Wheat Flows and Empire-Making

In Oceans of Grain, Scott Nelson explores the role of wheat in making and unmaking empires. While there is some discussion of ancient and medieval empires, the book focuses mostly on empire-making during the “long nineteenth century” up until and including World War I. The book is much more about how wheat flows than about how wheat grows (or who grows it and under what conditions), but Nelson advances some highly original arguments.The story revolves in part around the ideas of the somewhat obscure Marxist thinker, revolutionary, grain trader, and arms dealer known as Parvus (Alexander Israel Helphand), whose ideas were influential in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but who has since been largely forgotten. Nelson anchors his argument on the concept of the “black paths,” the ancient trade routes along which grain was carried to port, creating long-distance trade networks but also spreading disease, ideas, and culture along the way. According to Nelson, it was the chumaki, traditional traders from what is now Ukraine, who forged the first black paths leading from the rich black soils of the interior to Black Sea ports. Nelson's central argument is that trade precedes and facilitates empire, not the other way around. Empires emerged when warlords managed to “establish a protection racket along chumaki pathways,” thereby shaping and taxing the flow of grain to their benefit (17). In this sense, an empire is “a monopolizer of food along ancient grain pathways,” and its fortunes rise and fall with its ability to control the flow of grain (39). In Eurasia, Nelson argues that the Bosporus strait, as the chokepoint for grain flowing from the Black Sea, has been centrally important to the rise and fall of empires since ancient times.For most of Western history, empires acted as “grain pumps” that funneled grain inward to feed the cities, then outward again to feed colonies and armies. In the late eighteenth century, Catherine the Great, inspired by the physiocrats, reversed this strategy by using grain exports from the new port of Odessa as a strategy for empire building. This strategy was later adopted by the United States beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and would eventually result in a massive increase in North American exports to Europe. One of the factors that ushered in nineteenth-century “free trade,” when the United Kingdom abandoned import restrictions on grain, was the potato blight of the 1840s and the resulting European famines. The oceans of North American and Russian grain that flowed into Western Europe from the 1850s onward facilitated the growth of “consumption-accumulation cities” (Parvus's term), attracting workers and capital with the promise of cheap food (and therefore lower wages). In turn, city dwellers deposited savings into banks, fueling the imperial expansion of states such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Massive exports of grain were of course made possible by the expansion of wheat-growing frontiers in North America and Eurasia. Nineteenth-century imperial rivalries and wars were profoundly shaped by attempts to block or facilitate the continued flow of grain into European capitals.Nelson writes of the 1873 Great Depression as a major turning point in European history, setting off the decline of formerly powerful agricultural empires but contributing to the growing power of wheat-importing, industrializing countries. Here is where Parvus reenters the story. As an emerging intellectual, Parvus developed an original theory of capitalism based on his analysis of the Great Depression. He argued that Marx's model of industrial capitalism was incomplete since it downplayed the importance of distribution. According to Parvus, Nelson writes, “the working world was organized spatially around pathways” and production was “only the first part of a worldwide distribution process” (173). He suggested that improving logistics—straightening out trade routes and making transportation more efficient—was a key dynamic of capitalist development. Thus, a more complete theory of capitalism must take into account transportation logistics. Nelson sees Parvus's ideas as a kind of proto-world-systems theory, with powerful insights to offer for understanding economic and political rivalries.The last few chapters of the book offer a novel interpretation of the factors that led to war and revolution in the early twentieth century. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Russia tried to compete with cheap North American exports through an ambitious phase of empire building and railroad building but ultimately failed, leading to revolution in 1905. This, according to Nelson, was the result of Russia's inability to create a continent-wide logistics and transportation corridor for wheat to rival that of the United States. In the lead-up to World War I, Russia feared the Ottoman Empire would block Russian grain shipments on the Black Sea, posing an existential threat. Nelson argues that this fear was one of the precipitating factors of the devastating conflict. Late in the war, severe Russian food shortages undermined the legitimacy of imperial rulers as revolutionaries began to collect and transport grain outside of imperial channels. Ultimately, this set the stage for the collapse of imperial rule and the revolution of 1917. Having been exiled from Russia for earlier revolutionary activities, Parvus helped broker the secret deal through which the German government provided large sums of money to the Bolsheviks in support of revolution. According to Nelson, Parvus had predicted that grain shortages would be the ultimate undoing of the Russian Empire. In sum, he suggests that Parvus provided a uniquely valuable perspective on capitalist geopolitics: “His understanding of the world shows us a deeper history about the growing of food . . . its prehistoric long-distance distribution lines, and the abstract instruments that made that trade possible. . . . Parvus saw the lines that bind us all together, the empire's fault lines, and their fatal weaknesses” (267).Oceans of Grain is a fascinating and frequently entertaining read. It will no doubt spark new debates on the rise and fall of empires and the role of food in geopolitics. This is certainly asking too much, but it would have been fascinating for Nelson to write about the period after World War I, when the collapse of world wheat prices led to many innovations including massive government intervention into markets (e.g., the US Agricultural Adjustment Act, government wheat boards) and international trade (e.g., International Wheat Agreements that set prices and production quotas). In the mid-twentieth century, the United States built a postwar “empire of grain” based on the strategic accumulation and disposal of massive grain surpluses, contributing significantly to American soft power. It would be equally fascinating for Nelson to apply his analytical lens to Russia's current war of conquest in Ukraine, given the strategic importance of Black Sea ports for the world food trade. To date, much more has been said about the geopolitics of energy in the Ukraine conflict, and less attention has been paid to the flow of grain. Perhaps these are topics for a second volume of this important book.

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