The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture

by Courtney Fullilove

Overview

While there is enormous public interest in biodiversity, food sourcing, and sustainable agriculture, romantic attachments to heirloom seeds and family farms have provoked misleading fantasies of an unrecoverable agrarian past. The reality, as Courtney Fullilove shows, is that seeds are inherently political objects transformed by the ways they are gathered, preserved, distributed, regenerated, and improved. In The Profit of the Earth, Fullilove unearths the history of American agricultural development and of seeds as tools and talismans put in its service.
 
Organized into three thematic parts, The Profit of the Earth is a narrative history of the collection, circulation, and preservation of seeds. Fullilove begins with the political economy of agricultural improvement, recovering the efforts of the US Patent Office and the nascent US Department of Agriculture to import seeds and cuttings for free distribution to American farmers. She then turns to immigrant agricultural knowledge, exploring how public and private institutions attempting to boost midwestern wheat yields drew on the resources of willing and unwilling settlers. Last, she explores the impact of these cereal monocultures on biocultural diversity, chronicling a fin-de-siècle Ohio pharmacist’s attempt to source Purple Coneflower from the diminishing prairie. Through these captivating narratives of improvisation, appropriation, and loss, Fullilove explores contradictions between ideologies of property rights and common use that persist in national and international development—ultimately challenging readers to rethink fantasies of global agriculture’s past and future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226454863
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Courtney Fullilove is assistant professor of history, environmental studies, and science in society at Wesleyan University, in Connecticut.
 

Read an Excerpt

The Profit of the Earth

The Global Seeds of American Agriculture

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By Courtney Fullilove

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-45486-3

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CHAPTER 1

The Museum of Seeds

As Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his gunboats to Edo Bay in 1853, charged with compelling Japan to trade with the United States, the expedition's agriculturalist, James Morrow, weathered the passage to the Indian Ocean in the hold of a store ship, trying to keep his plants alive. The plants and papers of garden seed, provided by Philadelphia horticulturalists and the United States Patent Office, were intended as diplomatic gifts to support Perry's mission. Morrow took his charge seriously. In gale force winds, he tried to prevent the plants being doused with salt water and spray, but rather than the state-of-the-art Ward cases made of glass, Morrow had old ones from China outfitted with oyster shells as vents. In storm after storm, the shells broke, the tarpaulin blew off the case, and the plants were doused in seawater, parching some of the hardiest.

Once on shore, Morrow spent happier days in country rambles, collecting seeds and cuttings for the use of American farmers, gathering whole plants he dried and pressed into herbarium specimens back on the ship at night, and attempting with some difficulty to purchase examples of agricultural implements not used in the United States. In Okinawa, he tried to buy a plow that caught his fancy, only to have half the village claim partial ownership. As the negotiation stretched upward of an hour, Morrow faced his translator in consternation, wondering how local agriculturalists could be so admired and yet too poor to afford a plow.

Morrow assumed the plow was singly owned rather than subject to overlapping entitlements, reflecting a simple and perhaps nationalist conviction in rights of private property. Yet in reality, there was nothing simple about American concepts of property. The seeds, dried plants, and agricultural implements Morrow collected would all be classified and distributed differently upon their return to the United States. Morrow sent his herbarium samples to Harvard's Asa Gray for identification; they survive as specimens of global nature in the collections of the US National Herbarium, New York Botanic Garden, and the Natural History Museum in London. The plow Morrow had worked so hard to acquire in Okinawa went on display in the Patent Office museum with the other diplomatic gifts and Japanese handicrafts collected by the Perry Expedition, ultimately forming the kernel of the ethnological collections in the nascent US National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.

Meanwhile, the seeds and cuttings went to the Philadelphia horticulturalists who had helped supply the expedition, and to the US Patent Office for gratis distribution to interested farmers. In transit, they remained in storerooms and greenhouses adjacent to the Patent Office Building. Although we can follow the progress of many objects through the Smithsonian or dispersed herbaria, the seeds and cuttings Morrow procured are the most difficult to track. Museums with aspirations to immortality prioritized permanent display, which in turn required inorganic objects, or feats of preservation arresting decay. In contrast, seeds require regeneration to remain viable. And once distributed to American farmers, they became the property of their cultivators, not the federal government.

Did seeds have value as commodities or scientific specimens, and what rules of exchange governed their transfer? The ultimate disaggregation of specimens into separate institutions — museums, botanic gardens, seed companies, and private farms — has concealed the many types of collection, appropriation, and exchange that occurred within diplomatic contexts, as well as the varied rights of ownership applied to the objects acquired. In museums, things became material signifiers of cultural difference, interpreted according to theories of social evolution. Herbaria in turn represented an insistence that global nature was universal and to be shared, although such collections often obscured the hierarchies of human labor and systems of knowledge that sustained them. Morrow's project was not to contribute to a universal store of knowledge, however, but rather to profit American agriculture.

For a time, these varied collections jostled in the halls of the Patent Office Building. As the only federal agency charged with managing problems of knowledge in the early republic, the Patent Office became a theater for conflicts over value and custody. Its mandate "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" derived from the constitutional clause establishing patents and copyrights. But the exact scope of the mandate remained undefined, alternatively oriented toward property rights in invention, exploration, research, publication, and expedition. These conflicts over the proper political economy of knowledge in the early United States expressed themselves in different claims to the specimens that flooded the halls of the Patent Office Building. Rather than staging a system of classification shared by curators and spectators, the Patent Office museum harbored an array of contradictory approaches to the material it housed. Naturalists' collections, agricultural fairs, and mechanics' institutes all served as models for the exhibition of artifacts in the museum, and competing visions meant competing systems of organization and display.

Meanwhile, tourists and journalists flocked to the halls of "the great cabinet of curiosities" in the Patent Office Building, which opened to the public in 1849 and quickly became the capital's most popular tourist attraction. Alternately styled as a cabinet of curiosities, a national gallery, a temple of invention, and a rational place of amusement, the Patent Office galleries amassed specimens of natural science through the navy and consular service, American Indian artifacts symbolizing territorial mastery over the continental West, and donations from American manufacturers and agriculturalists. Collection relied on practices of territorial and economic expansion: naval expeditions, the violent removal of American Indians and annexation of Mexican territories, and the development of circuits of commerce for agricultural products and manufactured goods.

Scientists and statesmen hashed out the meaning of science and useful arts through turf wars over appropriations, rooms, and collections housed in the Patent Office museum, which were ultimately transferred to the Smithsonian Institution when it was inaugurated in 1857. In the Patent Office, and variously bound for greenhouses and storerooms, plants were subject to the debates over meaning and value. The museum remained a site where problems of knowledge went unresolved, revealing a state that was less inchoate than disordered, administered by politicians, bureaucrats, and foot soldiers with competing visions of proper government and public knowledge.

Ultimately, disputes over the value of specimens were less about prices, as Commodore Perry would have had it, than the character of global connections being forged. For while the decade before the American Civil War was a moment of expanded commerce and global aspirations, it also entailed varied imaginations of the global: as a patchwork of militarized nation-states, a hierarchy of civilizations, a grid of marketplaces, and a zone of common nature. Each model required different rules of conduct, which often contradicted one another in theory and practice. Is trade free that requires a threat of force? Do people need permission to buy, barter, or take? What if the goods in question are products of nature rather than human labor? How should ownership and value be determined across societies with different organizations of property and worth? The persistent collection and exchange of global seeds and plants provoked these questions.

In spite of their ultimate obscurity, seeds and plants were the most common collections in early national museums constituted of global military and scientific expeditions. In 1843, Secretary of War John M. Porter had advocated putting a pine box on every outgoing vessel for collections of nature specimens, charging every officer of the navy to devote his free time to the increase and diffusion of knowledge. The collecting enterprise had begun on a grand scale with the Wilkes Expedition to the Pacific (1838–42), and it continued with naval expeditions to the Dead Sea and the River Jordan (1847–1849), the Herndon-Gibbon Expedition to the Amazon (1851–52), the Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere (1846–52), the Page Expedition to Rio Paraguay and Rio de la Plata (1853–56), and Commodore Matthew C. Perry's 1852 and 1854 expeditions to Japan. Alongside the spoils of naval expeditions were collections from the Creek and Seminole Wars, the Mexican War, and Charles Fremont's collections with the Corps of Topographical Engineers in the American West. Seeds and cuttings choked storage rooms and public galleries of the US Patent Office and sometimes disappeared in the purses of powerful visitors with horticultural fancies.

Proponents of American expansion targeted naval reach and continental settlement. The Pacific figured as a special object of exploration and commerce, with products of nature moved overseas in the holds of merchant brigs and naval warships before being wheeled into the basement corridors of the Patent Office Building. This exercise in collecting was consistent with, and indeed modeled on, European imperial exploration of the preceding three centuries. The continental West presented a field for collection and documentation, with evidence of native technics used to support claims to the superiority of Euro-American institutions of science and property.

The Patent Office museum followed the pattern of early national museums in Europe, many of which derived from private collections and cabinets of curiosity enlarged through colonial expansion, imperial acquisition, scientific exchange, and public and private patronage. Like the museums to which Americans looked for inspiration, the one in the Patent Office Building expressed national power, addressing its own citizens and the elite members of other nations. It nested claims to education and enlightenment within an ideology of national competitiveness and commercial might. In the machinery of expeditions and surveys, scientific societies, agricultural improvement, and patents for manufactures, the Enlightenment imperative for the increase and diffusion of knowledge and the political imperative of expansion met.

The Patent Office museum differed from its European precedents in part because of its belated and derivative formation. Like many museums, the one in the Patent Office Building was a site of conflict between diverse constituents, interests, and claims to authority, each of which expressed different ideas of the functions the galleries should serve. But rather than legitimizing an established state, the museum in the Patent Office Building expressed all the indeterminacy and conflict of state development itself.

No one felt his disunity more keenly than the museum's caretaker, John Varden, who went with his personal cabinet as custodian after it was acquired by the leadership of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, then attempting to build a cabinet in a bid to acquire James Smithson's bequest to the United States, "to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." Varden was a set designer for traveling theaters with a penchant for collecting, gathering American Indian relics and assorted nature specimens from New Orleans and Mississippi and throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Through collecting and exchange, he had amassed sufficient material by the late 1820s to open his collection to the public. A year later, it was acquired by the National Institute.

Varden had not one but three bosses over the course of a single decade. After the National Institute acquired his cabinet, Varden's collections went to the upper floor of the Patent Office Building, which was then the largest building in Washington and the plausible materialization of the first Superintendent of Patents William Thornton's dream of a "National Museum of the Arts" modeled on the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Thornton's successor, Henry Ellsworth, had other ideas, soliciting donations from manufactures and agriculturalists for display in the upper halls. Ultimately, Ellsworth was compelled to share the Patent Office Building with the National Institute, which made a case for appropriations to manage the collections of the scientific corps of the US Exploring Expedition. The expedition was then winding its way through the Pacific under the direction of Charles Wilkes, and Wilkes, too, made claims on Varden's time.

Varden used different titles for the gallery depending on whom he was addressing. To Commander Charles Wilkes of the US Navy, who promoted the botanical, ornithological, and ethnological spoils of his Pacific expedition, it was the Hall of the US Exploring Expedition. To the members of the National Institute, which contributed its own scientific cabinet assembled from donations, it was the National Gallery. To Commissioner of Patents Henry Ellsworth, who solicited donations representing American ingenuity, it was the National Gallery of Manufactures and Agriculture. To everyone else, it was the national cabinet of curiosities, obviating the more specific visions of the museum's progenitors. Meanwhile, ever more plants, seeds, and cuttings made their way to US shores, setting the stage for a crisis over the meaning of the specimens clogging the halls of the Patent Office Building. Were seeds scientific specimens, objects of common use, or commodities?

The exchange of seeds as diplomatic gifts showcased the simultaneous and contrary values of global nature, private property, and tool of commerce applied to them — contradictions that persisted in subsequent institutions of research and development. In the absence of the market norms for international exchange Perry tried to impose, Morrow struggled to fix the value of seed specimens variably determined by customs of gift, barter, and market exchange. What determined value? Morrow negotiated these questions on the ground, with limited success.

Officially, Morrow and Perry were bound for Japan on a diplomatic errand. When Perry first docked in Edo Bay in July 1853, he intended to deliver a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the emperor. While Japanese officials attempted to redirect him to the port of Nagasaki, where the Dutch had limited and exclusive rights of trade, Perry would not be moved. After accomplishing the delivery of the letter on his own terms, he retreated to Macao to provision his ships and await the shipment of gifts intended for the emperor, which were mentioned explicitly at the conclusion of Fillmore's letter.

The store ship Lexington reached Hong Kong the day after Christmas bearing the official gifts for the Japanese, including a quarter-scale fully operational railroad, a telegraph set with three miles of wire, a set of standard weights and measures, navigational charts provided by the US Coast Guard, and a complete Double Elephant folio of John James Audubon's Birds of America. In the interim, the sloop Vandalia arrived as well, bearing numerous agricultural implements, seeds, and plants also intended for distribution as gifts, and with them James Morrow, the South Carolina physician and agriculturalist charged with their care. Morrow had accompanied the Vandalia from Philadelphia to Rio de Janeiro and the Cape of Good Hope onward through Java and Singapore to Hong Kong and Macao, surveying agricultural practice and collecting seeds and plants at every stop.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Profit of the Earth by Courtney Fullilove. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Prologue: In the Field
Field notes. “Green Revolutions”: Hunting Turkey Wheat
Part 1. Collection: The Political Culture of Seeds
1. The Museum of Seeds
2. Seed Sharing in the Patent Office
3. Failures of Tea Cultivation in the American South
Field notes. “Local Knowledge”: What the Pastoralist KnewPart 2. Migration: Wheat Culture and Immigrant Agricultural Knowledge
4. For Amber Waves of Grain
5. Spacious Skies and Economies of ScaleField notes. “Indigenous Knowledge”: Diversity and Endangerment
Part 3. Preservation: Indigenous Plants and the Preservation of Biocultural Diversity
6. Elk’s Weed on the Prairie
7. The Allegory of the Cave in Kentucky
8. Writing on the SeedEpilogue: In the Gene Bank
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Fullilove organizes her work by seed processes—'Collection,' 'Migration,' and 'Preservation'—and adopts a dynamic, as opposed to static, stance for this sequence. She utilizes the US Patent Office and, later, the US Department of Agriculture to explore collection processes; discusses immigration and settlement behaviors of the Mennonites in late-19th-century Kansas for the circulation of seeds; and, finally, examines one aspect of seed preservation, the disturbance of the major grain monoculture, by focusing on biodiversity through invasive species. Periodically, Fullilove inserts field notes from her research to illustrate both the universal scope of seed dynamics and the trans-positioning of seeds across the globe. The net effect is to shift the focus from seeds as passive tools to vehicles reflecting political, economic, social, and cultural patterns—which is expressed well in her chapter ‘Writing on the Seed.’ Quite thought-provoking, this volume might best be directed more to advanced undergraduate and graduate readers and above. It is specifically recommended for collections in agricultural history, rural sociology, and anthropology. Recommended.

Choice

“The Profit of the Earth takes as its premise that no matter how much human activity has narrowed this range, the history embedded in seeds can recover the biodiversity of the past, help scholars recognize the complexity of the present, and inform humanity about how to expand the possibilities of its future…. Fullilove has a knack for recovering historical subjects that, in both the literal and metaphorical sense, have been lost in the weeds. Never losing sight of the tragic dimensions of the Anthropocene, her end result cuts across the longest spans of time and the smallest dimensions of space to capture the making of an agricultural empire in its fullest historical scope.”
 

Edge Effects

"At every turn in The Profit of the Earth, Fullilove provides sharp analysis, theoretical sophistication, and compelling stories that are beautifully told...Contemporary conversations about agriculture can easily fall into bucolic or technocratic enthusiasms—whether panaceas rooted in locovore practices or novel forms of genetic engineering. Fortunately, Fullilove offers a valuable corrective by way of historical examples of bioprospecting and biopiracy. As such, this book should appeal far beyond scholarly circles to any-one interested in the genealogies of contemporary agricultural and pharmaceutical debates."

Journal of the History of Biology - Chris Fite

"Profit of the Earth is a fascinating read, shedding light on some of the people, entities, and themes in the United States during its formative century, about which I, for one, was largely unaware. The range of sources she uses, and the careful weaving together of their content, which continues through the endnotes, are truly impressive. For a relatively short book, it has a detailed, fourteen-page index, containing no less than eighteen referenced subheadings for 'Mennonite,' and fifty for 'wheat''! In sum, this is a very creative piece of quality scholarship for which Fullilove should be commended."

The Mennonite Quarterly Review

How did the United States become the breadbasket of the world? In this riveting book, Mesopotamian agriculturalists, Washington bureaucrats, plains farmers, and Russian scientists create new strains of grains, appropriate ancient knowledge, conquer foreign territories, and build a powerful state in the service of agricultural power and profit. Fullilove situates a quintessential national story—the farming economy of the midwest—in a global framework, forcing us to rethink the advent of modern agriculture in the United States.

Harvard University Sven Beckert

"In this remarkable first book, Courtney Fullilove uncovers the many layers of forgotten and ignored history that tell the complex story of the origins of wheat. Fullilove’s key insight is that this history is neither linear nor easily known, but rather reflects the constantly changing circumstances of farming over the last ten thousand years and over much of the globe."

Journal of American History

"Fullilove advocates a cultural history of seeds. If, she argues, we see seeds as products of biological evolution and stochastic processes, which we have enhanced through science, the resulting narrative will be linear and progressive. Her goal is to show that the history of agricultural expansion is as complicated, circuitous, and messy as human history... Fullilove opens a window onto the cultural, political, and economic history that lies behind the creation and transmission of seeds and thus places the history of life sciences within the broader context of American territorial expansion and economic growth."

Isis

Seeds are one of humanity’s earliest and best technologies. Centuries of seed selection have generated small, human-tweaked packages that deliver life, health, and beauty. The Profit of the Earth offers an insightful and engaging history of that ongoing process.

Harvard University Joyce E. Chaplin

"Seeds are more than simply vessels for commodity-crop DNA; they are repositories of human history. This is Courtney Fullilove’s central message in this book about the evolution of Americans’ perceptions and practices regarding collection and preservation of seed. Fullilove shows how custodians of seeds, including nineteenth-century government officials at the US Patent Office and twenty-first century scientists in Norway’s Global Seed Vault, created germplasm catalogs that erased sociocultural histories of agricultural laborers. . . . Showing how scholars might read seeds as historical objects is the primary objective of this provocative and well-researched book that draws on diverse archival resources as well as field investigations in Armenia, Syria, and beyond."

Environmental History

In The Profit of the Earth, Courtney Fullilove offers something different: an ambitious and creative study that uses the story of seeds to ask readers to rethink the origins of American agricultural exceptionalism. The central narrative examines the nineteenth-century institutions that allowed the nation to become a major breadbasket of the world… Fullilove argues that recovering knowledge systems and landscapes lost during agricultural modernization will prove imperative in our own era as many across the globe face food scarcity in the face of climate change. While this book is a fine addition to the history of seeds, it is also a prompt to learn from more diverse, inclusive, and traditional systems of agricultural knowledge.

Agricultural History

"[A] book focused on seeds and the knowledge and expertise of many generations of farmers, especially one of this quality, serves to remind us that there is little about agriculture or food production whose origin or present character can be confined within national boundaries. . . . Fullilove’s excellent and beautifully written book tells this story, and so much more besides, and reminds us of the vital importance of history in understanding the present and why and in what ways we may not necessarily be living in the best of possible worlds."

Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Fullilove is a genuinely original thinker whose insights transcend the boundaries between American and global history, as well as between the histories of science, technology, the environment, and capitalism. The Profit of the Earth shows how American agricultural development arose from the interactions with the natural environment—and one another—of farmers, government agencies, and entrepreneurs at home and overseas. It is a strikingly new portrait of how the United States became an agricultural superpower.

Columbia University Eric Foner

"This is a curious book. Nearly every page conveys the author’s curiosity and her insatiable appetite for collecting historical anecdotes, allegories, oddities, and, befitting the subject, seeds. (Interspersed throughout the text are “field notes” in which Fullilove uses tales of her seed-collecting explorations in central Asia to offer wide-ranging musings on how seeds should be understood as “deep-time technologies.”) The writing is sophisticated, erudite, and mesmerizing..."

Technology and Culture - Shane Hamilton