Global History of Food and Famine

Catalog description

This course examines different case studies of agriculture, food production, and food availability in diverse settings to show how access to food and its denial intersects with ethnic and nationalist politics, imperial and colonial encounters, and global asymmetries. The course reveals the close association of food to social and cultural identities and to conflicts in a global history framework. Spanning case studies from the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-nineteenth century to the Russian Famine of early twentieth century to the Bengal Famine of mid-twentieth century, the course focuses on disparity in access to food for social classes. It focuses on discrete social classes (landlords, farmers, labor, women), but also on modernizers, agronomists and scientists, on state, and on global diplomacy and developmentalist perspectives in the post-World War II era to show the embeddedness of food production and consumption in social relations and in emergent political economy contexts.