Moving crops: approaches to global history

• Department of History

This event features a discussion with Professor Barbara Hahn (Texas Tech University) on doing global history with crops.

Crops are a very special type of human artefact, living organisms literally rooted in their environments. Crops, as human-prompted life forms, oblige us to reckon seriously with the specifics of their materiality—its affordances, its resistances, and how these affect movement, growth, and the creation or loss of meaning as crops move in various ways—or as they stay in place. Crops embed rootedness in mobility studies, fleshing out linkages and developing effective frameworks for reconnecting local and global history. Writing Moving Crops meant working with 'cropscapes': the ever-mutating ecologies, or matrices, comprising assemblages of nonhumans and humans, within which a particular crop in a specific place and time flourishes or fails.

As with the landscape, the cropscape as a concept and analytical tool implies a deliberate choice of frame. In playing spatially and chronologically with framing our selected cropscapes – in this case, dates and wheat in particular – Moving Crops develops productive alternatives to latent Eurocentric and modernist assumptions about periodisation, geographical hierarchies, and scale, that still prevail within the history of technology, global and comparative history, and indeed within broader public understanding of mobility and history.

Please register in order to get a seat or to receive the ZOOM link