Interview with Award-Winning AHS Author

Michel Sollai has given an interview about his award-winning article published in Agricultural History. From the Society for Italian Historical Studies:

“The Society for Italian Historical Studies is happy to announce this year’s recipient of the Article Prize in Modern Italian History. We congratulate Michele Sollai for his article ‘How to Feed an Empire? Agrarian Science, Indigenous Farming, and Wheat Autarky in Italian-Occupied Ethiopia, 1937-1942,’ published in Agricultural History (2022). The essay examines the failed attempts by the fascist regime to make Italian East Africa self-sufficient in grain production by adopting a sophisticated ecological perspective that takes seriously the interactions between humans, non-human actors, and their environments. This perspective allows Sollai to nuance the contours of colonial practices and highlight the active roles played by indigenous knowledge in negotiating colonial power and its experimental ambitions. Sollai shows a remarkable ability to connect Ethiopia’s brief colonial experience to a longer genealogy linking pre-existing Italian agricultural projects to the worldwide spread of high-productivity agriculture after WWII. The essay meticulously analyzes the complexity of colonial agricultural practices in Ethiopia while ambitiously setting them in a global context of techno-scientific exchanges and political projects.”

The Agricultural History Society congratulates Dr. Sollai for his award and excellent addition to the field.