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Roger Chickering, Truth and Dirt, German History, Volume 29, Issue 4, December 2011, Pages 640–647, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghr064
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Frank Uekötter’s Habilitionsschrift is the first volume in a new monograph series, ‘Environment and History’, which the Rachel Carson Centre at the University of Munich and the Deutsches Museum in Munich have together inaugurated. The goal, as the editors announce, is to turn the series into ‘the most important German-language site for publishing scholarly work on the history and present state of the environment and history’ (p. 9). Given the fact that Uekötter is himself one of the series editors, this claim may seem immodest. On the strength of the first volume, it is not. Uekötter has written one of the most exciting and provocative studies in agricultural history to appear in a long time.
Work in the agricultural history of Germany and other lands has comported generally with one of two grand narratives.1 The first is a success story. It charts the dramatic growth of productivity, as agriculture adapted to the challenges of a modern world of industry and urban civilization. This narrative features the increasing shift during the mid-nineteenth century to commercial agriculture and to new, more effective systems of crop-rotation and drainage, the introduction of new crops and new, inorganic fertilizers. In the twentieth century, the gains in productivity accelerated, powered now by technological change, the use of improved ploughs, mechanized reapers, threshers and seeders, and the introduction of internal-combustion tractors, whose proliferation in the 1960s drove the most stunning productive gains to date.
