Research
Verdant Empire:
Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development
From the early 1940s to the early 1970s, the United States, in conjunction with corporate, philanthropic, state, and academic actors around the world, led a set of international capital- intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer initiatives designed to increase agricultural yields and combat hunger, poverty, and unrest across the Third Word amidst concerns of rapid population growth. Through the devices of U.S. technical assistance and economic aid programs of the mid-twentieth century, these initiatives led to the adoption of high-yield varieties of grains and large-scale mechanized modes of agricultural production, paired with irrigated water supplies and heavy petrochemical use—techno-scientific innovations that seemingly superseded the limitations of “traditional” farming practices and technologies.
My current book project, Verdant Empire: Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development, reframes the post-World War II U.S. agricultural and rural development agenda across the Third World as an exercise in the risk management of the imperial accumulations of U.S. racial capitalism, and does so within longer temporalizations of racialization, settlement, and empire. Through careful contextual analysis of the transnational policy, bureaucratic, and academic archives of U.S. agricultural and rural development between the early and mid-twentieth century, it contends that the strategies of and rationales for postwar agricultural and rural development across the Third World had elaborated upon early-twentieth century innovations in U.S. settler colonial and anti-Black forms of subjection, administration, and governance toward the development of a Native market agrarianism and Black market agrarianism.
Verdant Empire reveals that such innovations in U.S. settler colonial and anti-Black forms of subjection, administration, and governance were born of U.S. liberal thought and politics that were not only sympathetic to the plight of Native peoples and Black peoples, but also rooted in a fear of potential unrest and revolt should their plight continue unchecked. Progressive-minded sociologists, political scientists, and government officials at the time pointed to the U.S. reservation economy and the Southern plantation economy as the sites of intervention, centering each as an object of knowledge and governance. Employing what became a common trope of development, they rendered the problem a largely technical one: an acute lack of techno-scientific agricultural knowledge, training, and machinery and inputs.
The fraught reforms directed toward the reservation and plantation in service of a techno-scientific Native market agrarianism and Black market agrarianism took shape as the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and the New Deal-era capitalization of planters and transformation of industrial education in the U.S. South. Ultimately, such reforms and rationales for intervention laid the ground for the imperial interventions and accumulations of U.S. postwar international agricultural and rural development across the Third World—principally, the 1949 “Point 4 Program” and Technical Cooperation Administration, which set out to “provide scientific and technical assistance to underdeveloped countries in an effort to further economic and social progress and maintain political stability.”
In its treatment of this archive, Verdant Empire cements the political economy of U.S. agricultural and rural development as a generative site through which to reframe postwar racial capitalism within longer temporalizations of racialization, settlement, and empire. Further, it lays bare the transnational and imperial interface between anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, thus forging opportunities to elucidate and challenge the geopolitical formations of “souths” within and beyond the U.S. nation-state. Selections of Verdant Empire are forthcoming in Comparative American Studies and under review at American Quarterly.
My current book project, Verdant Empire: Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development, reframes the post-World War II U.S. agricultural and rural development agenda across the Third World as an exercise in the risk management of the imperial accumulations of U.S. racial capitalism, and does so within longer temporalizations of racialization, settlement, and empire. Through careful contextual analysis of the transnational policy, bureaucratic, and academic archives of U.S. agricultural and rural development between the early and mid-twentieth century, it contends that the strategies of and rationales for postwar agricultural and rural development across the Third World had elaborated upon early-twentieth century innovations in U.S. settler colonial and anti-Black forms of subjection, administration, and governance toward the development of a Native market agrarianism and Black market agrarianism.
Verdant Empire reveals that such innovations in U.S. settler colonial and anti-Black forms of subjection, administration, and governance were born of U.S. liberal thought and politics that were not only sympathetic to the plight of Native peoples and Black peoples, but also rooted in a fear of potential unrest and revolt should their plight continue unchecked. Progressive-minded sociologists, political scientists, and government officials at the time pointed to the U.S. reservation economy and the Southern plantation economy as the sites of intervention, centering each as an object of knowledge and governance. Employing what became a common trope of development, they rendered the problem a largely technical one: an acute lack of techno-scientific agricultural knowledge, training, and machinery and inputs.
The fraught reforms directed toward the reservation and plantation in service of a techno-scientific Native market agrarianism and Black market agrarianism took shape as the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act and the New Deal-era capitalization of planters and transformation of industrial education in the U.S. South. Ultimately, such reforms and rationales for intervention laid the ground for the imperial interventions and accumulations of U.S. postwar international agricultural and rural development across the Third World—principally, the 1949 “Point 4 Program” and Technical Cooperation Administration, which set out to “provide scientific and technical assistance to underdeveloped countries in an effort to further economic and social progress and maintain political stability.”
In its treatment of this archive, Verdant Empire cements the political economy of U.S. agricultural and rural development as a generative site through which to reframe postwar racial capitalism within longer temporalizations of racialization, settlement, and empire. Further, it lays bare the transnational and imperial interface between anti-Blackness and settler colonialism, thus forging opportunities to elucidate and challenge the geopolitical formations of “souths” within and beyond the U.S. nation-state. Selections of Verdant Empire are forthcoming in Comparative American Studies and under review at American Quarterly.
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