agriculture

Throughout the nineteenth century, ecological currents in the agricultural world promoted organic farming and the defense of small producers. The story of these “ecological farmers” sheds light on the forward-looking contract forged between agriculture and society.

The renaturation of cities offers several advantages in terms of healthcare, urban planning and economics. But urban gardens can also become a Trojan horse for gentrification. Is cultivating them really all that counter-cultural?

While agribusiness is the object of ever more criticism, Matthieu Calame claims that no real agricultural transition will be possible as long as political and cultural leaders do not change too.

Alessandro Stanziani recounts the long story of how agriculture embraced capitalism and productivism, from the transformation of seeds and species to producers’ farms, by way of peasant expropriation and the chemistry of fertilizers and pesticides.

Although France is a significant player in world agriculture; it still benefits from a rural image made up of small producers. Venus Bivar tackles this paradox and shows how the industrialization of French agriculture has fostered niche productions, including organic farming.

A French qualitative strand of research opens new paths to understanding wealth accumulation in the post-Piketty era and renews our vision of elite groups and beyond.

At the frontiers of epidemiology and social history, Delphine Berdah compares the very different health policies implemented in France and the United Kingdom in the fight against tuberculosis and foot-and-mouth disease.

Addressing the issue of state intervention in agricultural markets, La Politique du Blé by Alain Chatriot examines the political debate behind the creation of the Office Interprofessionnel du Blé, the French national wheat pool, that was established in 1936 by the leftist government.

In 1901 a small group of African-American agronomists from the Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, undertook to teach the Ewe tribe in the German colony of Togo cotton-farming techniques deployed in the American South. Once put in a global historical context, Zimmerman shows that this short agricultural experiment charts the evolution of a globally interdependent capitalist world order that prefigures the North-South pattern of globalization we witness to the present day.

When it is not considered as the heartland of conservatism, Middle America is looked down on as backward and regressive. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow challenges this narrative of decline by looking at innovative local communities and stressing their impressive adaptability. But one can regret that he does not consider that alternative paths could have been taken.