Agrarian Superpower

Agrarian Superpower is a landmark work of global political economy. Iyer’s commanding ambitious sweep is matched by an empirically meticulous mapping of the geographies of power—geopolitical, ecological, and social—that remade agrarian capitalism across the United States, Egypt, and India. A tour de force! – Manu Goswami, coeditor of Political Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century IndiaSamantha Iyer’s sweeping Agrarian Superpower powerfully foregrounds agricultural productivity as decisive in twentieth-century struggles over geopolitical dominance, national economic policy, and distributions of social power. Adeptly integrating the political-economic histories of Egypt, India, and the United States, the book reveals the ways these societies negotiated shared dilemmas and gives the United States’ post–World War II instrumentalization of agricultural overproduction for imperial ends a necessary, contingent history. It is indispensable reading for global and transnational historians; historians of agrarian capitalism; and historians of Egypt, India, and the United States in the world. – Paul A. Kramer, Vanderbilt UniversityAgrarian Superpower is a groundbreaking study of the centrality of agriculture and food to the ascent of US hegemony. Drawing on rare archival findings, Iyer brilliantly weaves together international history, political economy, and development to reveal how food and its distribution shaped power, politics, and governance. At a time when hunger is weaponized as a tool of annihilation, Iyer’s rigorous and profound book could not be more urgent. – Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

Samantha Iyer is associate professor of history at Fordham University.