Hello, I'm developing a chapter of my current work that needs to account for the increased supply of wheat on the world market from c. 1840 to 1914. It's obvious that the supply of wheat available for export to Britain did increase dramatically in this time frame, and it's pretty clear that this increase was intimately tied to the expansion of cultivated area in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Argentina, where non- or semi-agricultural peoples (Native American, Australian Aborigines, etc.) we expropriated and/or exterminated, making way for European settlement. According to some economic history literature, wheat was the preferred crop of frontier settlement because it offered the highest value relative to bulk; indeed, some economic historians have essentially explained the movement of the frontier in the American West as this equation: if (wheat prices - transportation costs) > cost of bringing land under cultivation, then settlement.
That's all very well, and is a useful way to look at the issue. However, people are not little working robots and there's clearly a LOT more going on than a simple calculus of grain prices and labor costs. So, I'm looking for book or article recommendations that can show me the state of scholarship on agricultural settlement in the US, Canada, Australia, and Argentina (or other places you think might be useful). I'm interested in works that address things like the patterns of settlement, the transformation of landscapes, the construction of infrastructure, conflicts between European settlers and non-European inhabitants, state policy in facilitating the growth of "settled" lands, and the ideologies and cultures that underlay this broad transformation of so much land.
Thanks!
I'm interested in works that address things like the patterns of settlement, the transformation of landscapes, the construction of infrastructure, conflicts between European settlers and non-European inhabitants, state policy in facilitating the growth of "settled" lands, and the ideologies and cultures that underlay this broad transformation of so much land.
This is a pretty tall order! Western history is a huge field in the US/Canada and there is tons of scholarship on almost all of the things you mention here. I could start listing some books but it might kind of be like throwing you in the deep end, and it's been a few years since I studied this so my references might be a bit out of date.
For the US, I might recommend starting with the Blackwell Companion to the American West - it's a decade old now, but full of historiographical essays that will give you a good idea what the key areas of study/issues are, and they all have extensive bibliographies that will give you ideas for other sources to look at. It sounds like you might find Drew Isenberg's essay "Environment and the Nineteenth-Century West: Or, Process Encounters Place" particularly interesting. If you don't have easy access I can send you a digital copy, just let me know!
Have you looked at Belich's Replenishing the Earth (and my old saw, Weaver's The Great Land Rush on Anglo settler land policy and settlement in law and custom)? There's also a journal entitled Settler Colonial Studies that touches on some of this. The wheat frontier and the beef frontier are also tightly interwoven in terms of global food networks. Southern Africa was part of this too; so was Kazakhstan (shockingly). The rise of the refrigerated-food and shipping empire of the Vestey Brothers is one sign of the late phase of this transformation, but it began earlier.
For a comparative perspective on Canadian and Latin American wheat production for the time period you are interested in, see Jeremy Adelman's first book, Frontier Development. I had to read it in graduate school and it does a good job of analyzing agricultural development and output in both regions.