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. Benjamin Hurwitz Moving Crops and the Scales of History. By francesca bray, barbara hahn, john bosco lourdusamy, and tiago saraiva. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. xiv + 338 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-25725-0. 40. 00 (hardcover). Fifty years after Alfred Crosby's The Columbian Exchange, historians have learned to take for granted the transplantation of seeds, livestock, and agricultural knowledge across oceans and continents. And nobody would be surprised to learn that crops have the power to transform landscapes, flora, fauna, and their human inhabitants. Many of the most striking examples involve the interplay of crops, markets, state power, and human toil: Sweetness and Power, Empire of Cotton, and Black Rice. But neither market incentives, nor innovation, nor brute force alone can bring a crop to harvest, and it is here that our authors have much to contribute. In Moving Crops and the Scales of History, Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva argue for a new frame of reference: the "cropscape, " a term that encompasses the soil characteristics, climatic conditions, pest infestations, horticultural knowledge, labor conditions, and human uses that determine a crop's viability and meaning at a given place and time. The book unfolds via a series of chapters on various dimensions of a cropscape: "Times, " "Places, " "Actants, " "Compositions, " etc. Each chapter is composed of case studies, or "riffs, " which are used to illustrate the capacity of these frameworks. Timescales in a cropscape may include a single season of End Page 163 planting and harvesting rice, a decades-long campaign to bring date palms to the Coachella Valley, or the rise and fall of China's Millet Belt across millennia. The authors draw generally on the inspiration of the Annales school, considering cropscapes over the long durée and across vast distances. More immediately, the work shows the strong influence of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT), adopting an inclusive definition of actor (or "actant") that includes animals, crops, and inanimate constituents of the landscape. The authors build upon recent commodity and environmental histories that reflect similar influences, drawing these studies together in surprising and illuminating pairings. What does it mean to speak of "plantation" crops like rubber, cotton, or tea (as historians may well do in an introductory course), when smallholder production was a central feature of their market compositions? This work excels when looking through an expanded cropscape transforms a familiar story. For example, the Tulip Fever of the seventeenth century routinely conjures visions of early capitalist excess or consumer culture, and the origins of the plant are only briefly considered as an episode of exotic collection by curious or rapacious westerners. But here, the authors describe an economy and culture of flower cultivation within the Ottoman Empire with a distinct capitalist flavor every bit as intriguing as the Dutch manic episode. In doing so, they disrupt the dichotomy of a reckless, adventurous West, and a timeless East. In another revealing "riff, " the authors consider the role of tuber cultivation in global, capitalist economies across multiple chapters. Readers familiar with James Scott or other recent scholarship of early agriculture will know that historians have contrasted the tuber cultivation of stateless or unsettled people with the grain cultivation favored by states (on account of its portability, transferability, and taxability). But the authors of this work show that tubers were not only desirable as an "anti-commodity" safeguard from confiscation. These plants could also play important roles in supporting state goals and coercive economies. From the sweet potatoes that fed sugarcane workers in South China, to the manioc earmarked for enslaved Africans, tubers were often important agents in fueling the growth of global capitalism. The authors have consciously searched for non-Western perspectives on historical cropscapes, much to their credit. The global economies they describe were directed by many actants (human and nonhuman) in many parts of the world, and the cropscapes they End Page 164 describe are peripheral to most Western readers. But there is also, at times, a tendency in this work to use Western industrial agricultural as a foil, or a. . .