BiblioVault - Books about Agriculture

Imperial Plots

Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies

Sarah Carter

University of Manitoba Press, 2016

Imprints on Native Lands

The Miskito-Moravian Settlement Landscape in Honduras

Benjamin F. Tillman

University of Arizona Press, 2011

More than one hundred fifty years ago, Moravian missionaries first landed along a so-called isolated stretch of Honduras’s Mosquito Coast bordering the western Caribbean Sea. The missionaries were sent, with the strong encouragement of German political leaders and in the context of German attempts at colonization, to “spread the word” of Protestantism in Central America. Upon their arrival, the missionaries employed a three-pronged approach consisting of proselytizing, medical treatment, and education to convert the majority of the indigenous population.

Much like the Spanish and English attempts before them, German colonizing efforts in the region never completely took hold. Still, as Benjamin Tillman shows, for the region’s indigenous inhabitants, the Miskito people, the arrival of the Moravian missionaries marked the beginning of an important cultural interface.

Imprints on Native Lands documents Moravian contributions to the Miskito settlement landscape in sixty four villages of eastern Honduras through field observations of material culture, interviews with village residents, and research in primary sources in the Moravian Church archives. Tillman employs the resulting data to map a hierarchy of Moravian centers, illustrating spatially varying degrees of Moravian influence on the Miskito settlement landscape.

Tillman reinforces Miskito claims to ancestral lands by identifying and mapping their created ethnic landscape, as well as supporting earlier efforts at land-use mapping in the region. This book has broad implications, providing a methodology that will be of help to those with an interest in geography, anthropology, or Latin American studies, and to anyone interested in documenting and strengthening indigenous land claims.

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In Essentials, Unity

An Economic History of the Grange Movement

Jenny Bourne

Ohio University Press, 2017

The Patrons of Husbandry—or the Grange—is the longest-lived US agricultural society and, since its founding shortly after the Civil War, has had immeasurable influence on social change as enacted by ordinary Americans. The Grange sought to relieve the struggles of small farmers by encouraging collaboration. Pathbreaking for its inclusion of women, the Grange is also well known for its association with Gilded Age laws aimed at curbing the monopoly power of railroads.

In Essentials, Unity takes as its focus Grange founder Oliver Kelley and his home organization in Minnesota. Jenny Bourne draws upon numerous historical records to present a lively picture of a fraternal organization devoted to improving the lot of farmers but whose legacies extend far beyond agriculture. From struggles over minimum wage, birth control, and environmental regulation to the conflicts surrounding the Affordable Care Act, and from lunch-counter sit-ins to Occupy Wall Street, the Grange has shaped the very notion of collective action and how it is deployed even today. As this compact book so effectively illustrates, the history of the Patrons of Husbandry exposes the classic tension between the desires for achieving overall economic success and determining how the spoils are split.

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Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest

Robert Boyd

Oregon State University Press, 2021

This publication is supported by a generous grant from the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde through their Cultural Resources Publication Sponsorship Program

Instead of discovering a land blanketed by dense forests, early explorers of the Pacific Northwest encountered a varied landscape including open woods, meadows, and prairies. Far from a pristine wilderness, much of the Northwest was actively managed and shaped by the hands of its Native American inhabitants. Their primary tool was fire.

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to one of the most important issues concerning Native Americans and their relationship to the land. Over more than 10,000 years, Native Americans in the Northwest learned the intricacies of their local environments and how to use fire to create desired effects, mostly in the quest for food.

Drawing on historical journals, Native American informants, and ethnobotanical and forestry studies, this book’s contributors describe local patterns of fire use in eight ecoregions, representing all parts of the Native Northwest, from southwest Oregon to British Columbia and from Puget Sound to the Northern Rockies. Their essays provide glimpses into a unique understanding of the environment, one that draws on traditional ecological knowledge. Together, these writings also offer historical perspective on the contemporary debate over “prescribed burning” and management of public lands.

This updated edition includes a foreword by Frank K. Lake and a new epilogue by editor Robert T. Boyd. Contributors include Stephen Arno, Stephen Barrett, Theresa Ferguson, David French, Eugene Hunn, Leslie Johnson, Jeff LaLande, Estella Leopold, Henry Lewis, Helen H. Norton, Reg Pullen, William Robbins, John Ross, Nancy Turner, and Richard White.

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Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest

Robert Boyd

Oregon State University Press, 1999

The Intended and Unintended Effects of U.S. Agricultural and Biotechnology Policies

Edited by Joshua S. Graff Zivin and Jeffrey M. Perloff

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Using economic models and empirical analysis, this volume examines a wide range of agricultural and biofuel policy issues and their effects on American agricultural and related agrarian insurance markets. Beginning with a look at the distribution of funds by insurance programs—created to support farmers but often benefiting crop processors instead—the book then examines the demand for biofuel and the effects of biofuel policies on agricultural price uncertainty. Also discussed are genetically engineered crops, which are assuming an increasingly important role in arbitrating tensions between energy production, environmental protection, and the global food supply. Other contributions discuss the major effects of genetic engineering on worldwide food markets. By addressing some of the most challenging topics at the intersection of agriculture and biotechnology, this volume informs crucial debates.

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Interregional Competition in Agriculture

With Special Reference to Dairy Farming in the Lake States and New England

Ronald L. Mighell and John D. Black

Harvard University Press

Agricultural planning, individual or national, depends on an understanding of competition in farm products between one region of the United States and another. The agriculture of different parts of the United States competes constantly with that of other parts—as, for example, the early competition in cotton between the northern frontier and southern growers, later between the southwest frontier and the Old South, and recently between California and the South. There is equally strong competition between potato-growing regions. It is this inter-regional competition in a country with no trade barriers which two outstanding economists analyze in this book.

They present the results of a concrete study of one outstanding example: competition in dairy production between the Northeastern States and the Lake States of the central Midwest for the New England market for fluid milk and cream. Six selected sample areas were analyzed carefully in each region in 1935–36 and predictions were made about future production and marketing of dairy products in each of these areas. Ten years later these areas were surveyed and the production changes compared with the predictions.

The authors’ conclusions about the conditions under which New England will be able to continue to compete with the lake states for the New England market are significant in themselves. Even more important, however, is the development of a method of analysis which can be widely employed to furnish the information which is needed to guide future developments in the agriculture of the United States or in any other country. This study is therefore an important contribution to the theory of interregional and international trade.

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Investment, Profit, and Tenancy

The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy

Dennis P. Kehoe

University of Michigan Press, 1997

The economy of the Roman Empire was dominated by the business of agriculture. It employed the vast majority of the Empire's labor force and provided the wealth on which the upper classes depended for their social privileges. Consequently, the way in which upper-class Romans maintained and profited from their agricultural investments played a crucial role in shaping the basic relationships characterizing the Roman economy.
In Investment, Profit, and Tenancy Dennis P. Kehoe defines the economic mentality of upper-class Romans by analyzing the assumptions that Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. In particular the author analyzes the duties of guardians in managing the property of their wards, and the bequeathing of agricultural property. He bases his analysis on Roman legal sources, which offer a comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans. Farm tenancy was crucial to these interests, and Kehoe carefully examines how Roman landowners contended with the legal, social, and economic institutions surrounding farm tenancy as they pursued security from their agricultural investments.
Kehoe argues that Roman jurists offer a consistent picture of agriculture as a form of investment that was grounded in upper-class conceptions of the Roman economy. In the eyes of the jurists, agriculture represented the only form of investment capable of providing upper-class Romans with economic security, and this situation had important implications for the relationship between landowners and tenants. Landowners who sought economic stability from their agricultural holdings preferred to simplify the task of managing their estates by delegating the work and costs to their tenants. This tended to make landowners depend on the expertise and resources of tenants, which in turn gave the tenants significant bargaining power. This dynamic relationship is traced in the jurists' regulation of farm tenancy, as the jurists adapted Roman law to the economic realities of the Roman empire.
Investment, Profit, and Tenancy will be of interest to classicists as well as to scholars of preindustrial comparative economics.
Dennis P. Kehoe is Professor of Classical Studies, Tulane University.

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Irrigation and the Cuicatec Ecosystem

A Study of Agriculture and Civilization in North Central Oaxaca

Joseph W. Hopkins III

University of Michigan Press, 1984

In this volume, Joseph W. Hopkins III reconstructs the history of the Cuicatec region in Oaxaca, Mexico, from the Aztec empire through the Spanish conquest and into the twentieth century. Hopkins also discusses the archaeology of the region with a particular focus on irrigation systems and agriculture. From 1968 to 1970, Hopkins conducted an archaeological survey and limited excavation in this region, and he presents the results of that fieldwork here.

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