Cropscapes
The Idea for the ‘Cropscapes’ concept came from a wider collaborative writing piece, Moving Crops and the Scales of History, generously sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and published in the Agrarian Studies series of Yale University Press in February 2023.
Moving Crops is a bold redefinition of historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”―the people, creatures, technologies, ideas, and places that surround a crop
Human efforts to move crops from one place to another have been a key driving force in history. Crops have been on the move for millennia, from wildlands into fields, from wetlands to dry zones, from one imperial colony to another. This book is a bold but approachable attempt to redefine historical inquiry based on the “cropscape”: the assemblage of people, places, creatures, technologies, and other elements that form around a crop.
The cropscape is a method of reconnecting the global with the local, the longue durée with microhistory, and people, plants, and places with abstract concepts such as tastes, ideas, skills, politics, and economic forces. Through investigating a range of contrasting cropscapes spanning millennia and the globe, the authors break open traditional historical structures of period, geography, and direction to glean insight into previously invisible actors and forces.
The cropscape histories presented in Moving Crops range from the travels of tulips to the deep genealogies of coffee in Brazil, from the surprising fortunes of marigolds or cashews as they travelled the world to reflections on ‘care’ in farming, as manifested in more-than-human cooperative communities like the Central American ‘three sisters’ of corn, beans and squash, or the mound-planting of beans and melons in medieval China. We weave our cropscapes together to suggest new ways to think more generally about chronology, space, agency and reproduction.
Below we show some examples of cropscapes (quite separate from those that feature in the book). We welcome contributions from others who have an exciting or suprising cropscape to share!
Please contact me if you would like to contribute a cropscape to this page.
Cropscapes
Gardens in Colonial Calcutta
By Laura Tavolacci, University of Chile
Vegetable gardens form an important cropscape in the daily life of many different societies. These spaces are not organized around one particular plant or market-type activity. As such, they show how cropscapes are far from static, and can hold shifting assemblages of actors, plants, and purposes. In British and colonial history, these gardens were sites of conflict and liaison between various ideas and social classes. The value of plants was continually contested, oftentimes within varied claims regarding their contribution to subsistence, aesthetics, or the market. The beginning of the 19th century is a particularly interesting time to study vegetable gardens, often called “kitchen gardens”, because it was when British visions of agriculture increasingly excluded them as less economically important. Calcutta likewise provides a valuable backdrop for studying vegetable gardens because of the various juxtapositions and conflicts between European, Bengali, and North Indian practices and knowledge. As an important source of nutrition, the vegetable garden is a helpful lens through which to view changing relationships to the market within the contested terrain of a colonial society.
Weeds in wheat field; https://cropwatch.unl.edu/post-wheat-harvest-weed-control
Weedscapes
By Sam Smiley, Independent Scholar
What is a weed? Ralph Waldo Emerson described a weed as a "plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." 19th century botanist Asa Gray wrote "Even the most useful plants may become weeds if they appear out of their proper place." In W.S. Blatchley's "The Indiana Weed Book", he wrote "Many weeds, like misery, love company."
I have worked for several years with another media arts collective, AstroDime Transit Authority on video productions. The following video is an ethnographic analysis done at the Weed Science Society of America (WSSA) conference Portland, Oregon on 7-10 February 2011. Liberties have been taken with the sound track and it is a work in progress. The question asked at the conference is “What is a Weed?”
Weed Ontology (Draft): https://vimeo.com/144936863
Beerscapes
by Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh
Though most of us equate beer with its European variant, barley-beer, almost every human society produces some beer-like drink, a mildly alcoholic liquid brewed from locally available starches, one essential product of the local cropscape. Sometimes beer is made from the main food-staple: manioc in Amazonia, for instance. Or the beer ingredient may come from another plant, like Mexican pulque made from agave cactus. Animal sugars can also be used: honey for mead, or milk for koumiss. Whatever the raw materials, beers share two great virtues: they are safer to drink than most untreated water-sources, and they lubricate social intercourse, hence their near-universal popularity.
Teascapes
by John Bosco Lourdasamy, IITM
In an important case of South-to-South transfer, tea (as a crop) was introduced into India, starting the 1830s from China. It was to be found later that tea plant as such was not new to India as a variant of it was found in Assam. But tea plants and most importantly the culture and knowhow of tea entered India from China in a big way in the 1830s. Tea would never be the same again as this transfer entailed considerable transformations on diverse fronts—the scale of cultivation, nature of ownership, mobilization of labor; methods of processing, marketing techniques, social reach, etc.
Tobaccoscapes
by Barbara Hahn, Texas Tech University
Cropscapes offer new perspectives on the size of tobacco cultivation units over the centuries. In other chapters we have analyzed the life-cycle flexibility of the tobacco plant—that is is a perennial grown commercially as an annual. We have also spoken of its geographical mobility. Here we focus on a single location, the Virginia-Carolina border where tobacco has been produced consistently from at least the 1600s to the 2000s.
Waterscapes
by Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh
Water is an essential component of all cropscapes. Crops need water and so too do humans and animals; water slakes the thirst of living creatures, and human populations also use water to keep clean, and for almost every kind of processing and manufacture, from cooking and pot-making to nuclear cooling towers. In fact we can usefully think of water as a crop, carefully planted, tended and harvested by individual farmers, local communities or states.