Books in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series series

During the twentieth century, 80 percent of all famine victims worldwide died in China and the Soviet Union. In this rigorous and thoughtful study, Felix Wemheuer analyzes the historical and political roots of these socialist-era famines, in which overambitious industrial programs endorsed by Stalin and Mao Zedong created greater disasters than those suffered under prerevolutionary regimes. Focusing on famine as a political tool, Wemheuer systematically exposes how conflicts about food among peasants, urban populations, and the socialist state resulted in the starvation death of millions. A major contribution to Chinese and Soviet history, this provocative analysis examines the long-term effects of the great famines on the relationship between the state and its citizens and argues that the lessons governments learned from the catastrophes enabled them to overcome famine in their later decades of rule.

This book deals with an important and timely issue: the political and economic forces that have shaped agricultural policies in the United States during the past eighty years. It explores the complex interactions of class, market, and state as they have affected the formulation and application of agricultural policy decisions since the New Deal, showing how divisions and coalitions within Southern, Corn Belt, and Wheat Belt agriculture were central to the ebb and flow of price supports and production controls. In addition, the book highlights the roles played by the world economy, the civil rights movement, and existing national policy to provide an invaluable analysis of past and recent trends in supply management policy.

Why are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) so successful in today’s world? How do they empower themselves? This insightful book provides important new perspectives on the strategic thinking of NGOs, the way they identify themselves, and how they behave. Raymond L. Bryant develops a novel theoretical perspective around the concept of moral capital and assesses that concept through in-depth case studies of NGOs in the Philippines.The book’s focus is on perceptions of NGOs as moral and altruistic and how such perceptions can translate into social power. Bryant examines the ambiguous qualities of NGO strategizing, the ways in which the quest for moral capital is bedeviled by the need to compromise with political and economic elites, and the possibilities for NGOs to achieve political goals as moral leaders.

East Germany, its economy, and its society were in decline long before the country’s political collapse in the late 1980s. The clues were there in the natural landscape, Arvid Nelson argues in this groundbreaking book, but policy analysts were blind to them. Had they noted the record of the leadership’s values and goals manifest in the landscape, they wouldn’t have hailed East Germany as a Marxist-Leninist success story. Nelson sets East German history within the context of the landscape history of two centuries to underscore how forest and ecosystem change offered a reliable barometer to the health and stability of the political system that governed them.Cold War Ecology records how East German leaders’ indifference to human rights and their disregard for the landscape affected the rural economy, forests, and population. This lesson from history suggests new ways of thinking about the health of ecosystems and landscapes, Nelson shows, and he proposes assessing the stability of modern political systems based on the environment’s system qualities rather than on political leaders’ goals and beliefs.

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world

How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics

Notes from the Ground examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in nineteenth-century America. Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, the book shows how and why agrarian Americansyeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alikeaccepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land. By detailing the changing perceptions of soil treatment, Benjamin Cohen shows that the credibility of new soil practices grew not from the arrival of professional chemists, but out of an existing ideology of work, knowledge, and citizenship.

"An exploration of life in the early medieval West, using pigs as a lens to investigate agriculture, ecology, economy, and philosophy. In the early medieval West, from North Africa to the British Isles, pigs were a crucial part of agriculture and culture. In this fascinating book, Jamie Kreiner examines how this ubiquitous species was integrated into early medieval ecologies and transformed the way that people thought about the world around them. In this world, even the smallest things could have far-reaching consequences. Kreiner tracks the interlocking relationships between pigs and humans by drawing on textual and visual evidence, bioarchaeology and settlement archaeology, and mammal biology. She shows how early medieval communities bent their own lives in order to accommodate these tricky animals-and how in the process they reconfigured their agrarian regimes, their fiscal policies, and their very identities. In the end, even the pig's own identity was transformed: at the close of the early Middle Ages, it had become a riveting metaphor for Christianity itself."--

A highly regarded academic and former policy analyst and consultant charts the forty-year history of neoliberalism, environmental governance, and resource rights in Madagascar Since the 1970s, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent millions of dollars to preserve Madagascar's rich biological diversity. Yet its habitats are still in decline. Studying forty years of policy making in multiple sites, Catherine Corson reveals how blaming impoverished Malagasy farmers for Madagascar's environmental decline has avoided challenging other drivers of deforestation, such as the logging and mining industries. In this important ethnographic study, Corson reveals how Madagascar's environmental program reflects the transformation of global environmental governance under neoliberalism.

For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround themslavery, conscription, taxes, corve labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an anarchist history, is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of internal colonialism. This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scotts work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

This work contains ten chapters on rural society and agrarian issues, encompassing various disciplines, historical periods, and regions of the world. It examines such topics as poverty, subsistence, cultivation, ecology, justice, art, custom, law, ritual life, co-operation and state action.

Based on twenty years of global research, this is the first comprehensive reference on crop genetic diversity as it is maintained on farmland around the world. Showcasing the findings of seven experts representing the fields of ecology, crop breeding, genetics, anthropology, economics, and policy, this invaluable resource places farmer-managed crop biodiversity squarely in the center of the science needed to feed the world and restore health to our productive landscapes. It will prove to be an essential tool in the training of agricultural and environmental scientists seeking the solutions necessary to ensure healthy, resilient ecosystems for future generations.

Recent decades have witnessed the rise of social and environmental certification programs that are intended to promote responsible business practices. Consumers now encounter organic or fair-trade labels on a variety of products, implying such desirable benefits as improved environmental conditions or more equitable market transactions. But what do we know about the origins and development of the organizations behind these labels? This book examines forest, coffee, and fishery certification programs to reveal how the early decisions of programs on governance and standards affect the path along which individual programs evolve and the variety and number of programs across sectors.

This ambitious work is the definitive account of Russias land reform initiatives from the late 1980s to today. In Russia, a country controlling more land than any other nation, land ownership is central to structures of power, class division, and agricultural production.The aim of Russian land reform for the past thirty yearsto undo the collectivization of the Soviet era and encourage public ownershiphas been largely unsuccessful. To understand this failure, Stephen Wegren examines contemporary land reform policies in terms of legislation, institutional structure, and human behavior. Using extensive survey data, he analyzes household behaviors in regard to land ownership and usage based on socioeconomic status, family size, demographic distribution, and regional differences. Wegrens study is important and timely, as Russian land reform will have a profound effect on Russias ability to compete in an era of globalization.

From Thomas Jefferson's Monticello to Michelle Obama's White House organic garden, the image of America as a nation of farmers has persisted from the beginnings of the American experiment. This collection presents a complex historical portrait of the American character through its relationship to the land.

Integrating the history of science, environmental history, and science studies, this book shows how and why agrarian Americans - yeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alike - accepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land.