Samantha Iyer, "Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States" (Columbia UP, 2026)

New Books Network · Jul 25, 2026 · 43m

The United States’ superpower status is often associated with its industrial, financial, and military might. Yet its global power after the Second World War hinged in part on something often seen as backward: agriculture. In contrast to Britain, the predominant global power of the nineteenth century, which depended on its current and former colonies for food and raw materials, the United States produced vast agricultural surpluses. During the 1950s, an era of decolonization and rising Cold War competition, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing…