Lichenz
Moving Crops and the Scales of History
Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva
A solid work of agrarian history. Centers around the idea of the "cropscape", a term the authors have coined to refer to a concept they develop in the work; basically, the idea that when people grow a crop, there develops a whole constellation of factors around that crop which allow it to prosper, including other plants, animals, fungus, and bacteria, but also including a set of material and social technologies. This may sound familiar to anyone who's read James C. Scott's Against the Grain, in which he argues that cereal grains foster a sort of mentality and social organization which is particularly suitable to state formation - this is no coincidence, as Moving Crops is a part of Yale's Agrarian Studies Series, edited by Scott, and his works are among those most frequently cited here.
The book suffers to some extent from problems which are endemic among modern works of history: a deference to modern progressive ideology bordering on the absurd (like the insistence on capitalizing "black" and not "white" when discussing race), and a tendency towards abstraction that sometimes leads to claims which are incredibly difficult to actually pin down, and therefore impossible to argue against. Fortunately, these are only present to a limited extent in this book, and the bulk of what's here is genuinely solid scholarship.
The work is structured into six chapters, each focusing on a particular factor relevant to growing crops - Times, Places, Sizes, Actants (agency), Compositions, Reproductions. Each chapter then features several crops and analyzes the cropscapes which form around it in relation to the chapter's theme, with several crops (tobacco, millet, wheat) showing up across multiple chapters. The authors have a tendency to jump around in terms of both chronology and location, drawing out connections that span different time periods and places. I imagine this might be unappealing to some, but I do not mind it.
The focus throughout the book in many places is on complicating things, on showing that established narratives are not so well-established as they may seem. Take, for instance, their section on dates in the first chapter: they explain how date palms allow for the construction(!) of oasis ecologies, their canopies providing shade under which other fruit trees may be grown, and then below those fruit trees cereal grains. These oasis ecologies are fruitful, but not enough to fully sustain their inhabitants, and so a symbiotic relationship forms between oasis-dwellers and camel-nomads, who connect oases to the wider world with their caravan networks of trade, exporting their dates far and wide. In focusing on this they disrupt the conventional division of settled/nomadic peoples, showing that across Arabia and North Africa, settler and nomad existed in an entangled relationship of interdependence.
This work of unsettling established narratives continues throughout: they challenge the idea of increasing size, organization, and mechanization as inevitable for progress in agriculture by pointing to the persistence of dynamic smallholder farms and traditional labor practices in many areas. One striking example is how the plantation model was applied in India, with the ideal being that one day these farms would be entirely mechanized and there would be no need for local laborers. This ideal was never realized, as tea production involved delicate processes which continued to require human labor (supplied by Indians who were indentured, sometimes forcibly; see the 1863 Transport of Native Labourers Act). So, also, they disrupt the idea of cacao as an inherently exploitative industry by pointing to its production in Ghana, dominated by smallholder farms in a sharecropping system which allows young men to work on another man's land and split the proceeds, giving the landowner a one-third share of the crop; the sharecropper (usually a relative of the landowner) acquires a degree of capital which he will later use to buy his own land and start a family, and eventually also lend his own land out in the same fashion. The system is resilient and promotes family formation, a far cry from the plantation structure most think of when they think of cacao production, which demolishes families and erodes traditional values.
The most illustrative examples of one of the core aspects of the book, the idea that crops foster systems of organization which then affect the entire organization of a society, are probably yams and cereal grains. Yams are resistant to commodification by their very nature, as they spoil easily. They serve as the staple crop of the Trobriand Islanders, the New Guinea highlanders, and several small Amazonian tribes. In all these cases we can see yams serving as the foundation of a sophisticated gift-economy. Cereal grains are in many ways the opposite, being grown intensively and being incredibly legible (an entire field of rice will ripen at the same time, visibly) and thus susceptible to state oversight. Indeed, in China rice and millet were consciously seen as promoting "civilized" Chinese values, and their cultivation was promoted in frontier areas and among marginal peoples.
There is much more that could be written about this book - it is really the first move in what will surely become a movement of works using this sort of methodology to analyze different aspects of the material world and how they relate to culture and society. I would highly recommend this one. Further information about the book and essays based around these concepts can be found on the Max Planck Institute's cropscapes webpage.