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2019 Roundtable Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Roundtable and Web Production Editor: George Fujii @HDiplo Roundtable Review Volume XX, No. 42 10 June 2019 Tore C. Olsson. Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. ISBN: 9781400888054 (hardcover, $35.00/£27.00). URL: http://www.tiny.cc/Roundtable-XX-42 Contents Introduction by Nicole Sackley, University of Richmond .................................................................................... 2 Review by Sterling Evans, University of Oklahoma ............................................................................................... 6 Review by Jody Pavilack, University of Montana ................................................................................................ 10 Review by Jeffrey M. Pilcher, University of Toronto ........................................................................................... 15 Review by Christy Thornton, Johns Hopkins University ................................................................................... 18 Review by Julie M. Weise, University of Oregon .................................................................................................. 21 Author’s Response by Tore C. Olsson, University of Tennessee ..................................................................... 24 © 2019 The Authors. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License. 1 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XX-42 Introduction by Nicole Sackley, University of Richmond his year marks the tenth anniversary of the first volume in Princeton University Press’s “America in the World” series, edited by Sven Beckert and Jeremi Suri. e series has been foundational in T establishing what is now a robust field of scholarship on the United States from a transnational perspective. Its aim has been to publish new work emphasizing “networks, identities, and processes that transcend the nation-state” with the goal “writing the history of ‘global America.”1 Collectively, the monographs in the series have spanned two centuries of history, deployed a range of historiographical methodologies, and reimagined such diverse topics as empire, development, Cold War diplomacy, immigration, and black nationalism. e eleventh monograph in this series, Tore C. Olsson’s remarkable and rich Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside, both builds upon and offers exciting new directions for the field. Where earlier volumes in the Princeton series emphasized processes of ‘Americanization’ or placed events which have been conventionally treated as U.S. history into global history frameworks, Agrarian Crossings explores mutually constitutive nation-state projects and focuses on the interactions between particular national regions.2 In doing so, the United States is both productively decentered and fractured. In brief, Agrarian Crossings illuminates how a cast of U.S. and Mexican reformers—heads of state and diplomats, social scientists and policymakers, engineers and research scientists—sought to transform their own impoverished countryside by looking to the reform politics, models, and strategies on the other side the border. ese comparisons could be perceived, Olsson argues, in part because by the 1920s, particular regions within each nation—the U.S. cotton South and the ‘plantation zones’ of Mexico—had grown increasingly similar through parallel processes of political disenfranchisement, capitalist transformation, environmental degradation, debt peonage, and populist backlash. Olsson credits the elections of two populist presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lázaro Cárdenas, with creating the conditions by which these parallel trajectories became recognized and ultimately interwoven. A two-way exchange of people, ideologies, and technologies shaped both nations’ agrarian reform politics and, initially, offered a wider range of possibilities for rural transformation than what ultimately triumphed in the 1940s. In particular, Olsson reexamines the agricultural work of the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico and finds that the Foundation’s experiences in the 1 America in the World Series, Princeton University Press, https://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/title/america-in-the-world.html (Accessed 15 January 2019) 2 On work emphasizing Americanization of the world, see David Ekbladh, e Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Ian Tyrell, Reforming the World: e Creation of America's Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). On work reimagining U.S. events within a global history framework, see especially omas Borstelmann, e 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Kiran Klaus Patel, e New Deal: A Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Closer to Olssen in their interest in the ways cross border interactions and dialogue transformed multiples places are Martin Klimke’s e Other Alliance: Student Protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) and Adam Ewing’s e Age of Garvey: How a Jamaican Activist Created a Mass Movement and Changed Global Black Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 2 | Page Roundtable XX-42 U.S. South led its scientists and officers to recognize the importance of designing solutions to fit local particularities and address economic inequalities. Only later did Foundation officials abandon these insights for a package of technological innovations that came to be known as ‘e Green Revolution.’ Olsson concludes Agrarian Crossings with an epilogue that examines the consequences of these decisions for millions of rural people around the world. e following roundtable brings together a diverse group of distinguished scholars, all of whom share expertise in the histories of the United States and Mexico and their interactions. But each one approaches these histories from a particular set of interests and methodological foci. Sterling Evans is a scholar of North American environmental and agricultural history; Jody Pavilack’s research focuses on the social and political history of Latin America; Jeffrey Pilcher is an historian of food studies; Christy ornton’s scholarship focuses on international development, labor and social movements, state formation, and political economy; and Julie Weise is an interdisciplinary historian of citizenship, migration, and race. e participants in the roundtable uniformly extoll Olsson’s depth and range of historical knowledge and archival research. Evans describes Olsson as “monumental in his knowledge and coverage” of U.S and Mexican history and of the “multinational and regional primary archival sources that Olsson scoured to research this monograph.” Pavilack similarly extols the book’s “rich archival detail” mined in “years of precisely the kind of intensive archival crossings that are necessary to produce a clear, passionate, and significant contribution to the current transnational turn in historical studies.” Reviewers also remark on Olsson’s skills as a writer. Many monographs as thick with research as Agrarian Crossings can become bogged down in details. e prose here is crisp, the organizational framework and transitions clear, and the cast of characters are rendered as fully as the ideas and policies they advanced. Reviewers see Agrarian Crossings as making three major contributions to historical scholarship. First, they note how the book’s first section illuminates often unrealized similarities in the histories of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Mexico and United States. While Evans critiques Olsson for shying away from the label of “comparative history,” other reviewers focus on Olsson’s distinction between comparative history and “a history of comparisons.” (8) To borrow ideas and policies across national lines requires that people see or invoke similarities and kinships across lines of difference. e power of Olsson’s work is that he shows that, in the 1930s, comparative affinities were forged not only across the Atlantic, as historians like Daniel T. Rodgers and Kiran Klaus Patel have previously shown, but also across the divide in what we become known as the “First World” and “ird World.”3 Second, reviewers see Olsson as offering a compelling revision of standard histories of the origins of the Green Revolution. Rather than treating the work of U.S. agronomist Norman Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation in 1940s Mexico as a prehistory to a Cold War story, Olsson decenters Borlaug and tells a more complicated story of dissension and debate within the Rockefeller Foundation, in which US midwestern and southern agronomists laid out competing visions of rural transformation. Olsson’s research, as Christy ornton notes, shows us how “the conventional narrative of the Green Revolution’s origins in Mexico 3 Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998); Patel, New Deal, 2016. 3 | Page Roundtable XX-42 actually miss its true