Agricultural Modernisation and the Green Revolution in the Twentieth-C

Before 1945, agricultural innovation grew within an intensive organic framework and moved largely in dialogue with the farmers who would use it. After the war, almost everywhere, it became social engineering: modernisation imposed from above on peasants labelled archaic, who were pushed towards ever greater yields of food, timber and raw materials through industrial and inorganic inputs. Exported by the United States to Asia, Latin America and Africa, that programme became known as the Green Revolution, and it left a difficult legacy for rural societies and sustainable farming.

The case studies here cross continents and political systems, from post-war reconstruction in the UK and Denmark to the Belgian Congo, post-fascist Ethiopia, communist Hungary, the Southern Cone and India. It is a serious, wide-ranging history for anyone interested in food, development or environmental change, and in how the twentieth century remade the countryside.