People

From the early 1940s to the early 1970s, the United States, in conjunction with corporate, philanthropic, state, and academic actors around the world, led a set of international capital- intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer initiatives designed to increase agricultural yields and combat hunger, poverty, and unrest across the Third Word amidst concerns of rapid population growth. Through the devices of U.S. technical assistance and economic aid programs of the mid-twentieth century, these initiatives led to the adoption of high-yield varieties of grains and large-scale mechanized modes of agricultural production, paired with irrigated water supplies and heavy petrochemical use—techno-scientific innovations that seemingly superseded the limitations of “traditional” farming practices and technologies.

My current book project, Verdant Empire: Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development, reframes the post-World War II U.S. agricultural and rural development agenda across the Third World as an exercise in the risk management of the imperial accumulations of U.S. racial capitalism, and does so within longer temporalizations of racialization, settlement, and empire. Through careful contextual analysis of the transnational policy, bureaucratic, and academic archives of U.S. agricultural and rural development between the early and mid-twentieth century, it contends that the strategies of and rationales for postwar agricultural and rural development across the Third World had elaborated upon early-twentieth century innovations in U.S. settler colonial and anti-Black forms of subjection, administration, and governance toward the development of a Native market agrarianism and Black market agrarianism.