Table Of ContentYale Agrarian Studies Series
James C. Scott, series editor
THE AGRARIAN STUDIES SERIES AT YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
seeks to publish outstanding and original interdisciplinary work on agriculture
and rural society—for any period, in any location. Works of daring that question
existing paradigms and fill abstract categories with the lived experience of rural
people are especially encouraged.
—James C. Scott, Series Editor
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed
Steve Striffler, Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia
Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of
Sight
James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
Loka Ashwood, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of
Rural America
Jonah Steinberg, A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways in India
Hannah Holleman, Dust Bowls of Empire: Imperialism, Environmental Politics, and
the Injustice of “Green” Capitalism
Johnhenry Gonzalez, Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti
Christian C. Lentz, Contested Territory: Điê.n Biên Phu� and the Making of North-
west Vietnam
Dan Allosso, Peppermint Kings: A Rural American History
Jamie Kreiner, Legions of Pigs in the Early Medieval West
Christian Lund, Nine-Tenths of the Law: Enduring Dispossession in Indonesia
Shaila Seshia Galvin, Becoming Organic: Nature and Agriculture in the Indian
Himalaya
Michael Dove, Bitter Shade: The Ecological Challenge of Human Consciousness
Japhy Wilson, Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon
Aniket Aga, Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary
India
Ruth Mostern, The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History
Brian Lander, The King’s Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers
to the First Empire
Jo Guldi, The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights
Andrew S. Mathews, Trees Are Shape Shifters: How Cultivation, Climate Change,
and Disaster Create Landscapes
Francesca Bray, Barbara Hahn, John Bosco Lourdusamy, and Tiago Saraiva, Mov-
ing Crops and the Scales of History
For a complete list of titles in the Yale Agrarian Studies Series, visit yalebooks.
com/agrarian.
Moving Crops and the
Scales of History
Francesca Bray
Barbara Hahn
John Bosco Lourdusamy
Tiago Saraiva
Yale university press•new haven & london
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of
Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright © 2023 by Yale University.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022934331
ISBN 978-0-300-25725-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Alina, Dagmar, Danyang, and Jon,
our heartfelt thanks
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Contents
Acknowledgments, ix
List of Abbreviations, xiii
Orientations. Cropscapes and History, 1
1 Times, 25
2 Places, 59
3 Sizes, 95
4 Actants, 134
5 Compositions, 172
6 Reproductions, 207
Epilogue. Beyond the Grain, 248
Notes, 253
Bibliography, 285
Index, 325
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Acknowledgments
Moving Crops has been on the move over a period of about four years.
Along the way we have gathered varied and pleasant debts of gratitude. Our
foremost thanks go to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science,
Berlin (MPIWG). We thank its director and one of our biggest well-wishers
Dagmar Schäfer, not only for seeding the project as part of Department III of
MPI and hosting us generously for almost a dozen meetings, but also for en-
abling us to tap into one of the most precious attributes of MPIWG—one
marked by a great deal of mobility and connectedness: the opportunity to meet
with numerous scholars from around the globe, drawn to the institute as long-
and short-term fellows or visitors. We have immensely profited in particular
through our interactions with BuYun Chen, Emily Brock, Jonathan Harwood,
Lisa Onaga, On Barak, Tamar Novick, Tim LeCain, and Yubin Shen.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to Alina Cucu, our intellectual coordina-
tor at MPIWG, who provided us with astute criticism, creative suggestions,
strong coffee, tasty snacks, and jazz evenings during our Berlin meetings.
Our travels to Berlin and our deliberations there would not have been as
enjoyable and fruitful as they turned out to be without the precious roles played
by the invariably cheerful and helpful MPIWG staff—in particular Danyang
