Moving Crops and the Scales of History is a scholarly collective working at the intersection of global history, agricultural history, and the histories of science and technology, to play with scales of historical writing and historical space, time and agency. We selected crops as our device to rethink narratives of global circulations because they are a very special type of human artefact, living organisms literally rooted in their environment.
Moving Crops is experimental in form, focus and method, beginning with our experiment in collaborative writing. The four co-authors specialize in the history of crops in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe, and work on a time-spectrum spanning the pre-modern, colonial and modern eras. We are all experts on history’s Big and Significant crops: cotton, rice, tea, wheat, oranges, tobacco. However, our goal was not to write yet another global history of emerging modernity, connecting the threads and integrating the networks structured around history’s winners. We wanted to write a more symmetrical and inclusive history, one that does not filter and flatten the variegated farming systems of past and present to trace a purified evolutionary line towards the contemporary “global food system.” Instead we wanted to show the much richer contributions of crops to history and their more complex temporalities. So we developed the concept of the cropscape. Like the landscape, of which it can be considered a variant, we propose the cropscape not as an object with strictly defined boundaries and components, but as a way of seeing and of looking, a multi-focal, multi-scale framing device.
Moving Crops: Image Gallery
Click below to scroll through the collection
A tea plantation in China: Workers roll the caper tea into balls. Coloured lithograph.
Courtesy : Wellcome Trust Collection UK
Tray of Western barley beers, picture released by author
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aufse%C3%9F_Bier.JPG
After the US Civil War, tobacco farms along the border of Virginia and North Carolina shrunk back to the small size that had disappeared with the rise of antebellum plantations. The small farms used larger labor forces to remain viable, and extended families rotated their labor across the farms of all family members for harvest and curing. Image courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Cropscapes
Like the landscape, of which it can be considered a variant, we propose the cropscape not as an object with strictly defined boundaries and components, but as a way of seeing and of looking, a multi-focal, multi-scale framing device. For more Cropscapes and related information, or to propose a cropscape of your own, please consult https://www.francescabray.co.uk/cropscapes/
Beerscapes
Though most of us equate beer with its European variant, barley-beer, almost every human society produces some beer-like drink, a mildly alcoholic liquid brewed from locally available starches, one essential product of the local cropscape.
Teascapes
When the British began to grow tea in colonial India, the cropscape that developed was radically different from the Chinese scenario. The cultivation of tea as a commercial crop entailed the creation of new places, as the plantations radically altered the virgin forests they replaced.
Tobaccoscapes
Cropscapes offer new perspectives on the size of tobacco cultivation units over the centuries. In other chapters we have analyzed the life-cycle flexibility of the tobacco plant—that is is a perennial grown commercially as an annual.
Waterscapes
Water is an essential component of all cropscapes. Crops need water and so too do humans and animals; water slakes the thirst of living creatures, and human populations also use water to keep clean, and for almost every kind of processing and manufacture, from cooking and pot-making to nuclear cooling towers.
Community
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Francesca Bray (Core Group Member, Co-Author)Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
I am a historian and anthropologist of technology and science in imperial China, and of agricultural and food systems in East and Southeast Asia. I am interested in developing new and more comprehensive approaches to technology in global history. Relevant works include:
- "Agriculture" (Science and Civilisation in China Vol. VI.2, 1984) View
- The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1994) View
- Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China: Great Transformations Reconsidered (2013) View
- Rice: Global Networks and New Histories (co-edited volume, 2015) View
- "Feeding the Farmers, Feeding the Nation: the Long Green Revolution in Kelantan, Malaysia," in James L. Watson and Jakob Klein, Handbook of Food and Anthropology (2016) View
Cropscape Project: Beerscapes
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Barbara Hahn (Core Group Member, Co-Author)Associate Professor of History, Texas Tech University
Associate Editor, Technology and Culture
I am an an Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University and the Associate Editor of Technology and Culture. My dissertation studied the interactions between the US tobacco industry and its interaction with tobacco agriculture over three centuries; it appeared as the book Making Tobacco Bright: Creating an American Commodity, 1617–1937 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) (View) and as a part of Plantation Kingdom: The American South and Its Global Commodities (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016) (View), and, with Bruce E. Baker, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Oxford University Press, 2015) (View), as well as several articles and book chapters. I am currently completing the monograph Technology and the Industrial Revolution for Cambridge University Press—research supported by a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship (#628722) at the University of Leeds 2014–16.
Cropscape Project: Tobaccoscapes
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John Lourdusamy (Core Group Member, Co-Author)Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
MA, MPhil in History, Pondicherry University, Pondicherry, India
DPhil in Modern History, University of Oxford, UK
My latest academic interests center around the history of tea plantation is India with specific focus on the evolution and transfers of technology in the tea industry. This interest, of late, also has drawn me into the history of global circuation of (other) crops and commodities. More broadly I am a historian of science, technology, and medicine in colonial India. Relevant works include "Betwixt Science and Religion; East and West: Jesuits in 17th and 18th Century Southern India’," in Yiftach JH Fehige (ed.), Science and Religion: East and West, Routledge, Oxford and New York, 2016; "College of Engineering, Guindy," in DP Chattopadhyay and Uma Dasputa (eds), Science and Modern India: An Institutional History," Pearson Education, New Delhi, 2010; with Srinivasa Rao, "Colonialism and the Development of Electricity: The Case of Madras Presidency, 1900–1947," Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 15, No.1, 2010.
Cropscape Project: Teascapes
Book
Moving Crops and the Scales of History (currently nearing completion). We borrow our model from jazz and its non-linear explorations of themes. We offer six sets or chapters: Times, Places, Sizes, Actants, Compositions and Reproductions. Each set consists of several riffs or cases, deliberately contrasting cropscapes from different periods and of different scales. Rather than aiming at exhaustive coverage, we choose cropscapes that illustrate unexplored historical scales or connections, unexpected dynamics or constellations.