The entire issue can be accessed on JSTOR. Open access articles are linked below.
Call and Response
Putting Agricultural History to Work: Global Action Today from a Communal Past (Free)
by Jonathan Dekel-Chen
There is a historical model for rural empowerment of ethnic minority groups resettled as productive farmers, most for the first time in their lives. I base this model on the long history of Jewish agrarianism from the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century. The article begins with an overview of the global arc of modern Jewish agrarianization, which at its height encompassed hundreds of thousands of farmers settled on millions of acres. It continues with a set of applied “lessons” from these organized resettlement projects that grew in a variety of political regimes and logistical landscapes. The article presents these lessons as a blueprint for reconstruction programs for endangered refugee communities today in Europe, the Near East, and elsewhere. These agrarian lessons could also perhaps ease some of the nationalist tensions in Europe around this latest wave of migration. This history informs us how refugee communities might be economically and socially empowered today. To that end, the article explores the significance of cooperative institutions, political advocacy, transnational philanthropic engagement, and the application of agro-technical expertise in the successful empowerment of new, ethnically “other” farmers in the midst of complex, at times hostile, local environments.
Responses
Farmers or Fisherman? Imagining Agrarian Pathways to Immigrant Inclusion in Dekel-Chen’s “Putting Agricultural History to Work” (Free)
by Ben Nobbs-Thiessen
The Stuff of Dreams (Free)
by R. Douglas Hurt
Jewish Agrarianization: Past and Present (Free)
by Nahum Karlinski
Response (Free)
by Jonathan Dekel-Chen
Articles
The Myth of Cuban Tobacco: Pinar Del Río and the Rise of Plantation Production during the Nineteenth Century
by William A. Morgan
Focusing on the province of Pinar del Río, the epicenter of Cuban tobacco cultivation, this article intends to correct a historiography that has either marginalized or inaccurately stereotyped the size and scale of Cuba’s tobacco economy, primarily by failing to recognize the widespread use of enslaved labor. As a conceptually reconfigured site, Pinar del Río offers a new narrative of Cuban tobacco, one that identifies and understands the area as an additional site of slave commodity production in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Through a pattern of interconnected developments—framed here as latifundia and including increases in farm size, production, and labor force—the agricultural economy of Pinar del Río matured into a plantation system at the same time as a second phase of enslavement developed in the larger Atlantic region. The growth of tobacco cultivation in Pinar del Río, marked by a concentration and expansion of slaves on estates that were increasing in size and efficiency, caused the industry to compete, in terms of scale, not only with the dominant archetype of Cuban plantation slavery but also with other similar slave-based commodities in a world market. Consequently, as the product of a true plantation economy, tobacco is not apart from, but rather fully within, the larger plantation worlds of the nineteenth-century Atlantic.
“Much Suffering Among Mexicans”: Migrant Workers in Idaho and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1917–1921
by Matthew C. Godfrey
In 1918 and 1919, the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company was investigated by the US Bureau of Immigration, the US Department of Labor, and Idaho’s Labor Commission for the living conditions of Mexican laborers under its employ. Ultimately, the sugar corporation was exonerated of any wrongdoing even though it had executed contracts with the workers stipulating the company would cover their necessities in the winter. Instead, the Mexican families were blamed for ingratitude and exaggerating their conditions. The experiences of these workers in Blackfoot, Idaho were complicated by the fact that the company that recruited them—and let them live in deplorable conditions—was a corporation run by high officials in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a religion that also had a significant stock interest in Utah-Idaho Sugar as well as a significant population of members in Blackfoot. Examining this episode in the history of the Intermountain West highlights the racism and difficulties that migrant workers faced in the late 1910s. It also explores a time when the federal government relaxed immigration restrictions and requirements so corporations and farmers could utilize their labor, an important precursor to the bracero program that would follow during World War II.
“The Single Most Important Factor”: Fossil Fuel Energy, Groundwater, and Irrigation on the High Plains, 1955–1985 (Free until Nov. 16)
by Andrew Watson
Historians of agriculture have not spent enough time thinking about energy, and historians of energy have not spent enough time thinking about agriculture. During the second half of the twentieth century, farmers transformed the High Plains of the United States into a nonrenewable landscape. Using one nonrenewable resource (fossil fuels) to exploit another (ancient groundwater), farmers broke the ecological constraints of the region’s semiarid environment and dramatically boosted cropland productivity. The development of North America’s largest natural gas field made abundant and cheap fossil fuel energy available to farmers, who adopted energy-intensive center-pivot irrigation systems. High cropland productivity attracted the cattle feedlot industry, which produced profits for farmers but an incredibly low energy return on investment. Fossil fuels provided the energy farmers needed to lift the enormous volumes of water necessary for industrial agriculture on the High Plains. Farmers made decisions based on water, but those decisions were fundamentally structured by energy.
Book Reviews
Featured Review (Free)
How Coffee Tied Together Tarrazú, Costa Rica, and New Jersey, a review of Carmen Kordick, The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity, by Steven Topik
Book Reviews
Musgrave, The Multifarious Mr. Banks From Botany Bay to Kew: The Natural Historian Who Shaped the World, by Maureen S. Thompson
Vivian, A New Plantation World: Sporting Estates in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1900–1940, by Scott E. Giltner
Perkins, Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks, by John Hayes
Ermus, ed., Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk, and Resilience, by Michael Pasquier
Briscoe, Crush: The Triumph of California Wine, by Anna Katharine Mansfield
Evans, ed., Farming across Borders: A Transnational History of the North American West, by Casey Walsh
Zafar, Recipes for Respect: African American Meals and Meaning, by Angela Jill Cooley
Salinas, Land, Liberty, and Water: Morelos After Zapata, 1920–1940, by David Reid
Tangires, Moveable Markets: Food Wholesaling in the Twentieth-Century City, by Chris Deutsch
Farmer, Rural Inventions: The French Countryside after 1945, by Venus Bivar
Britto, Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s First Drug Paradise, Timothy Lorek
Lorenzini, Global Development: A Cold War History, by Jenny Leigh Smith
Collantes, The Political Economy of the Common Agricultural Policy: Coordinated Capitalism or Bureaucratic Monster?, by Wyn Grant
Previous Issues
94.3 (Summer 2020)
94.2 (Spring 2020)
94.1 (Winter 2020)
93.4 (Fall 2019)
93.3 (Summer 2019)
93.2 (Spring 2019)
93.1 (Winter 2019)