Agrarian Superpower - (Global America) by Samantha Iyer

About the Book

Through the lens of food and agriculture, this book offers new ways to understand the roots of the post-Second World War global order and the US position in it.

Book Synopsis

The United States's superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing nations in the Third World through its massive food aid program.

Through the lens of food and agriculture, this book offers new ways to understand the roots of the post-Second World War global order and the US position in it. Samantha Iyer traces how two former British territories and agricultural competitors of the United States, India and Egypt, became two of the largest importers of US food aid. She investigates the origins and consequences of the US-centric postwar food regime by examining changes in the production, distribution, and consumption of agricultural surpluses from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. Bringing together life in villages, towns, and cities with national, imperial, and international affairs, Iyer demonstrates that food aid was the expression of a changed political, economic, and ecological world that the United States did not create alone. Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, Urdu, and English, Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking comparative history of food, agriculture, and development.

Review Quotes

Samantha Iyer's sweeping Agrarian Superpower powerfully foregrounds agricultural productivity as decisive in 20th century struggles over geopolitical dominance, national economic policy, and distributions of social power. Adeptly integrating the political-economic histories of Egypt, India and the United States through a generative "relational comparison," the book reveals the ways these societies negotiated shared dilemmas, and gives the United States' post-World War II instrumentalization of agricultural overproduction for imperial ends a necessary, contingent history. It is indispensable reading for global and transnational historians, historians of agrarian capitalism, and historians of Egypt, India and the United States in the world.--Paul A. Kramer, Vanderbilt University

Agrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of agriculture and food to the ascent of U.S. hegemony. Drawing on rare archival findings, Samantha Iyer brilliantly weaves international history, political economy, and development to reveal how food and its distribution shaped power, politics, and governance. At a time when hunger is weaponized as tool of annihilation, Iyer's rigorous and profound book could not be more urgent.--Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

Agrarian Superpower is a landmark work of global political economy. Iyer's commanding ambitious sweep is matched by an empirically meticulous mapping of the geographies of power (geopolitical, ecological, and social) that remade agrarian capitalism across the US, Egypt and India. A tour de force!--Manu Goswami, coeditor of Political Imaginaries in Twentieth Century India

About the Author

Samantha Iyer is associate professor of history at Fordham University.