Workshop Report on “Provisioning Conflicts: Food Commodities & War”, a British Academy “Commodities of Empire” International Research Network event, hosted at the University of Birmingham, UK, 12-13 September, 2024
By Rosie Charles (University of Birmingham, Contemporary History MA student)
The entanglement of food and conflict forms a crucial segment of present-day politics. Likewise, the historical context of this interrelationship has long been recognised by researchers across history and cognate disciplines. The aim of this workshop, organised by Simon Jackson (University of Birmingham), was to spatially and temporally broaden this research framework, bringing historians with a range of approaches and expertise into closer conversation. Maintaining its core focus on commodities and imperial formations, this two-day international Commodities of Empire workshop investigated how forms of warfare have historically shaped and interacted with the production, processing, trading, transport, distribution, consumption and destruction of food commodities. Structured around four thematic panels, the workshop fostered papers and discussions which not only examined the mutually constitutive relationship between food systems and political-military conflicts, but offered opportunities for further commodity research.
The ways that trauma and food scarcity instigate individual, local and national forms of resistance was at the centre of two papers. In an exploration into the pre-history of the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, Christopher S. Rose (Our Lady of the Lake University, Texas), attributed peasant participation to years of inflation, food scarcity, and hunger. Chronologically expanding scholarly narratives of peasant grievances to 1914, Rose’s paper demonstrated how continuous economic instability and the failure of the Anglo-Egyptian government to adequately provide for the civilian population created an environment in which the Egyptian peasantry actively sought to “sever the tentacles” through which the state inflicted desperation. The role of the state in the relationship between trauma and resistance was a similar point of focus for Tylor Brand (Trinity College Dublin). Focused on the Great Famine of Mount Lebanon during World War I, Brand explored how the uncertainty surrounding food provisions and the onset of mass-starvation shaped attitudes toward the state and the ways in which people obtained food. Here, the failures of the state to adequately provision food made certain acts of illegal provisioning and disobedience, what Brand termed the “immoral economy”, socially acceptable, even heroic, behaviours.
Making a prominent appearance in a couple of papers was the radical reorganisation of ecologies and landscapes in the accumulation of wartime capital. Recentring the Seven Years’ War as a moment reconfiguration in the capitalist world-ecology, John Peter Antonacci (SUNY Binghamton) demonstrated how the conflict necessitated the “codification, rationalization and (re)construction of North American environments” in a process of environment-making – a process Antonacci argued interacted with that of war-making. Antonacci showed how the massive subsidies, infrastructure projects and movement of troops required to defeat the French unleashed forces of proletarianization and agro-industrialisation onto the North American landscape. These state-led revolutions of appropriation produced the conditions for the accumulation of capital. Such state-led revolutions were a similar point of interest in the paper presented by Narusa Yamato (Stanford). Engaging with themes of autonomy and non-human agency, Yamato traced the creation of a Japanese “Holstein Island”. Previously foreign to Japanese landscapes, this paper analysed how the introduction and expansion of this breed of dairy cow transformed Hachijō island – emphasised by Yamato to be neither a borderland nor colony – into an intensive commodity frontier as the consumption of milk was entwined with the idea of a robust national military.
The overarching theme of food politics formed a large component of many of the workshop papers, with each introducing central questions and insights into how food politics have been shaped by encroaching wartime specificities. For example, Somo Seimu (Moshi, Tanzania) provided insight into the increasingly exploitative relationship between native and settler colonial coffee producers in Tanganyika under the wartime bulk purchase arrangement. By focusing on Tanganyika, a colony not central to the fighting of World War II but vital for providing agro-commodities, Seimu provided critical insight into the varied legal and marketing histories of commodity exploitation. Meanwhile, Lara Wijesuriya (Independent Researcher, Sri Lanka) focused her paper on the food politics surrounding rice on the Ceylonese home front, paying attention to how rice supply and production was framed and discussed by the colonial State Council in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and other authorities. By focusing on how substitutes such as wheat became the subject of propaganda, how the colonial government intervened to override private traders and enter the rice market, and how newspapers and posters were used to promote the production of “home-grown” crops for the war effort, Wijesuriya demonstrated the mutability of food politics and its entanglement with wartime refiguring of space, race and nationalist politics. Furthermore, nutrition formed a common thread within this theme with two papers connecting nutritional welfare with military organisation. For example, Ṣeun Sedẹ Williams (Graduate Institute, Geneva) and Waliu A. Ismaila (West Virginia University) examined the significance of World War II for cattle production and livestock trade in colonial Nigeria. Shifting attention to Nigerian cattle as a nonhuman colonial subject, Williams and Ismaila argued that Nigerian cattle played a significant role in the colonial state’s bid to meet military nutritional requirements, particularly that surrounding the consumption of protein. Similarly, Satarupa Lahiri (UPES, India) explored the complexities of food provisioning within the Indian Army where nutritional sustenance was maintained alongside the respect for varied religious and cultural practices. Utilising official records and personal narratives, this paper explored how military authorities managed the availability, transportation and preservation of foodstuffs as well as issues of food adulteration, logistical failures and the impact of dietary practices on health. This focus allowed Lahiri to contribute a deeper understanding of the intricate interplay between nutrition, logistics, and cultural identity within the Indian Army. Moving away from nutrition, Ingrid de Zwarte (Wageningen), with Helmi Moret and Pim de Zwart, explored the Indonesian War of Independence as being marked not only by excessive violence and food scarcity, but also by the use of hunger as a weapon of warfare. Such a focus was achieved in the paper through the analysis of food prices and its relation to tactics of war, such as the Dutch naval blockade, among others.
A final theme observable amongst the workshop papers was that of science and the role of scientific experts. For instance, Soumyadeep Guha (SUNY Binghamton) explored how colonial science responded to the 1943 Bengal famine. Focusing on three sites – the laboratory, the agricultural field, and the home – Guha pointed out that scientific responses to this famine are to be best understood through the lens of the 1930s “ecology of fear” which witnessed anxiety on malnutrition, soil erosion and population rates. Guha also showed how policies to solve these issues were not to be considered as monoliths. Policy was instead formulated based on which idea was cheapest and found agreement across international scientific circles. John Garnett (George Mason University) focused on the role of plant pathologists from World War I as the outbreak of the plant disease, wheat rust, threatened the vital production of wheat across North America. Garnett argued that by focusing on wheat rust, plant pathologists were able to position themselves as defenders of the state and develop tools to effectively shape public policy on topics as broad as plant quarantine legislation, disease-resistant crop breeding, and environmental control measures. Omri Polatsek (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Technical University, Berlin) studied the history of chemical fertiliser within the British protectorate of Egypt. Noting that histories of chemical fertiliser have usually been studied from the Anglo-European context, Polatsek considered how chemical fertiliser was introduced, established, and integrated into Egyptian agricultural policy from World War I to World War II. Tracing a history of dependence, Polatsek provided insight into the intertwined history of fertiliser and power, from the standpoint of Egypt and technology.
The workshop concluded with a collective discussion on numerous recurring themes and paved the way for future research. Of particular importance among discussions was how agency, particularly that of non-human agency, can be applied more fruitfully within commodity histories and what this would mean for how historians and scholars in cognate disciplines approach the commodity category. Also mentioned was the role of science and technological studies (STS). Many of the papers raised questions surrounding just what could be termed a form of technology and where the boundaries of this definition lie. As such, concluding discussions were framed around how we can approach the relationship between humans and non-humans with that of technology.
Workshop overview:
Resistance, Adaptive & Hybrid Practices in Contexts of Exploitation & Famine
Chair: Dr Jon Curry-Machado (School of Advanced Study, University of London) / Discussant: Dr Simon Jackson (University of Birmingham)
Dr Christopher S. Rose (Our Lady of the Lake University, Texas), “Disease, Famine, and Death in Egypt 1914-1919.”
Lara Wijesuriya (Independent Researcher, Sri Lanka), “Rice on the Ceylonese Home Front, 1939-42.” (via Zoom)
Dr Tylor Brand (Trinity College Dublin), “Smuggling, Hoarding, and the Immoral Economy of the Lebanese Famine of World War I.”
Economic, Scientific & Legal Concepts
Chair: Dr Simon Jackson / Discussant: Prof. David Pretel (UA Madrid)
Soumyadeep Guha (SUNY Binghamton), “War, Science and Survival Technologies: The Politics of Nutrition and Agriculture in Late Colonial India.”
Dr John Garnett (George Mason University), “Enemy of the State: Wheat Rust, Wartime Food Security, and the Birth of Plant Pathology, 1916-1943.”
Dr Ingrid de Zwarte (Wageningen University), with Helmi Moret & Pim de Zwart, “The Value of Rice: Food Prices and Hunger during the Indonesian War of Independence.”
Spatial Arrangements & Temporal Frameworks
Chair: Dr Jelmer Vos (University of Glasgow) / Discussant: Prof. Helen Cowie (University of York)
John Peter Antonacci (SUNY Binghamton), “Agriculture and Environment in North America’s Seven Years’ War.”
Narusa Yamato (Stanford University), “The Global Making of a Japanese “Holstein Island”: War, Dairy Cows, and Hachijō in Imperial Japan.”
Omri Polatsek (Max Planck Berlin), “Fertilizer, Crisis, and War in 20th Century Egypt.”
Emergent Infrastructural Arrangements
Chair: Prof. Helen Cowie (York) / Discussant: Dr Samuël Coghe (Universiteit Gent)
Ṣeun Sedẹ Williams (Graduate Institute, Geneva) & (via Zoom) Dr Waliu A. Ismaila, “Of ‘Military Cattle’: World War II, Nutritional Welfare and Meat Production in Colonial Nigeria.”
Dr Somo M. L. Seimu (Moshi Co-operative University, Tanzania), “Bulk coffee purchases during and after World War II in Tanganyika.”
Dr Satarupa Lahiri (UPES, India), “Feeding the Empire: Logistical Challenges and Cultural Negotiations in the Indian Army during World War I.”