap goods they were helping to make.
According to FEN, total cutting increased by 67% between 1960 and 1994; but, because of mechanisation, total employment in Maine's timber and paper industries decreased by 27% during the same period.
It may be that broad trends, such as the triumph of notions of progress, the decline of the Ottoman empire, the advance of mechanisation and the emergence of international capital markets, made the construction of the canal inevitable.
