Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, l:2 (Otoño, 2019), 187–212.
The 50th Year: Special Essay 5
Peter A. Coclanis
Field Notes: Agricultural History’s
New Plot Agricultural history has come a long way in recent
décadas, bearing little resemblance to the field at the time when
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History published its first issue in
1970. Además, after decades of decline, this venerable field has
become hot and trendy, attracting many young scholars not only
in history but also in a variety of related disciplines. The study of
agricultura, perceived by many to be old-fashioned, even a bit
anachronistic in the 1970s and 1980s, has actually been transformed
intellectually and demographically over the past twenty-five or
thirty years; a new generation of “aggies” and newcomers from
emerging domains of history have re-envisioned and rejuvenated
the field.
To foreground the argument herein, the rise of cognate fields
such as environmental history and food history in the 1980s had
much to offer increasingly beleaguered agricultural historians, como
did the advent of new approaches and subfields in economic history
(historical anthropometrics) and in allied areas (bioarcheology and
auxology). By and large, agricultural historians’ perception of these
developments as new opportunities to be embraced helped to facil-
itate a process that would ultimately prove instrumental in recasting
and thus reinvigorating the field intellectually—introducing it to
new theories and methods, as well as to what might be called
new points of emphasis. As both a cause and an effect of the re-
invigoration process, the field’s demographics shifted as well, como
younger and more diverse scholars, pleased by the warm reception
that they received, entered agricultural history from these cognate
fields. Eventualmente, agricultural history began to transform, aunque
Peter A. Coclanis is Albert Ray Newsome Distinguished Professor of History and Director,
Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina. He is the author of Time’s Arrow,
Time’s Cycle: Globalization in Southeast Asia Over La Longue Durée (Singapur, 2006); El
Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920
(Nueva York, 1989).
© 2019 por el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts y The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Historia, Cª, https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01409
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| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
188
slowly and fitfully; the changes, which were profound, first had to
be recognized, legitimized, and valorized by “market makers” in
the field— by influential editors, organizaciones profesionales, educa-
tional institutions, funding agencies, and senior academics. A
demonstrate this process, the focus in this article is mainly on U.S.
agricultural history, particularly the agricultural history of the U.S.
South. Much the same transformation occurred, sin embargo, en
agricultural history elsewhere in the United States, in Europe, en
Asia, etc.. Specialists all over the world responded to the same stimuli,
albeit sometimes after a lag.
Nor did the change in agricultural history occur in a vacuum.
The development of both the cognate fields and the new
approaches that were to prove instrumental to it found inspiration,
encouragement, and support from a variety of institutions, centros,
and publication venues, including The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Historia. Although the JIH was hardly the progenitor of the new
agricultural history, it certainly proved adept at the art and science
of intellectual midwifery.
THE BIRTH OF AGRICULTURAL HISTORY IN THE JIH If agricultural
history qua field and agricultural historians qua scholars, alrededor
the early 1990s, could both still be characterized as traditional,
even a tad stodgy, neither was reactionary. In terms of receptivity
to new ideas, both were certainly well within two standard devi-
ations of the scholarly mean for the time. The same is true of the
principal contemporary journals, most notably, Agricultural History,
the standard bearer in the field. Few journals are ever truly “cutting
edge.” Yet, in this regard, the JIH stands out as a major exception.
To be sure, this journal, which has always been accurately associ-
ated with innovation and the embrace of new methods and
approaches, era, in the early 1990s, still in the early stages of incor-
porating the emerging fields and subfields mentioned above into its
scholarly portfolio. Even so, by that time, it had already played an
outsized role in their development. A brief look at the JIH’s
thematic coverage since it began publication in 1970 will illustrate
this point.1
1 En este momento, the Agricultural History Review, the organ of the British Agricultural History
Sociedad, like other leading agricultural-history journals, resembled its older American coun-
terpart, Agricultural History, which began publication in 1927 under the auspices of the Agri-
cultural History Society, founded in Washington, CORRIENTE CONTINUA., eight years earlier.
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
| 189
Classification is seldom as easy as it seems at first blush and is
almost always arbitrary at the margins. These points are particularly
relevant when we want to place objects of concern—in this case,
material published in the JIH—in one bucket and one bucket
solo. Many scholarly articles address multiple themes, at least to some
degree; focusing on just one of them risks the loss of texture and nu-
ance. For the purposes of this exercise, sin embargo, some texture and
nuance can be sacrificed to highlight broad trends regarding coverage
of agricultural history, and its cognates—environmental history, alimento
historia, and historical anthropometrics.
Given these considerations, what do we find on the pages of
the JIH? As early as Volume I in 1970, the journal presented book
reviews dealing, in one way or another, with agricultural history
y, during the journal’s first two decades of existence, a moderate
number of research articles also relevant to the field. Desde el
1990s, sin embargo, research articles about agricultural history have
been scarce. De hecho, desde 1991, the journal has not published a
single paper devoted primarily to agricultural history, a pesar de
pieces with an anthropometric focus often discussed agriculture.
En efecto, even in the 1970s and 1980s, several of the fourteen pieces
classified herein as “agricultural history” could have been described
instead as investigations of slavery, famines, or peasant revolts.
The relative dearth of research essays and articles on agricul-
ture in the JIH is not altogether surprising. The journal’s scope is
general, its aims interdisciplinary, and its preference innovation. Como
suggested above, during much of the JIH’s existence, the specialist
field of agricultural history was traditional, not especially interdis-
ciplinary, y, with a few notable exceptions, seldom ground-
breaking. Por eso, outside of reviews, work in the field was not
highly visible in this journal.
The situation regarding the cognate fields and approaches that
served to revivify agricultural history in recent decades was far dif-
ferent. In that respect, the JIH, true to form, displays its cardinal
traits: Articles on food history appeared as early as 1971; papers fo-
cusing on environmental history had appeared by the late 1970s;
and the journal’s first article in historical anthropometrics arrived in
1982, just as that methodological subfield was emerging. The jour-
nal played a major role in promoting the early development of each
of these areas of study, offering landmark special issues on “History
and Climate” (Primavera 1980), with seventeen contributions, y
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| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
190
“Hunger and History” (Agosto 1983) with twenty-one contribu-
ciones. Similarmente, since the appearance of the JIH’s first piece on his-
torical anthropometrics in 1982, the journal has published another
twenty pieces in this vein, thus becoming one of the major cham-
pions (and publication outlets) for inventive interdisciplinary work
of this sort. Claramente, the JIH has proven helpful to the rise of each of
these fields, and by valorizing and disseminating ideas, conceptos,
and frameworks associated with them, it has arguably facilitated
the transformation of agricultural history into a fecund and fertile
new field.2
THE HISTORY OF FOOD HISTORY On one level—the level of
production—food has long been central to the study of history.
The legions of historians who study the role of agriculture and
agriculturalists around the world in great detail have amassed heaps
of information about food production from the “invention” of
agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago—the so-called Neolithic
Revolution (a term coined by Childe, an Australian archaeologist,
in the mid-1930s)—to the present day. Although those historians
gave their closest attention to crop and animal production, en el
form of farming regimens, labor systems, tecnología, and the like,
they also covered, at least to some extent, input acquisition and the
distribution of farm output. Over time, interested parties learned
something about pre-production and post-harvest activities as well
—not enough, but not a negligible amount either. Food history
focused firmly on matters material and fit snugly within the frame
of agricultural history, traditionally conceived.3
Food historians today approach their subject differently, generación-
erally focusing on food as an expression of culture, a marker of
identity, a representation or signifier of taste and discernment,
and a lens or prism through which to explore mentalités, etc.. Food
studies of this kind have been around a long time in disciplines
such as anthropology, sociology, folklore, and psychology, pero
in the discipline of history they are of relatively recent vintage
and still awaiting complete legitimization. To be sure, angosto
cadres of historians interested in culinary history and the history
2 These trends are based on an analysis of JIH content running from the first issue of Volume
I (Otoño 1970) through the second issue of Volume XLIX (Otoño 2018).
3 V. Gordon Childe, New Light on the Most Ancient East (Nueva York, 1952; origen. pub. con
this title, 1934), 23.
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
| 191
of cuisine have occupied the connoisseurial edges of the discipline,
but not until the 1960s did the broader cultural dimensions of food
start to acquire serious scholarly treatment.
In that decade, historians associated with the journal Annales:
Economies, Societés, Civilisations, Por ejemplo, began publishing
pieces on food that pushed beyond narrow connoisseurship—
en efecto, beyond the larder and the kitchen table—focusing mainly
on the effects of diet and nutrition on various historical peoples and
grupos. These studies were more social than cultural in orientation—
given the manner in which cultural pieces on food were eventually
to be written as time passed—and they anticipated work in historical
anthropometrics as much as food studies. Sin embargo, by employing
documentation related to food to raise new scholarly questions, ellos
began to take food history down new, broader paths.4
Scholarly works in the 1970s, such as Crosby’s The Columbian
Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport,
1972) and Braudel’s three-volume Civilisation matérielle, économie
et capitalisme, XV e–XVIII e siècle (París, 1967–1979) continued what
the Annales started in the 1960s, drawing attention to matters large
and small illuminated by food. According to Crosby, biotic migra-
ciones, including those of foodstuffs—migrations that previous
generations of historians barely glossed—were important to under-
standing phenomena ranging from the demographic collapse of
Native American societies in the centuries after 1492 to African
slavery in the Western Hemisphere and population growth in
Europe and Africa. In the first volume of Civilisation matérielle,
économie et capitalism, Braudel’s masterful discussions of the various
effects of wheat and rice in world history and his anthropologically
informed insights about what food, cooking, and table manners
can reveal about social and cultural life energized everyone who
engaged with his work. Truth be told, sin embargo, Crosby’s book,
which was published by a relatively obscure press after being
rejected by numerous mainstream outlets, took time to gather
steam, gaining broad scholarly purchase only after Braudel’s
multi-volume work was fully translated into English (1981–1984).5
Ver, Por ejemplo, John C. Super, “Food and History,” Journal of Social History, XXXVI
4
(2002), 165–178; Warren Belasco, “Food History as a Field,” in Paul Freedman, Joyce E.
Chaplin, and Ken Albala (editores.), Food in Time and Place (berkeley, 2014), 1–17.
5 Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
( Westport, 1972); Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XV e–XVIII e
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192
| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
During the 1970s, most of the exciting work relevant to food
history continued to originate in, and radiate from, the allied
disciplines mentioned earlier, particularly anthropology and sociol-
ogia. Important new work, sin embargo, also began to emerge in en-
vironmental history and historical anthropometrics, destined to
play key roles in the decades ahead (about which, more anon).
The end of the decade was marked by two important develop-
ments in the field of food history. In May 1979, the first three
seminars of the now-famous Oxford Symposium on Food and
Cookery took place, organized by food historian Alan Davidson
and the eminent historian of France, Theodore Zeldin. En eso
same year, Petits Propos Culinaires, the world’s first journal of “food
studies and food history,” was founded, the first issue appearing in
1980.6
Todavía, food history did not really break out until the 1980s, en
large part because food, as a subject of inquiry, comported so well
with approaches, conceptos, and conceits associated with cultural
historia, at that point the hottest area in the historical field. El
fact that cultural historians during that decade were heavily influ-
enced by structural and cultural anthropologists who wrote fre-
quently and substantively about food—Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, Marvin Harris, etc.—as well as
theorists such as Roland Barthes and Bourdieu, whose interests
lay in the semiotics of food and eating, helps to explain the surge
of writing in food history during the 1980s.7
dicho eso, Mintz was the anthropologist who arguably exerted
the most influence in that decade and those that followed. No
particularly theoretical in orientation, he nonetheless inspired
siècle (París, 1967–1979), 3 v., published in English as (trans. Siân Reynolds), Civilization and
Capitalism 15th–18th Century (Nueva York, 1981–1984). An early, shorter, preliminary version of
Braudel’s argument was published in English as (trans. Miriam Kochan), Capitalism and Material
Life 1400–1800 (Nueva York, 1975). For Crosby’s difficulty in finding a publisher for Columbian
Exchange, see the interview by Meghan Gambino, “Alfred W. Crosby on The Columbian Ex-
cambiar,” Smithsonian.com (4 Oct. 2011), disponible en https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/
alfred-w-crosby-on-the-columbian-exchange-98116477/ (consultado en septiembre 15, 2018).
6 For the origins and early history of the Oxford Symposium, see the historical section on
the Symposium’s website https://www.oxfordsymposium.org.uk/early-history/ (accedido
Septiembre 15, 2018).
Ver, Por ejemplo, Freedman, “Preface,” in idem, Chaplin, and Albala (editores.), Food in Time
7
and Place, xi–xxi; Belasco, “Food History as a Field.” For a “taste” of Bourdieu on these
matters, see Bourdieu (trans. Richard Nice), Distinction: A Social Critique of Judgement and Taste
(Cambridge, Masa., 1984), 175–208.
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
| 193
scholars all over the world with the publication of Sweetness and
Fuerza: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Nueva York, 1986), en
which he demonstrated the crucial links between the European
demand for sugar and the African slave trade, capitalist plantations
in the Americas, and the transformation of bourgeois eating rituals
and working-class nutrition in Europe. Although scholars had stud-
ied the histories of individual crops—Redcliffe N. Salaman’s The
History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge, 1949) being a
case in point—no scholarly work of this type, before or since, tiene
ever enjoyed the influence of Mintz’s Sweetness and Power. The book
quickly became the primary motivating force behind the sub-genre
of scholarly and nonscholarly work often known as “commodity
estudios,” treating plants such as corn, wheat, coffee, cotton, a-
bacco, rice, indigo, manioc, bananas, peaches, chocolate/cacao,
henequen/sisal/abacá, etc., as prisms through which to analyze
económico, environmental, cultural, and political issues. En efecto, él
is the rare, seemingly forlorn plant today that does not have its
own historian. Even rhubarb has a good one, Clifford M. Foust,
who penned Rhubarb: The Wondrous Drug (Princeton, 1992).8
Such commodity studies represent only one strain of work
that has developed in the field of food history and, more broadly,
food studies since the 1980s. The so-called cultural turn in histor-
ical studies during that decade led to a tsunami of scholarship on
food and foodways, ranging from the history of eating disorders
and food phobias to the rise of the restaurant and the origins of
cookbooks to national cuisines. More sociologically inclined
scholars followed suit, publishing extensively on the history of
food-distribution networks, food production/dietary regimes, fam-
ines, hunger, and obesity. High-profile historians emerged in the
food-history field—for example, Belasco and Harvey Levenstein
in the early days and Donna R. Gabaccia, Freedman, Amy Bentley,
jeffrey m. Pilcher, and James E. McWilliams later—and we now
have listservs, specialized websites, and conferences galore.
A number of impressive food handbooks, encyclopedias, y
compendia have appeared, and food-history collections see regular
En 1985, British journalist Henry Hobhouse also published an important early study in the
8
commodity genre, Seeds of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind (Londres, 1985). Este
study garnered a great deal of attention from, and sales to, general audiences. Hobhouse’s top
five crops were sugar, tea, cotton, the potato, and quinine. In a revised edition, published in
1999, he added a sixth crop, the cocoa plant.
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194
| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
publicación, along with several established journals in food history,
such as Global Food History, now in its fourth year. Food journals
with broader mandates, like Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and
Cultura (2001– ), often feature historical essays, and new food
programs arise with increasing frequency. The field has become
popular with younger scholars of all genders, y, important for
our purposes in this article, the interests of these scholars often
cross into agricultural history, providing that venerable—some
would say, wizened—field the possibility of a second act. Este
re-emergence owes much to the nearly simultaneous ascent of
another cognate field, environmental history.9
Environmental History Most scholars trace the beginnings of
environmental history to the late 1960s and early 1970s, seeing it
as a scholarly outgrowth of the broader environmental movement
that was coming to prominence. Writers from a variety of back-
grounds and disciplinary perspectives—human ecology, geog-
raphy, conservation biology, and the like—had already been
working on related and relevant themes. The list includes not only
iconic figures like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson but also more
obscure ones like Julian Steward, Eugene Odum, Carl Sauer, y
Paul Sears; Sears’ work in the 1940s and 1950s was to prove ex-
tremely influential among environmental historians. Además,
political historians in the United States had generated a sizable
literature on the conservation/preservation movements, incluido
most notably Hays’ Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency
(pittsburgh, 1999), which focuses on the Progressive era.10
Without getting too deeply into the weeds, we can depict
environmental history as the study of the relationship between
human cultures and environment in the past. Its principal goal,
See Freedman, Chaplin, and Albala (editores.), Food in Time and Place; Matt Garcia, “Setting
9
the Table: Historians, Popular Writers, and Food History,” Journal of American History, CIII
(2016), 656–678; Pilcher, “The Embodied Imagination in Recent Writings on Food History,"
American Historical Review, CXXI (2016), 861–887.
Sarah T. Phillips, “Environmental History,” in Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (editores.),
10
American History Now (Filadelfia, 2011), 285–313; Paul S. Sutter, “The World with Us:
The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History, C (2013),
94–119; Donald Worster, “Fear and Redemption in the Environment Movement,” in
Coclanis and Stuart Bruchey (editores.), Ideas, Ideologies, and Social Movements: The United States
Experience Since 1800 (Columbia, S.C., 1999), 158–172; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the
Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.,1959).
For more discussion of environmental history in this journal and elsewhere, see Steven A.
Epstein’s special article, “Environmental History in the JIH, 1970–2020,” in this issue.
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
as Worster famously put it, is one “of deepening our understand-
ing of how humans have been affected by their natural environ-
ment through time and, conversely, how they have affected that
environment and with what results.” Although food history and
environmental history have different taproots, they share some
genetic material. Both fields drew from concerns and methods
associated with social history—for example, the research priorities,
expansive time horizons, and eco-geographical emphases frequently
on display in Annales ESC during the 1960s and 1970s—and both
credit Crosby as a progenitor, viewing The Columbian Exchange,
which foregrounds both food and environmental concerns, en
reverential terms.11
The Relationship between Environmental and Agricultural History
Throughout the course of the three scholarly generations since
its emergence, environmental history has moved from the margins
to the epicenter of historical inquiry, in some ways mirroring
broader socio-cultural trends regarding environmental issues.
Given the “ground” that they shared, agricultural history and
environmental history were destined to find each other, but what
economists call the discovery process was slower than might have
been expected, for a variety of reasons.
Differences in the “cultures” of the two fields and in the prev-
alent ideological assumptions of practitioners in each were at least
partially responsible for the protracted nature of the discovery
proceso. As late as the 1990s, agricultural history was dominated
by scholars from—or who could at least claim an affinity with—
land-grant institutions, generally those with well-regarded
schools of agriculture, especially in the Midwest. De este modo, the ma-
jority of the participants at the meetings of the Agricultural His-
tory Society—the oldest and most respected organization of its
kind in the world—tended to be from the universities Iowa State,
Kansas State, Wisconsin-Madison, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Texas A & METRO, Cornell, California-Davis, or Georgia, a pesar de
non–land-grant universities such as Oklahoma, Iowa, and Florida
11 Worster, “Doing Environmental History,” in idem (ed.), The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives
on Modern Environmental History (Nueva York, 1988), 289–307, esp. 290–291 (quotation); John
R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History &
Teoría, XL (2003), 5–43; Andrew C. Isenberg, “A New Environmental History,” in idem
(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History (Nueva York, 2014), 3–20. See also the
works cited in n. 10.
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196
| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
Estado, and personnel from the United States Department of Agri-
cultura (USDA) were represented, también (the number of people there
in recent decades affiliated with, or separated by only a degree of
freedom or two from, Iowa State is remarkable).
Notwithstanding some coincidence between the schools
where agricultural historians trained and/or taught and those
where the “newbie” environmental historians originated, the rela-
tionships between the two sets of schools did not seem to overlap
much at first. The University of Wisconsin was one major excep-
ción. Sin embargo, even at Wisconsin-Madison—where the distin-
guished environmental historians Roderick Nash and Carolyn
Merchant did their graduate work and, más tarde, William Cronon
spent his undergraduate years—the connection of environmental
history with intellectual history, the history of science, and espe-
cially frontier history and the history of the West seems to have
been tighter than that with agricultural history per se.12
Wisconsin was an established center for studying both frontier
history and western history: How could it be otherwise with a
scholarly roster running directly from Frederick Jackson Turner to
Frederic L. Paxson, John Hicks, Merle Curti, Vernon Carstensen,
Bogue (an original and active member the JIH’s board of editors),
and Cronon? Nor was Wisconsin the only university with a strength
in western history/history of the frontier that served as a breeding
ground for environmental historians during the field’s early years.
Two of the most important early figures in the field, Worster and
Cronon, both did their graduate work at Yale University under
the guidance of Howard Lamar. But such close coincidence was
the exception rather than the rule. Since the 1990s, sin embargo, más
overlap has clearly occurred, and some universities—Georgia and
Mississippi State, for example—excel in both fields.13
12 The lack of connection between environmental and agricultural history at Wisconsin-
Madison is surprising, given the presence there of the eminent agricultural historians Allan
Bogue from 1964 a 1991 and Morton Rothstein from the early 1960s until 1984, antes
he moved to the University of California-Davis to succeed James Shideler as editor of Agri-
cultural History.
See Jon K. Lauck, “The Last Prairie Historian: An Interview with Professor Allan G.
13
Bogue, Historian of the Midwest,” Middle West Review, I (2014), 91–105; interview with
Morton Rothstein, conducted by Peter H. Lindert, Octubre 29, 1998, Universidad de
California-Davis, disponible en https://video.ucdavis.edu/media/ Morton+Rothstein/
0_3t27d62b (consultado en septiembre 16, 2018). Note that Bogue was closely associated with
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History from its inception in 1970 until the time of his death;
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
| 197
In addition to the early lack of institutional overlap between
agricultural history and environmental history, the practitioners
of the two fields held few fundamental assumptions in common.
A pesar de, broadly speaking, scholars in both fields dealt with the
relationship between human cultures in past environments, agricul-
tural historians were more likely to privilege human actions (y
judge their results more favorably) and to view the environment
in more instrumental terms—the provision of the food and fiber
necessary and sufficient to support human life.
Most agricultural historians explored the means and relations
of production in agriculture or the social, cultural, and political ex-
pressions and concomitants associated therewith. Until the arrival
of environmental history onto the scholarly stage, they generally
did not concentrate on the environment per se; nor did they
view it in reciprocal terms. They usually treated it, whether explic-
itly or implicitly, as “land” in the economist’s sense—a bundle of
“natural” resources for humans to utilize in the process of produc-
ción. They granted the environment special attention primarily
when some aspect of it impeded said process—the expense of
land-clearing, Por ejemplo, or migration, or expensive reclamation
projects driven by soil erosion.
Como era de esperar, environmental historians took a vastly differ-
ent approach, analyzing the interaction between humans and their
environment in a reciprocal way, almost as mathematical equals
regardless of the variables involved. They also had their ideological
differences with agricultural historians, and still do. Phillips among
others has made the important distinction between environmental
historians and environmentalist historians who embrace and often
practice hard or soft forms of environmental advocacy. She sug-
gests that environmental historians are aware of this distinction
and generally abide by it, though both branches tend to share
commitments to the environment that differ in degree, if not in
he wrote for it and served on the editorial board from 1970 until 2002 before becoming an
editor emeritus until 2016. Bogue’s wife, Margaret Beattie Bogue, was also a distinguished
agricultural and environmental historian of the Midwest based in Madison, teaching in the
extension and outreach divisions of the University of Wisconsin from 1966 until 1991. Ella
finally received a joint appointment in History in 1989, two years before her retirement. Ella
became president of the Agricultural History Society in 1984 and a fellow of the society in
1995. See “Agricultural History Talks to Allan and Margaret Bogue,” Agricultural History,
LXXIX (2005), 347–369; Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, “In Memoriam: Margaret Beattie Bogue
( Junio 14, 1924–March 8, 2018),” Agricultural History, XCII (2018), 261–263.
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198
| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
kind, from those that agricultural historians share about any facet
of agriculture.14
Some of the differences between environmental(ist?) histo-
rians and (traditional) agricultural historians in the early 1990s
are evident in a narrative (en el cual, alas, I was a principal contrib-
utor) that involves one of the ur texts in modern environmental
historia, Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
(Nueva York, 1991). In this important and hugely influential study,
Cronon not only punctures any residual Turnerian beliefs about the
development narrative in the U.S. Oeste; he also offers a provocative
interpretation of Chicago’s rise, which he insists was predicated on
the systematic, and egregious, exploitation of the resources of the
city’s vast continental hinterland. By making his case with vigor
and with considerable empirical support, he sought to baptize the
concept of second nature—mankind’s artificial manipulation of “first
nature.” Nature’s Metropolis received a great deal of attention, won
several prizes, and attracted overwhelmingly positive reviews.15
A few traditional agricultural historians demurred, incluido
mí mismo. For better or worse, I wrote a strongly worded critical es-
say about the book in Reviews in American History (1992), that ac-
cused Cronon of being smug and his argument in Nature’s
Metropolis of being tendentious and anti-capitalist to the point of
misanthropy in its zealous defense of “first nature,” or something
akin to nature. In Cronon’s narrative, a vaguely defined but clearly
pernicious “logic of capital” was responsible for the decline of
milling, lumbering, and meatpacking—the three resource-based
processing industries upon which he focuses almost all of his atten-
tion—and thus the city’s economy. En otras palabras, a development
strategy based on resource extraction and exploitation was a mon-
umental mistake. I interpreted the situation differently, sin embargo,
maintaining that in shedding those industries, Chicago was mov-
ing purposively and decisively into other better and more sophis-
ticated valued-added ones—iron and steel, machine-shop/foundry
14 Phillips, “Environmental History," 285.
15 Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Nueva York, 1991). In the wake of
Cronon’s work, environmentalists such as anthropologist Anna Louwenhaupt Tsing at the
University of California-Santa Cruz have elaborated on his concept of “second nature”—
nature after transformation by (capitalistic) humans—by drawing attention to “third nature,"
which for Tsing is “what manages to live despite capitalism.” See idem, The Mushroom at the
End of the World: Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, 2015), viii.
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| 199
products, and railroad cars, as well as clothing/apparel and tobacco
products. In those new endeavors, the city was to become a
national leader, but Cronon had not seen fit to discuss them.16
My review captured considerable attention—not all of it
favorable, by any means. Hoy, it is often paired with Cronon’s
book for educational purposes as a useful heuristic foil. I bring up
this little dust-up not for promotional purposes but to illustrate the
degree to which at least some agricultural historians in the early
1990s still harbored suspicions about the arguments and even the
motivations of “green” historians.
Ironically, at about the same time, momentous change was
afoot. More ironically, the spark for it was a high-profile and
much-debated 1990 piece written by Worster—a central figure
in environmental history even more critical of capitalist agriculture
and capitalism in general than was Cronon. In it, Worster made a
galvanizing case for what he called an “agroecological perspective”
among environmental historians, which inspired many of them to
explore more closely what agricultural historians had done and
were doing. In time, or more accurately, in relatively short order,
such exploration led to increasing communication and eventually
to a colonization movement. By the end of the 1990s, agricultural
history had become home to many graduate students and younger
scholars who had migrated from environmental history, or food
historia, forever changing both the intellectual dynamics and the
demographics of agricultural history as a distinct field.17
THE NEW AGRICULTURAL HISTORY The past two decades have wit-
nessed the emergence of the “new” agricultural history, a devel-
opment inclined toward greater interdisciplinarity because of its
openness to change, thanks mainly to those youngish boundary-
crossers from environmental history and food history. Once the
field opened to such newcomers, similar crossings by business histo-
rians, historians of science/technology, labor historians, económico
historians, historical geographers, and historians of gender ensued.
Además, with the coming of the new agricultural history, el
sociology and culture of the field changed as well, acquiring much
16 Coclanis, “Urbs in Horto,” Reviews in American History, XX (1992), 14–20.
17 Worster, “Transformation of the Earth: Toward an Agroecological Perspective in
Historia,” Journal of American History, LXXVI (1990), 1087–1106; Sutter, “World with Us,"
105–109.
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| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
200
greater representation of “neo-aggies” from “Moo U’s” such as
Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. Who knew? The mash-up brought
agricultural history from the margins into the mainstream, mucho
nearer to the center of research in the historical field. A pesar de
the JIH did not lead the charge across disciplinary boundaries, él
certainly was helpful in its role as a venue for scholars exploring
new subfields and themes, y, even more important, for model-
ing interdisciplinarity, cual, después de todo, is the journal’s raison d’être.
The new agricultural history contrasts sharply from the old in
many ways but, first and foremost, in its broader remit. As sug-
gested earlier, traditional agricultural historians had focused on
matters of production (en otras palabras, farmers in the field) o,
to stretch the point a little, on farm politics. The new agricultural
historians, sin embargo, began to conceive of agricultural history as
incorporating the vicissitudes of rural life more generally—input
acquisition and the disposition of farm output, the relationship be-
tween rural and urban patterns and processes, agriculture’s place in
larger ecological/environmental systems, and economic circuits
and orbits ranging from the local to the global.
The success of new journals, such as the Journal of Rural Studies
(1985), Histoire & Societes Rurales (1990), and Rural History: Economy,
Sociedad, Cultura (1990), and new organizations, such as EURHO
(European Rural History Organisation), is one manifestation of
that expansion, although rural history as a separate field of inquiry,
not to mention other antecedents, had an initial growth spurt
slightly earlier, in the 1980s. The same holds true in general for
the mushrooming genre often known as commodity studies, el
popularity of which owed much to the intellectual and commer-
cial success of Mintz’s Sweetness and Power in the mid-1980s. En eso
vein, we can only wonder at the deforestation necessary to print
Mark Kurlansky’s numerous books about cod, oysters, milk,
American food in the pre-modern era, Clarence Birdseye, etc.,
as well as his anthologies of food writing (I, también, have delved into
commodity history in my work on rice and its evolving place in
economic circuits across the globe for the past 350 años).18
18 For further details regarding Kurlansky’s massive food corpus, see his website http://
www.markkurlansky.com/ (consultado en septiembre 16, 2018). For a brief, early introduction to
the major themes treated in my study of rice, see Coclanis, “Distant Thunder: The Creation of
a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought,” American Historical Review,
XCVIII (1993), 1050–1078.
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| 201
Other writers used the new remit to change the angle of re-
fraction, the register, etc., of their studies. Take the global turn, para
ejemplo. Many historical studies in recent decades have focused
on agricultural developments in global perspective, particularly
on the global supply chains involving food and fiber that emerged
in the early modern and modern eras. Less familiar are those that
experiment with narrative strategies, employing unusual lenses or
aural ranges in agricultural and environmental history—among
a ellos, William Least Heat-Moon’s Prairy-Erth: A Deep Map
(Nueva York, 1991), William T. Vollmann’s Imperial (Nueva York,
2009), Madeleine Bunting’s The Plot: The Story of a Father and an
English Acre (Londres, 2009), y, further back, John Berger’s Pig
Earth (Nueva York, 1979).
Collaboration and Incorporation Nonetheless, the new agricul-
tural history is more concerned with incorporating new interests
rather than devising new discursive strategies. One result of this
cross-pollination is the increased difficulty of clearly distinguishing
“agricultural” historians from specialists in other subfields, particular-
larly if they do not explicitly identify their provenance. Para en-
postura, was Kirby an agricultural historian or an environmental
historiador, o ambos, later in his career? What about other fine
“hybrid” scholars such as Mart Stewart, Mark Hersey, and Bert
Way? What about the scholar of Southeast Asia Peter Boomgaard
or the scholar of Africa James C. McCann? It is difficult to say, pero
given the degree of boundary crossing between the fields, semejante
distinctions really no longer matter as much as they used to.19
In this era of incorporation, virtually all agricultural historians
now devote increased attention to the short-term and long-term
environmental effects of cultivation practices and regimes, también
as to matters of systemic sustainability. Agro-environmental
scholars now take economic matters more seriously, particularly
negative externalities. Además, as environmental historians
and food historians, who often favor ethical questions, joined
Ver, Por ejemplo, Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960
19
(Baton Rouge, 1987); ídem, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill,
1995); ídem, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill, 2006). kirby
served as President of the Agricultural History Society in 1993/4. En 2010, shortly after his
death in 2009, the Southern Historical Association established the Jack Temple Kirby Prize
for the best journal article in either southern agricultural history or southern environmental
history over a two-year period.
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| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
202
the fold, the field of agricultural history became more accepting
de, and comfortable with, normative judgments about people,
políticas, and political arrangements in the past. En efecto, phalanxes
of newcomers arriving from environmental history and food
history cut their teeth on theories and arguments based on the as-
sumption that capitalist agriculture and capitalist food systems were
inherently exploitive, inequitable, and unethical to nature and
humans alike. The challenge that such “declensionist” views posed
to agricultural historians of a more traditional persuasion, OMS
tended to be positivist in orientation and supportive of capitalist
agricultura, was both provocative and exhilarating, gradually cre-
ating more sophisticated and comprehensive interpretations of
what might be called food systems. Works of that kind are now
commonplace for the United States as well as other parts of
el mundo. Por ejemplo, within the last decade alone, grandes,
McElwee, and Aso, among others, have written excellent studies
about Vietnam, which once may have been considered far-flung.20
Speaking of food systems, some historians—myself and Shane
hamilton, to name just two—have drawn insights from not only
the commodity-chain/supply-chain literature in the social sciences
but also from input-output analysis and, more specifically, de
John H. Davis and Ray Goldberg’s foundational book, A Concept
of Agribusiness (Cambridge, Masa., 1957). Hamilton and I, each in
our own way, have made a case for the efficacy of approaches
spanning the sequence from input acquisition and farm finance
through production, harvest, post-harvest activities (storage and
wholesale distribution), retail sales, food/fiber consumption,
waste/waste management, etc.. Because of the ever-increasing
number of works on parts of this “system”—Hamilton’s Trucking
Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton,
2014) springs to mind—the task of synthesis is becoming easier;
it will soon be available for the asking. Other scholars engaged
in systems thinking have used the nexus concept in water studies
to explore the relationship between water, energía, land use, alimento,
20 David Biggs, Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (seattle, 2010);
Pamela D. McElwee, Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (seattle,
2016); Michitake Aso, Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975
(Chapel Hill, 2018). Among the scholars pursuing similar lines elsewhere, see McCann,
who has a rich body of work on the agro-environmental history of Africa, particularly
Ethiopia and East Africa, and Mark Elvin and Kenneth Pomeranz, who write about China.
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and human rights around the world. Además, the notion of food
regimes, which is consistent with, and benefits from, systems ap-
se acerca, is becoming established in the agricultural historian’s
tool kit. Questions regarding the environment, producción, nutri-
ción, etc., are increasingly folded into such regimes, whether “in-
dustrial” or LOS (local, organic, slow), as scholars analyze the
consequences arising therefrom or at least associated therewith.21
Among those specialists in fields other than environmental
history and food history who have found a home in agricultural
history are historians of African-American history. Many of them
found inspiration in historical geographer Judith Carney’s Black Rice:
The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge,
Masa., 2001), which incited a lively (and protracted) debate, sin embargo
improbable, about the origins of rice technology in the Western
Hemisphere. Similarmente, following in the footsteps of scholars such
as Vaclav Smil, Deborah Fitzgerald, and Francesca Bray, who have
made lasting contributions to our understanding of agricultural tech-
nología, a new generation of historians of science and technology
estudios (STS)—Hahn and Saraiva, among others—have raised new
questions and offered provocative answers about that theme. Hahn
and Saraiva, along with Bray and John Bosco Lourdusamy, son
engaged in a research initiative entitled “Moving Crops and the
Scales of History,” which, when completed, could well disrupt
our thinking about not just the history of technology but also agri-
cultural history and the history of globalization. Finalmente, a number of
“new” agricultural historians have deployed GIS and its software tools
in a reorientation of our spatial conceptions of historical develop-
ments in rural America—Cunfer’s superb agro-
environmental
studies of the Great Plains being a case in point.22
21
John H. Davis and Ray Goldberg, A Concept of Agribusiness (Bostón, 1957); Coclanis,
“Breaking New Ground: From the History of Agriculture to the History of Food Systems,"
Historical Methods, XXXVIII (2005), 5–13; Shane Hamilton, “Revisiting the History of Agri-
negocio,” Business History Review, XC (2016), 541–545. For the record, Bruchey and Coclanis
employed Davis and Goldberg’s concept in “A History of Agribusiness in the United States,"
in Giulio Pontecorvo (ed.), The Management of Food Policy (Nueva York, 1976), 149–192. Ver
hamilton, Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Wal-Mart Economy (Princeton, 2008). Para
the nexus concept, see especially Felix Dodds and Jamie Bartram (editores.), The Water, Food,
Energy and Climate Nexus: Challenges and an Agenda for Action (Nueva York, 2016). In recent
décadas, several socialist journals, especially Monthly Review, have aggressively pursued research
on food regimes, agro-environmentalism, etc..
22 For the fullest critique of Carney’s argument, see David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David
Richardson, “Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution
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204
| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
Like agricultural studies in the STS mode, the so-called new his-
tory of American capitalism has created quite a stir in recent years.
Numerous scholars associated with this movement focus on southern
agricultura, particularly the relationship between slavery, plantations,
commodity production, and the course of U.S. historia. Their con-
troversial work returns slavery and southern agriculture to the posi-
tion of scholarly prominence that it last enjoyed in the 1970s.23
Labor historians, también, have been finding agriculture and the food
system fertile fields for research. Historians such as Cindy Hahamovitch,
Matt Garcia, Deborah Fink, Roger Horowitz, Bryant Simon, y
Monica Gisolfi, as well as labor anthropologists such as Steve Striffler
have done important work on farm workers, farm animals, meat
producción, and meatpacking, y, further up the food supply chain,
several studies of kitchen workers, servers, and the entire food-service
industry have recently appeared. Hribal has written about farm animals
as agricultural “workers,” and other scholars about plant “agency” in
agricultura, including “quorum sensing” among soil bacteria.
The budding area of inquiry known as “coevolutionary history,"
which brings together history and biology, has galvanized the in-
terest and attention of not a few young agricultural historians.24
to Rice Culture in the Americas,” American Historical Review, CXII (2007), 1329–1358. Ver
also “AHR Exchange: The Question of ‘Black Rice,’” ibid., 115 (2010), 123–150. Barbara
METRO. Hahn, Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617–1937 (baltimore, 2011);
Tiago Saraiva, Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (Cambridge,
Masa., 2016). For information about the “Moving Crops and the Scales of History” project,
see the group’s website https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/projects/moving-crops-
and-scale-history (consultado en septiembre 16, 2018). For a sample of Cunfer’s work, see idem,
“Scaling the Dust Bowl,” in Anne Kelly Knowles (ed.), Placing History: How Maps, Espacial
Datos, and GIS are Changing Historical Scholarship (Redlands, 2008), 95–121; Cunfer and Fridolin
Krausmann, “Adaptation on an Agricultural Frontier: Socio-Ecological Profiles of Great
Plains Settlement, 1870–1940,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLVI (2016), 1–38.
23 For a concise analytical discussion of the new history of American capitalism, see Sven
Beckert and Christine Desan, "Introducción,” in idem (editores.), American Capitalism: New Histories
(Nueva York, 2018), 1–32; for interesting assessments of this new formulation, the discussion
entitled “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History, CI (2014),
503–536; Eric Hilt, “Economic History, Historical Analysis, and the ‘New History of
Capitalismo,’” Journal of Economic History, LXXVII (2017), 511–536; for the place of slavery
in the new history of capitalism, Beckert and Seth Rockman (editores.), Slavery’s Capitalism: A
New History of American Economic Development (Filadelfia, 2016); for critiques of the new
views of slavery’s role, Juan J.. Clegg, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Critical Historical Studies, II
(2015), 281–304; Coclanis, “Slavery, Capitalismo, and the Problem of Misprision," Diario de
American Studies, LII (2018), disponible en https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875818000464.
See Jason C. Hribal, “‘Animals Are Part of the Working Class’: A Challenge to Labor
24
Historia,” Labor History, XLIV (2003), 435–453; ídem, “Animals, Agencia, and Class: Writing
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
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The surging interest in women’s history and gender history
since the 1980s has affected agricultural history as well. Académicos
working in these areas have forced us to qualify generalizations
and to acknowledge activities previously considered beyond our
proper scope, thereby enabling fuller assessments of the dynamics
in both agriculture and rural life. More recently, gender historians
like Rosenberg have also challenged conventional narratives and
enriched traditional interpretive schemes.25
The work of labor historians and women’s/gender historians
interested in agricultural themes has often dovetailed in recent
years with that of oral historians. Sharpless and Jones have pub-
lished excellent books in U.S. rural and agricultural history that
rely heavily upon the methods of oral history, as have scholars
studying other agricultural regions—Charles van Onselen, para
uno, whose riveting The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South
African Sharecropper, 1894–1985 (Nueva York, 1996) is reminiscent of
Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw
(chicago, 1974), a classic in U.S. agricultural history.26
the History of Animals from Below,” Human Ecology Review, XIV (2007), 101–112; Owain
jones, “Non-Human Rural Studies,” in Paul J. Cloke, Terry Marsden, and Patrick Mooney
(editores.), Handbook of Rural Studies (Thousand Oaks, 2006), 185–200; Ann Norton Greene, Horses
at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, Masa., 2008), 189–199; Ulrich
Raulff (trans. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp), Farewell to the Horse: A Cultural History (Nueva York,
2018). For plant agency, ver, Por ejemplo, Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-
Eye View of the World (Nueva York, 2001); for the related concept of coevolution regarding plants
and humans, Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand
Life on Earth (Nueva York, 2011). Many authorities extend “agency” to bacteria as well, arguing
that some bacteria employ “quorum sensing” to coordinate various actions and activities. Ver,
Por ejemplo, Paul Williams, Klaus Winzer, Weng C. chan, and Miguel Cámara, “Look
Who’s Talking: Communication and Quorum Sensing in the Bacterial World,” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, B Biological Sciences, Marzo 13, 2007, available at doi.org/
10.1098/rstb.2007.2039; Sarangam Majumdar and Subhoshmita Mondal, “Conversation
Juego: Talking Bacteria,” Journal of Cell Communication and Signaling, X (2016): 1–5, disponible
at doi:10.1007/s12079-016-0333-y (consultado en septiembre 17, 2018). Not all bacteriologists buy
the argument that bacteria work consciously and collectively.
Scholarship about the history of women in agriculture has burgeoned in recent decades.
25
For an up-to-date collection of representative work, see Linda M. Ambrose and Joan M.
Jensen (editores.), Women in Agriculture: Professionalizing Rural Life in America and Europe, 1880–
1965 (Iowa City, 2017); for an introduction to Gabriel Nathan Rosenberg’s work, ídem,
The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America (Filadelfia, 2015); ídem, “How Meat
Changed Sex: The Law of Interspecies Intimacy after Industrial Reproduction,” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, XXIII (2017): 473–507.
26 Rebecca Sharpless, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900–1940
(Chapel Hill, 1999); Lu Ann Jones, Mama Learned Us to Work: Farm Women in the New South
(Chapel Hill, 2002).
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| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
A long succession of economists have explored some aspect
of agricultural history. Lewis C. Gray, William Parker, Roberto
Gallman, Robert Fogel, and Stanley Engerman would be on
everybody’s short list of historians with outstanding studies about
the American South. Many of these historians have remained loyal
to the field even as it has morphed. On the U.S. frente, veteran
economists such as Gavin Wright, Jeremy Atack, Lee Craig, Lou
Ferleger, and Lee Alston have continued to do important work
(although Alston has shifted his attention lately to agriculture and
resources in Latin America). Not to be omitted is Lorena Walsh,
whose quantitative work on early American agriculture—for ex-
amplio, Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management
in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill, 2010)—is justly
admired by economists and non-economists alike. Two others,
Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode, aptly demonstrate the promise
that attends the new agricultural history. Olmstead and Rhode,
who made major contributions to the agricultural history of the
South, are currently completing a path-breaking work on slavery
in the Cotton South, but their contributions to U.S. agricultural
history more generally are worthy of extended comment.
Olmstead and Rhode
Simplemente pon, Olmstead and Rhode rep-
resent the new agricultural history at its best, no more astutely than
in their co-authored books—Creating Abundance: Biological Innova-
tion and American Agricultural Development (Nueva York, 2008) y
Arresting Contagion: Ciencia, Política, and Conflicts Over Animal Disease
Control (Cambridge, Masa., 2015)—as well as in one of their joint
documentos. In both books, they advance boldly revisionist arguments
that are at once empirically rich, seamlessly cross-disciplinary, y
highly persuasive, skillfully bounded by theoretical insights and
methods from economics. More impressive is their mastery of his-
torical sources (particularly obscure governmental publications), y
their ability to draw from “harder” sciences—plant and animal bi-
ology, genetics, soil science, epidemiology, climatology, veterinari-
an medicine, etc.. The upshot is that their overarching arguments
quickly challenged and largely superseded conventional views.27
In Creating Abundance, their emphasis on the importance of bi-
ological innovation—not just mechanical innovation—in explaining
27 Olmstead and Rhode, “Adapting North American Wheat Production to Climatic Chal-
lentes, 1839–2009,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, CVIII (2011), 480–485.
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
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productivity gains in U.S. agriculture prior to World War II is
already becoming standard. Their principal claim in Arresting
Contagion—that the governmental regulation of agriculture, particular-
larly of animal-borne diseases, which preceded the governmental reg-
ulation of interstate commerce, was highly effective—immediately
led many scholars to rethink their positions on regulation, ranging
from Neo-Marxist to public-choice options.
As well as these two books showcase the promise inherent in
the new agricultural history, su 2011 essay, “Adapting North
American Wheat Production to Climatic Challenges, 1839–
2009,” might take them a step further. In this piece, the authors
complicate increasingly popular climate-change, doom-and-gloom
narratives by demonstrating convincingly, even conclusively, eso
in the period between 1839 and the early twenty-first century,
American wheat farmers were able to adapt successfully to lands
once thought “too arid, too variable, and too harsh to farm.” Tech-
nological innovation was the key, particularly the biological devel-
opment of new varieties. Although most such varietal innovation
involved adjusting to colder or more arid environments, en vez de
to warmer temperatures like those looming in the coming decades,
the fact that farmers, making use of private and public research,
were able to modify crops for different climates offers at least a
modicum of hope that they will be able to do so again.28
Olmstead and Rhode’s findings render less disturbing the fact
that by 2050 or thereabouts, the world will have to feed a popu-
lation that will likely grow to about 10 o 11 billion, with a greater
proportion of affluent consumers moving increasingly to protein
and dairy-based diets that, given the technology of today, are re-
source-intensive. At that point, thanks to the effects of climate
cambiar, much of the land available for crops will be of inferior
quality, with less water, less fertilizer, and fewer pesticides. Nosotros
can take some solace, sin embargo, in the success story of Olmstead
and Rhode’s North American wheat farmers.
CO MPA RATI V E, T RANS NAT IO NAL APPRO ACHE S AND THE WA Y
FORWARD The JIH has been an inveterate promoter of compar-
ative/transnational work, areas in which agricultural historians
have become increasingly active. Illuminating transnational studies
28
Ibídem., 484.
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208
| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
have appeared on subjects ranging from the agricultural labor force
to the boll weevil and blood oranges, and from henequen and sisal
to agrarian reform. Gavin Wright, John Majewski, and others—
including the seemingly ubiquitous Olmstead and Rhode—have
produced enlightening comparative studies. Tomados juntos, estos
studies—and many others—have greatly enriched our understand-
ing of the complex dynamics of U.S. agriculture.29
Another subfield that the JIH embraced is historical anthropo-
métrica. The traction that this approach has begun to gain among
agricultural historians is only fitting since Pitirim Sorokin, a titanic
figure in rural studies, was a pioneer in its development during the
1920s and early 1930s. Specialists in agricultural history are return-
ing to these roots. Por ejemplo, a 2007 study by Bassino and me
demonstrated that the biological well-being of rice cultivators in
Lower Burma declined significantly as the economy of the region
transformed into a rice-export platform in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. I explore this matter in closer detail in an-
other work, arguing that during that period, Lower Burma under-
went a thoroughgoing “metamorphosis” that affected not only its
economy and environment but also the bodies of the people living
allá. en el proceso, I tie together several of the main threads of
the new agricultural history, perhaps opening an advanced look at
the future of the field.30
29 Neil Foley, White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture
(berkeley, 1999); James C. Giesen, Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American
South (chicago, 2011); Timothy P. Bowman, Blood Oranges: Colonialism and Agriculture in the
South Texas Borderlands (College Station, 2016); Sterling D. evans, Bound in Twine: The History
and Ecology of the Henequen–Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains,
1880–1950 (College Station, 2007); Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Making
of the US and Mexican Countryside (Princeton, 2017); Wright, “Slavery and American Agricul-
tural History,” Agricultural History, LXXVII (2003), 527–552; Majewski, “Why Did North-
erners Oppose the Expansion of Slavery? Economic Development and Education in the
Limestone South,” in Beckert and Rockman (editores.), Slavery’s Capitalism, 277–298.
Ver, Por ejemplo, Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmerman, and Charles J. Galpin, A Systematic
30
Source Book in Rural Sociology (Mineápolis, 1930–1932), 3 v., esp. III (1932), 5–14; Coclanis,
“Pitirim A. Sorokin’s Early Contributions to the Development of Anthropometric History,"
Economics and Human Biology, XI (2013), 259–268; Alexander Nikulin and Irina Trotsuk,
“Pitirim Sorokin’s Contribution to Rural Sociology: Russian, European and American Mile-
stones of a Scientific Career,” Journal of Peasant Studies ( Enero 25, 2018), available at doi.org/
10.1080/03066150.2017.1419190 (consultado en septiembre 17, 2018); Jean-Pascal Bassino and
Coclanis, “Economic Transformation and Biological Welfare in Colonial Burma: Regional
Differentiation in the Evolution of Average Height,” Economics and Human Biology, VI
(2008), 212–227; Coclanis, “Metamorphosis: The Rice Boom, Environmental Transformation,
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
| 209
But what path is the new agricultural history likely to take?
Prognostication is a difficult task, especially for a historian. In Yogi
Berra’s words, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the
future”—too many known unknowns and unknown unknowns,
to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld. Sin embargo, we can say with
some confidence that the trend toward a convergence of agricul-
tural history, environmental history, and food history will con-
tinue; the exciting work begun during the last few decades shows
no signs of abating. A few research areas seem particularly well
positioned to grow. En años recientes, rural life and culture, rural peo-
ples, and “rurality” in general have become more prominent, al menos
in part because of the U.S. 2016 presidential election. Yet scholars
have also shown a renewed desire to reclaim a world with which
they feared to have lost touch. Some of this trepidation seems to
have resulted from the worldwide newsflash in 2007 that Earth’s
population was reaching a tipping point: For the first time in hu-
man history, more than half of the total population would soon be
considered “urban.” Although the “news” was not really earth-
shattering—after all, there was little to distinguish the urban pro-
portion in 2008 o 2009 de, decir, 2005—it instilled the sense of a
general retreat from rural life, piquing the interest of journalists
and scholars alike.31
In the light of those considerations, various manifestations of
rural culture, whether represented in religious expressions, politics/
political movements, or music will remain in the public, and aca-
demic, purview. One exemplar in a scholarly context is Bethany
Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free
Enterprise (Cambridge, Masa., 2009), but other recent works rele-
vant to “southern” culture, though not rural history per se, are re-
velatory about the rural South: Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers
in Their Own Land (Nueva York, 2016) and Randall J. Stephens’ The
and the Problem of Truncation in Colonial Lower Burma, 1850–1940,” Agricultural History,
XCIII (2019), 35–67. Economic historians interested in historical anthropometrics have delved
into the complex relationship between environmental and economic change and biological
well-being—agricultural historians, not so much.
31
Ver, Por ejemplo, Population Reference Bureau, Urban Population to Become the New
Majority Worldwide ( Washington, CORRIENTE CONTINUA., 2007), disponible en https://www.prb.org/urbanpopto
becomemajority/ (consultado en septiembre 17, 2018); United Nations, Department of Economic
and Social Affairs, Population Division, Urban and Rural Areas 2009 (Nueva York, 2010), avail-
able at http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/urbanization/
urban-rural.shtml (consultado en septiembre 17, 2018).
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| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
210
Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced
Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, Masa., 2018).
Other dimensions of culture—food and foodways—will
likely attract attention in the years ahead. As food fads, fetishes,
and obsessions become increasingly common in bourgeois culture
within the developed world, and as “foodies” run riot in academe,
it would be shocking were scholars not to examine or, in some
casos, re-examine numerous questions relating to food and food-
ways in the past from a decidedly modern food-oriented perspec-
tivo. David S. Shields’ Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival
of a Cuisine (chicago, 2015) and Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That
Changed America (Nueva York, 2106) are sophisticated examples of
cultural approaches to food and foodways that portend more of
the same for the future.
Similarmente, in food politics, particularly the politics of food
trade/aid, scholars will build on the strong base provided by Nick
Cullather, Bill Winders, Raj Patel, Phillips, y otros. Food
ethics and moral questions relating to food and eating will also as-
cend in the years ahead, largely owing to Pollan’s work. muchos de
these studies will involve contemporary debates, but some—such
as Helen Zoe Veit’s Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Ciencia,
and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century
(Chapel Hill, 2013)—will look back at related questions during
earlier periods of our history. We shall undoubtedly see digital
archives/interactives websites modeled after Veit’s What America
Ate initiative.32
Another likely growth area will feature climatic issues, incluir-
ing climate change. The relationship between climate and agricul-
ture has been a mainstay in numerous historical works in the years
since the JIH’s special issue “History and Climate” appeared in
1980. Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: Climate Change and Catastrophe
in the Seventeenth Century (nuevo refugio, 2013) and John L. Brooke’s
32 Veit’s “What America Ate” website is available at http://whatamericaate.org/. Garcia
tells an illuminating story regarding Pollan’s influence and the trendiness of food history. Ser-
fore the publication of Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (chicago,
2006), Garcia had trouble organizing sessions on “agricultural history” for the annual meeting
of the Organization of American Historians. After Pollan’s book appeared, Garcia replaced
“agriculture” with “food” in the proposed session title, immediately attracting a much larger
crowd. See Garcia, “Setting the Table: Historians, Popular Writers, and Food History," Diario
of American History, CIII (2016), 657.
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A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O RY ’S NE W P LO T
| 211
Climate Change and the Course of Global History (Nueva York, 2014) son
two excellent cases in point.
In light of the overwhelming interest today in the elastic con-
cept known as “sustainability,” scholars will undoubtedly revisit
and at times, alas, rummage through history in search of connec-
tions between environmental stresses, food insecurity, and socio-
political changes that led to disorder, dysfunction, or even societal
destruction. The 800-pound gorilla of this genre is Jared Diamond,
particularly in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(Nueva York, 2004), but other scholars explore how food insecurity
affects both policy and practice: Timothy Snyder’s provocative
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Nueva York,
2015) is noteworthy in this regard.
Finalmente, historians could well benefit from moving toward one
or another systematic or holistic approach to agriculture, alimento, y
the environment. They need not cover such systems in their entirety;
they need only be closely attuned to their existence. In the prescient
words of Genovese nearly forty years ago, “No subject is too small to
treat. But a good historian writes well on a small subject while taking
cuenta (if only implicitly and without a single direct reference) de
the whole, whereas an inferior one confuses the need to isolate a
small portion of the whole with the license to assume that that
portion thought and acted in isolation.” To be sure, scholars have
already come a long way down this road for the past twenty-five
or thirty years. The welcome arrival and subsequent entrenchment
of environmental and food historians in agricultural-history circles, como
we have seen, has extended the range of activities and themes; di-
versified the demographics, methods, and ideologies involved;
deepened levels of analysis; sharpened debates, and made the field
much more interesting overall.33
Notwithstanding this impressive evolution in the historical
studies surrounding agriculture, we still have a considerable distance
to go. One expeditious, perhaps even necessary, way to press for-
ward will require more historians to break from convention to
pursue research within larger interdisciplinary (and hopefully inter-
national) equipos. The use of big data to shed light on food problems
33 Eugene D. Genovese, “American Slaves and Their History,” in idem, In Red and Black:
Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (Nueva York, 1972), 103. This essay
first appeared in the New York Review of Books, XV, 3 Dec. 1970.
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212
| PETER A. CO CL AN IS
of the past can help us to confront pressing problems within this
sphere today and tomorrow—nothing less than our highest priori-
corbatas. As Bertold Brecht put it in The Three Penny Opera, food is al-
ways the first thing. Orwell made make much the same point in a
more sociobiological way in The Road to Wigan Pier: “A human be-
ing is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and
faculties may be more god-like, but in point of time they come af-
terwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are
forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or
rotten bones of his children.”34
This brief sketch cannot hope to cover every aspect of the
new agricultural history, nor to mention, much less to highlight,
all the impressive work that this rejuvenated field has generated.
Bastante, the more modest goal is to look at some of the field’s
newest contours. The editors of the JIH are to be saluted for the
inspired idea to mount this retrospective/prospective initiative on
the pages of the journal. Also worthy of a salute are the distin-
guished senior agricultural historians who helped to keep hope
alive during American agricultural history’s relative decline in
the second half of the twentieth century by welcoming talented
young interlopers into the fold. Without their efforts we would
not be discussing this field in the fiftieth anniversary year of the
JIH, a journal that promoted many of the sources of rejuvenation
in agricultural history, and we probably would not be celebrating
the Agricultural History Society’s centennial in 2019 either.
34 For a recent overview of the use and potential of “big data” in economic history, ver
Myron P. Gutmann, Emily Klancher Merchant, and Evan Roberts, “‘Big Data’ in Economic
Historia,” Journal of Economic History, LXXVIII (2018), 268–299. For the George Orwell quo-
tation, see idem, The Road to Wigan Pier (Nueva York, 1961; origen. pub. 1937), 85.
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