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 that aimed 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—innovations in governance, administration, and knowledge-sharing that set out to supersede the limitations of “traditional” farming practices and technologies across the Third World.
My current book project, Verdant Empire: Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development, investigates the largely obscured connections between the United States’ Cold War-era agricultural and rural development programs—which helped consolidate U.S. empire as they aimed to combat hunger and contain civil unrest across the Third World—and the conditions of U.S. slavery, settlement, and racialization that prefigured such programs. 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, Verdant Empire contends that the racial liberal and spatial repertoires of postwar agricultural and rural development across the Third World had elaborated upon early-twentieth century innovations in U.S. governance, administration, and knowledge-sharing developed in relation to Native peoples and Black peoples.
Verdant Empire reveals that the early-twentieth century innovations that laid the ground for the United States’ Cold War-era agricultural and rural development programs were driven by race-liberal U.S. philanthropists, policymakers, and sociologists who were not only sympathetic to the plight of Native peoples and Black peoples, but who also feared potential unrest and revolt should their plight continue unchecked. Specifically, prefiguring the racial liberal and spatial repertoires of postwar agricultural and rural development across the Third World, this race-liberal web of alliances looked to and defined the U.S. plantation and reservation as the principal sites of Black and Native subjection, dispossession, and unrest, and thus risk management achievable via the devices of what would become recognizable as “development.” Asserting each geography as an object of knowledge, governance, and reform, they rendered the problem a largely technical one: an acute lack of techno-scientific agricultural knowledge, training, and machinery and inputs.
My current book project, Verdant Empire: Racial Capitalism, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of U.S. Agricultural Development, investigates the largely obscured connections between the United States’ Cold War-era agricultural and rural development programs—which helped consolidate U.S. empire as they aimed to combat hunger and contain civil unrest across the Third World—and the conditions of U.S. slavery, settlement, and racialization that prefigured such programs. 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, Verdant Empire contends that the racial liberal and spatial repertoires of postwar agricultural and rural development across the Third World had elaborated upon early-twentieth century innovations in U.S. governance, administration, and knowledge-sharing developed in relation to Native peoples and Black peoples.
Verdant Empire reveals that the early-twentieth century innovations that laid the ground for the United States’ Cold War-era agricultural and rural development programs were driven by race-liberal U.S. philanthropists, policymakers, and sociologists who were not only sympathetic to the plight of Native peoples and Black peoples, but who also feared potential unrest and revolt should their plight continue unchecked. Specifically, prefiguring the racial liberal and spatial repertoires of postwar agricultural and rural development across the Third World, this race-liberal web of alliances looked to and defined the U.S. plantation and reservation as the principal sites of Black and Native subjection, dispossession, and unrest, and thus risk management achievable via the devices of what would become recognizable as “development.” Asserting each geography as an object of knowledge, governance, and reform, they rendered the problem a largely technical one: an acute lack of techno-scientific agricultural knowledge, training, and machinery and inputs.
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