Articles
Turning the Tree Plantations of Slavery into Agroforests for Everyman: A Piece of Landscape History from Pemba Island, Zanzibar
by Christopher A. Conte
This essay argues that agroforestry is deeply embedded in the history of tropical agriculture in the Indian Ocean basin. Drawing on the example of Pemba Island, part of the Zanzibar Archipelago just off the coast of Tanzania, the essay studies a transitionary phase in the island’s agricultural history when plantations of clove trees gave way to more diverse small-scale agricultural systems. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, former slaves began a landscape overhaul that combined a suite of Asian, African, and American plants with methods and knowledge of agroforestry.
Nature’s Bread: The Natural Food Debate in Canada, 1940–1949
by Brian Payne
The medical discovery of vitamins in the 1920s ushered in a new era in food consumption patterns. The food industry sought to capture the public’s concern for wholesome diets by marketing their products as rich in vitamins, normally with very little to no scientific evidence. With the Great Depression came new discussions about the relationship between food health and poverty. Providing healthy food for those most in need became a question of poor relief and social equity. Bread became one of the central food commodities in these discussions because bread carried both material and symbolic value as the principle foodstuff of the masses. Yet the highly refined white bread that had become so popular by the 1930s lacked any real nutritional value. While both the United States and Great Britain adopted a policy of enriching flour with synthetic vitamins and using bread as a delivery mechanism to address what many saw as vitamin deficiencies, Canada took a different route.
Agricultural High Modernism and Land Reform in Postwar France
by Venus Bivar
In the three decades following World War II, French farming was transformed. At Liberation in 1944, the vast majority of French farms looked as they had in the nineteenth century, but by the middle of the 1970s, France was the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural goods. To achieve this rapid transformation, the French state pursued a high-modernist program of agricultural industrialization. As part of this program, the state created a highly controversial land reform organization, the Société d’aménagement foncier et d’établissement rural (SAFER). Through focusing on a single case study that pitted a local community against the SAFER, this article demonstrates how the French state was able to engage farmers in a brutal war of attrition while simultaneously refusing to take full responsibility for the social consequences of its modernization mandate.
Hutterite Agriculture in Alberta: The Contribution of an Ethnic Isolate
by Simon Evans
The Hutterites are a German speaking religious sect. They live communally, holding “all things common.” This characteristic separates them from the Mennonites and the Amish, with whom they share a common Anabaptist tradition. The Hutterites have resisted assimilation and have maintained their language and culture. The three original colonies, established along the James River in Dakota Territory in 1874, have grown to number some five hundred colonies distributed across five states and four Canadian provinces.
This article describes and evaluates the contribution of Hutterite colonies to agriculture in Alberta, Canada. They own about 4 percent of Alberta’s farmland but produce 80 percent of the province’s eggs, 33 percent of its hogs, and more than 10 percent of its milk. This productivity is based on the Brethren’s ability to deploy their relatively large labor force to carry out diversified mixed farming. Their willingness to embrace modern science and technology is matched by the links they have been able to establish with marketing chains in agribusiness.
Centennial Feature
Book Reviews
Featured Review
Latin America
Taussig, Palma Africana, by Jonathan Robins
Europe and Asia
Bohling, The Sober Revolution: Appellation Wine and the Transformation of France, by Zachary Nowak
DeMare, Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution, by Yixin Chen
Hale-Dorrell, Corn Crusade: Khrushchev’s Farming Revolution in the Post–Stalin Soviet Union, by Andy Bruno
North America
Dechêne, Power and Subsistence: The Political Economy of Grain in New France, by Christopher M. Church
Alt, Cahokia’s Complexities: Ceremonies and Politics of the First Mississippian Farmers, by Brian Hosmer
Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1800, by Urmi Engineer Willoughby
Lewis, The Carolina Backcountry Venture: Tradition, Capital, and Circumstance in the Development of Camden and the Wateree Valley, 1740–1810, by Peter N. Moore
Mauldin, Unredeemed Land: An Environmental History of Civil War and Emancipation in the Cotton South, by William D. Bryan
Field, Growing up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War, by Valerie Grim
Mallea, A River in the City of Fountains: An Environmental History of Kansas and the Missouri River, by Charles Closmann
Anderson, Capitalist Pigs: Pigs, Pork, and Power in America, by Sarah Wassberg Johnson
Salinas, Managed Migrations: Growers, Farmworkers, and Border Enforcement in the Twentieth Century, by María Esther Hammack
Bitar, Diet and the Disease of Civilization, by Michael S. Kideckel
Civitello, Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking, by Kellen Backer
Simon, The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, by Fraser Livingston