The world was our garden: United States plant introduction, empire, and industrial agri(culture), 1898–1948

Jeffrey Jacob Jones, Purdue University

Abstract

Through its analysis of the operations of the Seed and Plant Introduction Office (SPI) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), this study links two major themes in the histories of science, agri(culture) and empire. Organized in 1898, the year the United States became a truly global imperial power, SPI plant explorers were charged with the responsibility to secure the world's best plant genetic material for the utilization of agricultural enterprises in the nation's expanding formal and informal empires as well as the “homeland.” In fulfilling this obligation, SPI explorers engaged in cultural exchanges with all manner of people on almost every continent, from fellow plant scientists in European imperial outposts in Java to indigenous farmers in the highlands of Guatemala. Explorers also created written and visual accounts of their enterprise, recording and interpreting their experiences for the home audience. Though closely related to earlier European imperial endeavors, the SPI has heretofore escaped the close scrutiny from cultural and world system's analysts that has enlivened the Continental scholarship of empire for over a decade. This study seeks to redress that imbalance, and in the process critique those portions of the “exceptionalist” narrative that have tried to set the United States apart from the heritage of European empire. The SPI's second duty was to utilize the germplasm and cultural (including scientific) information collected overseas to aid in the development of domestic plant industries. To this end explorers sought to attract the attention of farmers and the general public to the literal “fruits” of the enterprise, as well as the cultural context in which they secured those fruits. Thus, explorers engaged in most of those endeavors—plant selection and breeding, political lobbying, advertising their plant “finds” to the public while promoting them to farmers—recently analyzed by a new generation of environmental historians focusing on the “industrialization” of California agriculture in the twentieth century. These scholars, however, have little to say about the international context of industrial agriculture, even though, as one SPI explorer argued in 1930, “America today, perhaps, owes her agricultural supremacy directly or indirectly more to agricultural explorations than to any other agency.” Through a close analysis of the SPI in the decades in which the United States achieved that “agricultural supremacy,” and by putting into conversation the two historiographic traditions noted above, this study advances the argument that both U.S. agriculture and American society were distinctly transnational enterprises.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Curtis, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American history|Agriculture

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