Samantha Iyer’s readable and insightful Agrarian Superpower discusses the centrality of agriculture to the rise of the United States as a global superpower, contributing to discussions about the role of food and agriculture in American power and prosperity. Simultaneously, she complicates the triumphalist narrative of US independence and uniqueness by utilizing a comparative approach to show how the US’s rise was dependent on and facilitated by less agriculturally developed trade partners, especially Egypt and India. In this way, Iyer makes productively unfamiliar the narrative of the twentieth-century rise of US agricultural power and contributes to a conversation about the construction of global capitalism “from beyond its centers of power” (p. viii).

As networks of technology, capital, and transportation created global markets in grain, food, and materials like cotton in the late nineteenth century, farmers in nations like the United States, India, and Egypt faced similar conditions of rising production costs and uncertain returns. However, US agricultural modernization expanded the country’s food production at unmatched rates. By the mid-twentieth century, America’s agricultural overproduction was a source of food aid and technical assistance that policymakers and politicians used to advance national power and national interests. As Iyer demonstrates, this rise of US agricultural production and the power it engendered is only half the story. Iyer argues that US partners in trade and global politics such as Egypt and India—crucial case studies as two of the largest recipients of US food aid—were critical to the development of the concept of a national economy, dependent on an organization of the world into distinct spheres of market exchange, social relations, and government.

The book is structured into three parts. In the first part, Iyer examines the origins of national food economies in the United States, India, and Egypt amid the global economic upheaval of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book’s first chapter describes how experts in all three countries utilized crop harvest forecasts to manage market uncertainty. In chapter two, Iyer examines regulation strategies used in Egypt, the United States, and India to address overproduction and the economic and social crisis that threatened the livelihoods of farmers and food producers, especially in the years after the First World War. These two chapters on the early twentieth-century crisis in agricultural production articulate how differential ideas of the national economy developed in the United States, India, and Egypt, ideas that guided food production and trade within and between them.

Part two explores how the common experiences of farmers in Egypt, India, and the United States diverged based on distinct grassroots conditions and experiences during World War II and the postwar years. In chapter three, Iyer describes the wartime experiences of Egypt as scarcity of important agricultural inputs like fertilizers combined with lack of access to shipping and global trade flows threatened rising prices and food shortages. They also raised fears about political upheaval. Iyer sketches how the concern of Egyptian and Allied officials about how food crisis could endanger British control and Egypt’s utility as a base for Allied operations spurred planners to build on tools like forecasts and regulation and use ideas of the national economy to balance food supply and demand. Chapter four turns to wartime India, where regional and global trade flow disruptions had much more severe effects, including three million deaths in the 1943 Bengal famine. As in Egypt, Indian officials sought to manage food crisis by using policies to organize food production and distribution, but faced challenges, including British policies which prioritized trade for the United Kingdom rather than supplying food to colonies experiencing desperate need.

Chapter five examines how agricultural abundances in the United States—a political and economic problem in the 1920s and 1930s—became a vital element of wartime efforts to supply military forces and support allies. As described in chapter six, a confluence of factors such as hybrid seeds, agricultural chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides, fossil fuel-powered machinery, and the increased business sophistication of agricultural producers empowered the growth of American agricultural outputs during the twentieth century. In the postwar years, American policymakers avoided the potential return to prewar food problems caused by an overabundance of food by deploying the agricultural surplus of American farmers and food producers as assistance to countries facing food scarcity.

In part three, Iyer adds vital perspectives to the story of the use of American food abundance as strategic food aid by considering the experiences of leaders and policymakers in Egypt and India alongside those in the United States. Chapter seven examines how officials in Egypt used American food aid to support efforts to promote development and economic stabilization, a strategy that worked for a decade until the 1967 war with Israel caused a realignment of Egyptian political and economic ties. Chapter eight explores how Indian officials deployed food aid to address hunger and support national economic policies. By the end of the 1950s, experts in government and private foundations in the United States began to worry about gaps between domestic food production in India and projections for future population growth, leading to a shift to policies that promoted technical assistance to support agricultural modernization and increasing links between food assistance and development strategy as well as support for broader US policy objectives.

This illuminating study places the rise of US agricultural power in a new light, demonstrating how US agricultural innovation and market influence were never a one-sided story of US dominance but always reciprocal and contingent. Iyer’s work contributes to an ongoing project to complicate and contextualize narratives of US hegemony and place the story of its rise to superpower status in comparative perspective.