UC Berkeley

This study show how American food production became a pillar of U.S. global power after the Second World War. To analyze the character of that power and the global scale on which it was exercised, the study traces its historical roots in two regions of the former British Empire. From the 1950s to the 1970s, countries across what had come to be called the "Third World" became reliant on imports of U.S. food aid to manage their domestic food supply, in an international political and economic arrangement that sociologists Harriet Friedmann and Phillip McMichael have called the post-war "food regime." Focusing on the largest consumers of U.S. food aid by the 1960s--Egypt and India--my study examines the foundations of this regime beginning in the late nineteenth century.

Drawing on sources in Arabic, French, and English from Egyptian, Indian, British, and U.S. archives, the dissertation shows how a range of actors in Egypt, India, and the United States contributed to produce institutions and ideas to regulate and make sense of volatile and unruly global markets between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War. Those institutions and ideas came to undergird a food regime structured around the U.S. export of food aid by the 1950s. Small and large farmers, wageworkers, consumers, and social scientists interacted with one another, and with government administrators and policymakers, in the making of this world. The study traces this history through social scientific writings, political tracts, private letters, propaganda, government records and reports, labor and farm newspapers, and petitions from farmers, workers, and consumers to state officials.

Through the history of food and agriculture, the dissertation offers a new lens for understanding how the United States emerged as a global power out of a British imperial world. It also shows in a practical way a different mode of writing global history. In order to understand how food became such a significant international political tool for American policymakers beginning in the 1950s, the study suggests, we must recognize that its power was contingent on particular struggles, conflicts, and compromises, not only within the United States, but also in countries like Egypt and India. Global processes did not simply affect local and national politics, but were also constituted by them.