Moving Crops and the Scales of History by Francesca Bray et al (review)

Reviewed by:

• Moving Crops and the Scales of History by Francesca Bray et al
• Harro Maat (bio)

Moving Crops and the Scales of History
By Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 352.

Four renowned historians of technology have delivered a wonderful and inspiring collection of crop histories. The book is important for more than just that. While the heart of Moving Crops is historic, stringing together a wealth of cases from different parts of the world, its central purpose is conceptual and historiographic: to demonstrate that much of the existing global history of crops, materials, and technology more generally is distorted.

Indeed, crops are the central topic to present a new approach to material artifacts and commodities that, as the authors put it, are the stuff of rooted global history. The choice for crops is for a purpose. Inspired by the French Annales school historians focusing on landscapes, the authors present the cropscape as the leading concept.

The methodological depth of the cropscape is convincingly explained, which is not to suggest the reader has to plow through abstract elaborations. A major reason the book is such a great read is the way critique, method, and principles are grafted onto concrete cases, presented as “riffs,” underlining the lively and entertaining style by which the crop stories are told. The introduction chapter needs only a handful of pages to set the stage for the first of these stories, portraying the centrality of crops in the transformation of the Cuban landscape and society through the works of two Cuban writers.

At this point the authors add an important critique. Most histories involving Cuba and crops almost inevitably give prominence to Sidney Mintz. He’s not called on stage for the opening riff, where Cuban writers perform with equal verve. This is a returning pattern in the book and brings less familiar authors and unexpected twists to the crop stories. Blended with renowned Western scholars—Mintz is sampled at various other points—the aim is to be global in the use of sources.

Neither crops nor historical periodization structure the book. The first chapter, “Times,” opens with a riff on date palms that dismisses straightforward historical chronology in clear terms. The movements of date trees, in both ancient Arab and recent American settings, defy a progressive historical narrative. Other riffs, on tobacco, rice, and cocoa, illuminate the intricate connections between crops and surrounding social-material structures in terms of seasonality, growth duration, and maturation. A final riff on millets connects history to current and future projections.

In chapters 2 and 3, the playful yet profound comments on analytical categories target understandings of “Places” and “Sizes.” In the opening riff of chapter 2, the authors explain how the tulip became an iconic Dutch flower [End Page 998] through capitalism, colonialism, and cunning marketeers. Historians have reiterated the tulip story in those terms, overlooking the fact that in Turkey, where tulips originate, the crop has a similar history of iconizing and capitalizing. The riff on yams is a brilliant tale of how a crop’s place in society reinforces cultural symbols of groups and families within near and not-so-near places. The yam story, like some of the other riffs in chapter 2, combines well with chapter 3, “Sizes,” dissecting the scales at which crops are grown.

At this point in the book the lineup includes key actors other than cultivated plants or humans. Pigs complete the riff on yams and chapter 3 ends with a beautiful riff on water, showing how (muddy) fields require water to be cultivated with similar care as a crop. The plasticity of the cropscape notion is further worked out in chapter 4, “Actants,” and chapter 5, “Compositions.” The lineup for the riffs in these chapters consists of tropical crops like rubber and cinchona, as well as the elephant and boll weevil. As collectives, different crops become a synergetic cropscape. A central critique of these two chapters, about the deceptive idea of agriculture as technological control by humans over nature, is perhaps familiar for historians of technology. Yet the way Moving Crops entwines cases and arguments is refreshingly perceptive...