In his introduction, Saraiva asks the rhetorical question, who wants to deal with pigs and potatoes in fascist regimes, when one can explore film, sports and architecture? In the rest of Fascist Pigs he shows why agricultural science and production are as modernist as the other objects of fascist regimes commonly studied, and why they matter to our understanding of fascism and the history of science and technology. The resulting account offers a nuanced and meticulous history that draws on Canguilhem, Rheinberger and previous histories of the breeding of plants and animals to both put science in dialogue with significant debates in the historiography of fascism and expand the idea of biopolitics under fascism to incorporate plants and animals. In doing so, Saraiva eschews epistemology in favour of ontology. He presents domesticated plants and animals – hardy wheat, pest-free potatoes, fat pigs, coffee, rubber substitute kok-sagyz, cotton and fleecy sheep – as technoscientific organisms that materialized the political ideologies and the domestic and colonial aspirations and violence of fascist regimes in Germany, Italy and Portugal. In turn he shows how these crops and animals were transformed into members of the fascist collective. Although the definition of fascism is a cursory one – owing a debt to Roger Griffin – Saraiva looks for similarities rather than differences to show how agricultural science and food production are not proxies for other fascist projects. Instead they are presented as crucial to revealing the commonalities across fascist regimes. Through his examination of the work of key scientists and fascist rural and agricultural policies, the technoscientific organisms that are the ‘objects’ of Fascist Pigs become historical artefacts to explore wider issues as Saraiva addresses how the fascist back-to-the-land movement to feed the organic nation was based on modern agricultural science and was central to fascist ‘alternative modernity’.

Part 1 of Fascist Pigs is firmly rooted in the domestic, mass mobilization, new state structures, and the intertwining of geneticists’ work with efforts to institutionalize the new regimes in the national soil. Here the narrative moves from Nazareno Strampelli's Ardito strain of wheat and the Battle of Wheat in Mussolini's Italy to its reproduction and adaption in the Wheat Campaign in Salazar's Portugal (Chapters 1 and 2) before turning to potatoes, pigs, Blut und Boden (blood and soil) and the Battle for Production in Nazi Germany (Chapters 3 and 4). Linking these chapters is how fascist regimes became obsessed with scientific agricultural projects for making the national soil feed the national body. Wheat, potatoes, pigs, agricultural scientists, fascist intellectuals and propagandists, state bureaucracies, chemical industries, peasants and landowners are all connected in what Saraiva explains was one of the first steps in fascist efforts to fashion an organic national community. While Saraiva offers rich detail on the work of key scientists, their research institutes and their model systems, he is clear to point out how much of the science pre-dated the fascist regimes, though this raises the question whether the state mobilized scientists or vice versa. At the same time, Saraiva is sensitive to the militarized metaphorical power that fascist regimes invested in these plants and animals, and aware of the socio-economic impact on land ownership and the landscape, especially in the chapters on wheat in Italy and Portugal. If the other chapters in Part 1 can at times seem a little fragmented – most visibly in the wide range of concerns to ensure that potatoes in Nazi Germany were pest-free – taken together they show how common experiences of hunger in the First World War and drives for autarky (self-sufficiency) connected the science of breeding and hybridization to fascist ideology. The resulting account highlights the entanglements between human and non-human and the nuances of how technologies of organism production were changed through scientific practices.

Fascism as a form of ‘alternative modernity’ takes a back seat in Part 2 of Fascist Pigs. Here Saraiva's narrative shifts to violent colonial expansion in Africa and Eastern Europe through an examination of coffee, cotton, rubber and sheep. In Part 2 Saraiva makes a compelling case for placing the brutal colonial expansion of fascist Italy, Germany and Portugal in a continuum with European colonial history. Connections are made between the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, German imperial rule in Eastern Europe and Portuguese colonialism in northern Mozambique through coffee, rubber and cotton to explore the role of plant breeders and a network of experimental stations in supporting plantation schemes and their reliance on genocide and the massive use of forced labour. Chillingly, Auschwitz is shown as a death camp and an agricultural research facility to pave the way for colonization in Eastern Europe. Self-consciously, Saraiva positions his final chapter as his most innovative. Here the story of Karakul sheep standardized by scientists at the University of Halle follows the circulation and hybridization of sheep into Germany, Ukraine, South West Africa, Libya and Angola to make further connections to the frontier genocide of the three fascist regimes.

Notwithstanding the opaque conclusion, Fascist Pigs is an excellent and at times provocative book that draws its arguments from a thoughtful engagement with the sources and the existing literature. Saraiva's arresting narrative touches on the histories of fascism, science and technology, agriculture, colonialism and environmental history to raise fascinating questions about the relationship between fascism and agricultural self-sufficiency, science, technology, brutal colonial expansion and genocide. In doing so, he manages to set an ambitious agenda and largely realize that agenda, even if at times key points are repeated in different formulations. The overall result is a compelling account of how, through the breeding and hybridization of key agricultural commodities, fascist ideology at home and abroad acquired concrete form.