Seeding Empire - by Aaron Eddens

About the Book

"In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past-and future-of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution"--

Book Synopsis

In Seeding Empire, Aaron Eddens rewrites an enduring story about the past--and future--of global agriculture. Eddens connects today's efforts to cultivate a "Green Revolution in Africa" to a history of American projects that introduced capitalist agriculture across the Global South. Expansive in scope, this book draws on archival records of the earliest Green Revolution projects in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as interviews at development institutions and agribusinesses working to deliver genetically modified crops to millions of small-scale farmers across Africa. From the offices of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the halls of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies to field trials of hybrid maize in Kenya, Eddens shows how the Green Revolution fails to address global inequalities. Seeding Empire insists that eradicating hunger in a world of climate crisis demands thinking beyond the Green Revolution.

From the Back Cover

"This powerful and beautifully written book offers a new way of looking at the Green Revolution that should be required reading for those inside the Gates Foundation and other institutions that say they have the answer to eliminating hunger around the world. As this book elegantly demonstrates, the stories we tell ourselves about our past can hinder our best efforts to eradicate poverty and famine in communities across the globe. As it turns out, feeding the world will involve more than just increasing crop yields; it will require interrogating the histories we thought we knew about why hunger exists in the world in the first place. This book is a great place to start that journey."--Bart Elmore, author of Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future

"In this very welcome contribution to the Green Revolution literature, Aaron Eddens excavates the imperial foundations of industrial agricultural technology to understand the push to transform African agriculture. With sharp observation and a rich analysis, Seeding Empire shows how new frontiers are premised on old and exposes the continuities that bind modern philanthropists to their Cold War counterparts. Laying bare these narratives, Eddens deploys wide-ranging scholarship to unsettle the complacent developmental maxims that would rather leave the tough questions unasked."--Raj Patel, coauthor of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

"From the Green Revolution to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, from Mexico to Kenya, Eddens has given us a new view of how philanthropy-promoted technological innovation advances the interests of monopolies such as Monsanto/Bayer. Compellingly argued, clearly written, and convincing, Seeding Empire is an indispensable guide to the inner workings of philanthrocapitalism."--Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

"Eddens combines meticulous research in the archives and printed sources with remarkably revealing oral interviews to produce a deeply creative study that advances the history of agriculture, of development, and of capitalism."--David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class

Review Quotes

"[Eddens] makes a crucial contribution to scholarship on agrarian change in contemporary Africa, which--despite many other angles of important critique--has often ignored less-than-overt dynamics of race and racialization. Even scholars less interested in the specifics of the New Green Revolution in Africa will find value in Edden's efforts to trace these logics and examine their shifting manifestations. . . . He examines beneath the soil, probing roots and continuities, while laying groundwork for other scholars who may seek to examine the fruits of this empire."-- "Antipode"

"Eddens's rather top-down analysis of the driving logics of Green Revolution memory makes an excellent case for the importance of bottom-up perspectives in development."-- "H-Net"

"Eddens offers both an unusually accessible entrée for readers new to this topic, and a trenchant analysis of the Green Revolution as discourse. In so doing, Eddens directs readers to the power wielded by stories."-- "Society for U.S. Intellectual History"

"Seeding Empire is a deftly written intellectual history on how racial and imperial discourses can evolve from the opening moments of the Green Revolution to the present. It would be especially useful for graduate courses on development."-- "CHOICE"

"A welcomed contribution to alternative histories of the Green Revolution."-- "Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems"

"American scholar Aaron Eddens covers a wide swath of history and geography to let in a sliver of light, revealing how the African Green Revolution still carries the blight of the old one."-- "Africa is a Country"

About the Author

Aaron Eddens is an American Studies scholar and Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University.