The General View series of county surveys was an initiative of the Board of Agriculture of Great Britain, of the early 1790s. Many of these works had second editions, in the 1810s.
The Board, set up by Sir John Sinclair, was generally a proponent of enclosures.
William Marshall, who had written the Central Highlands survey, was a rival of Arthur Young, and at odds with him over the surveys. He wrote at length about the reports in 1808 to 1817, producing a five-volume Review, generally critical of the reports. William Lester's History of British Implements and Machinery applicable to Agriculture (1811) drew heavily on extracts from the surveys, where those covered agricultural implements. His introduction commented on the difficulty in referring farmers directly to the reports.
Sir John Sinclair wrote a number of related works: