Yale Agrarian Studies

With the publication of Essay on the Principle of Population and its projection of food shortages in the face of ballooning populations, British theorist Thomas Robert Malthus secured a leading role in modern political and economic thought. In this startling new interpretation, Deborah Valenze reveals how canonical readings of Malthus fail to acknowledge his narrow understanding of what constitutes food production. Valenze returns to the eighteenth-century contexts that generated his arguments, showing how Malthus mobilized a redemptive narrative of British historical development and dismissed the ways that people adapted to the challenges of subsistence needs. She uses history, anthropology, and food studies to redirect our attention to the margins of Malthus's essay, where activities such as hunting and gathering were rendered extraneous. She demonstrates how Malthus's omissions and his subsequent canonization provided a rationale for colonial imposition of British agricultural models, regardless of environmental diversity. By broadening our conception of human livelihoods, Valenze suggests pathways to resistance against the hegemony of Malthusian political economy. She invites us to imagine a world where monoculture is in retreat and the margins are recentered as spaces of experimentation, nimbleness, and human flourishing.

A definitive history of ideas about land redistribution, allied political movements, and their varied consequences around the world Jo Guldi tells the story of a global struggle to bring food, water, and shelter to all. Land is shown to be a central motor of politics in the twentieth century: the basis of movements for giving reparations to formerly colonized people, protests to limit the rent paid by urban tenants, intellectual battles among development analysts, and the capture of land by squatters taking matters into their own hands. The book describes the results of state-engineered "land reform" policies beginning in Ireland in 1881 until US - led interests and the World Bank effectively killed them off in 1974. The Long Land War provides a definitive narrative of land redistribution alongside an unflinching critique of its failures, set against the background of the rise and fall of nationalism, communism, internationalism, information technology, and free-market economics. In considering how we could make the earth livable for all, she works out the important relationship between property ownership and justice on a changing planet.

Love for the Land explores the power and potential of people-place relationships. Through clear and compelling prose, it elevates the virtues of imagination, affection, and fidelity-concepts promoted by farmer-writer Wendell Berry-and shows how they motivate small- and mid-scale farmers to care for the land, even in the face of adversity. Paying particular attention to farmland loss from suburban sprawl, rampant agricultural consolidation, and, for farmers of color, racial injustice, Brooks Lamb reckons with the harsh realities that these farmers face. Drawing from in-depth interviews and hands-on experiences in two changing rural communities, he shares stories and sacrifices from dozens of farmers, local leaders, agricultural service providers, and land conservationists. Lamb's rural roots and farming background enable him to cultivate honest, trusting connections with the farmers he engages, yielding raw and powerful insights. Time and again, compelling evidence reveals that stewardship virtues encourage people to live and act as devoted caretakers. With a refreshing, accessible, and engaging approach, Lamb argues that these resilient and often overlooked farmers show rural and urban people alike a way forward, one that serves people, places, and the planet. That path is rooted in love for the land.

From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott comes the compelling account of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state–making to live at arm's length from any organized state society. For two thousand years, the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia-a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries-have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them: slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an "anarchist history," is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state–making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain, agricultural practices that enhance mobility, pliable ethnic identities, devotion to prophetic millenarian leaders, and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells in accessible language the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and he challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state–making as a form of "internal colonialism." This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott's work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen. "This book may well become a cult classic." "Nothing less than a refutation of the traditional narrative of steady civilizational progress…For many people through history, Scott argues, civilized life has been a burden and a menace." "Scott's book is refreshingly welcome…highlighting egalitarianism and independence as the ideals of hill societies…Scott has provided us with a platform for rethinking ethnic identities and inter-ethnic relations."