It is refreshing to read a book that sees the agricultural market at the core rather than the periphery of politics. For decades, social scientists have been bidding farewell to the peasantry, but across the globe the persistence of the small-scale farm remains the norm. Estimates suggest that there are at least 570 million farms worldwide, of which the majority are family farms that cultivate less than 2 ha of land (see Sarah Lowder, Jakob Skoet, and Saumya Singh, “What Do We Really Know about the Number and Distribution of Farms and Family Farms in the World?” Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 2014). And while urbanization continues its seemingly inexorable march, the countryside remains the home of half the global population, and in Africa and Asia, where authoritarian regimes predominate, rural populations are still in the majority. As Henry Thomson rightly reminds us, agricultural production comprises a substantial component of the economies of the developing world and thus is the lifeblood of many a regime (p. 25).

The political consequences of a ruler’s mismanagement of agriculture are made abundantly clear in the opening pages of the book. Food, unlike other issues of concern to the state, represents a fundamental obligation of a government: the ability to feed its people. A government that cannot ensure a steady supply of food at reasonable prices is at risk of being overrun by the urban mob. Rulers must also mind the other side of the agricultural ledger: the farmers. The countryside can also pose a severe threat to a regime when producers are squeezed by persistent unfair terms of trade and, more crucially, when they have the organizational capacity to make their grievances known.

In a series of short, empirically driven chapters, Thomson uses cross-national data to clarify the rural and urban dynamics influencing the state’s political calculus regarding agricultural policy. The basic argument centers on the politics of regime survival, showing that authoritarian governments decide to intervene in agricultural markets in favor of the urban or rural elite, depending on which group poses a greater threat to the regime.

Each chapter layers on increasing degrees of complexity. Thomson first considers regime type and its relation to food policy: authoritarian regimes are less likely to support agriculture than their democratic counterparts, and, under authoritarianism, higher levels of urbanization and lower levels of land inequality are associated with less agricultural support (chap. 3). A deeper look at threat structures highlights why authoritarians enact the policies they do. In the urban areas, food taxes lead to higher levels of unrest under conditions of anocracy, highlighting why urbanization endangers regimes (chap. 4). In the countryside, Thomson then considers under which conditions rural interests may threaten political stability (chap. 5). A series of tests show the association of high levels of land inequality (i.e., the presence of large landowners), high state rents on agriculture, and regime collapse. However, Thomson argues, if these rents are redistributed to producers, there is less risk of regime failure. Together the chapters characterize agricultural policy as a high-stakes endeavor for the authoritarian ruler, and its distributional effects on welfare between town and country are decidedly zero-sum.

Although compelling, some may question Food and Power’s characterization of agricultural policy making under authoritarianism. For those of us who argue that authoritarian rulers can sometimes be interested in issues of governance beyond considerations of regime survival, Thomson’s authoritarian state may appear too much a power-maximizing, rent-seeking machine (see Rory Truex, Making Autocracy Work, 2016). Others may disagree with the zero-sum nature of agricultural policy, noting that even in urban-biased countries, agricultural policies are often bundled with a host of other welfare programs to farmers, such as China’s New Socialist Countryside Campaign or Venezuela’s Return to the Countryside policy. Still others may argue that the urban–rural divide has grown increasingly blurred as urban capital penetrates the countryside through large-scale agribusinesses. My major concerns are Thomson’s somewhat narrow view of rural contentious politics centered on a landed elite and his lack of engagement with peasant resistance, a point to which I return later. But these objections are matters of emphasis rather than substance. Food and Power is a remarkable book that brings agriculture back to the center of our understanding of authoritarian politics.

The book’s cross-national analyses are complemented by two in-depth case studies on agricultural policy in Bismarck’s Germany (1878–90) and Malaysia under Razak (1969–80). The cases focus our attention on how a strong landed elite channel their interests so as to effect a rural-biased policy. In Germany, we observe how the increased threat of the Junker class, following the collapse of global grain prices, led Bismarck to enact an “Iron and Rye” tariff in 1879. Landowners placed pressure on the regime through the legislature, the Prussian state bureaucracy, and membership in Bismarck’s cabinet. In Malaysia, a more complex picture arises, but again we observe well-organized landed interests in the hardline faction of the UMNO party, forcing Razak to institute a rural-biased New Economic Policy (NEP) to secure the position of the ruling coalition.

If one may quibble with Thomson’s case studies it is not because they are overstylized, but that they are too complex. The parsimony of Thomson’s cross-national analyses with its methodical hypothesis testing is lost in the intriguing politics of nineteenth-century Germany and twentieth-century Malaysia. We are not left with a clear “causal mechanism” linking land inequality to rural agricultural support but more of a “complex web.” The cases introduce a range of factors, including electoral politics, state–society relations, ethnic politics, global price shocks, and elite coalition building. Yet Thomson leaves readers to ascertain, on their own, the generalizable sequencing and the necessary/sufficient conditions that lead to rural-biased policies in two distinct political contexts: the Juncker threat brought on by a collapse in world grain prices, and the dramatic decline of electoral support in 1969 Malaysia (see David Collier, “Understanding Process Tracing,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 44 (4), 2011). Again, this is small beer; the richness of the cases will certainly help others develop their own hypotheses regarding agricultural policy and authoritarianism.

In my own work on the peasantry in China, Thomson’s study clarifies the politics surrounding the “agrarian question,” involving evolving rural/capitalist relations, land marketization, and urbanization. When agrarian change unfolds, authoritarian regimes face irreconcilable demands as urbanization increases pressure on the regime to lower food prices and the increased concentration of landholdings among agribusinesses leads to demand for rural-biased state support. Under these conditions, Food and Power would suggest the decreasing capacity of agricultural policy to stymie unrest (p. 211). For China, where agrarian reform is viewed as a necessary gamble to further fuel its economic growth, this does not bode well for regime stability (see Kristen Looney and Meg Rithmire, “China Gambles on Modernizing through Urbanization,” Current History, 116, 2017). I would agree with Thomson that the only solution available to the Chinese state would be to increase its authoritarian grip.

In my reading of the book, agricultural policy appears to be more the Achilles heel of authoritarian governments than an effective tool for regime stability. In urban-biased regimes, the demands of city dwellers may temporarily be appeased by lower food prices. But as the countryside becomes more impoverished, it encourages further migration to the cities, increasing the probability of social unrest (p. 210). The sustainability of rural-biased regimes also remains in question. Thomson’s analysis shows that an increase in producer rents to landed interests decreases the probability of regime failure, and he argues that this leads to a virtuous cycle of farmer-centered development (p. 210). However, it is less clear as to how long urban dwellers will tolerate this scenario, especially given their sensitivities to food price movements. In his own assessment of Malaysia’s rural-biased regime, Thomson acknowledges that the distortionary effects of the NEP have undermined regime support in the long term (p. 208). Even in the countryside under a rural-biased regime, one could also expect significant unrest on the part of small rural cultivators, a social category that Thomson does not highlight in his book. As agricultural rents are increasingly siphoned off by landed elites, an immiserated peasantry also serves as a potential source of discontent. Although peasant forms of social resistance may not lead to regime failure, they can certainly weaken the state by draining its resources for increased policing or pay-offs to contentious rural populations. Foot dragging, false compliance, evasion, and pilfering can also present significant costs to agricultural productivity. Small-scale incidents of rural unrest can coalesce into broad movements, and new organizational forms can arise to threaten the state, as was the case in Mexico during the 1960s. I am increasingly skeptical that a long-term, politically viable agricultural policy solution exists under either a rural- or urban-biased system for an authoritarian regime. As such, I would go much further than Thomson in highlighting the risks of unbalanced agricultural policy in an authoritarian setting.

If the business of political science is the study of power and how distributions of power affect who gets what, when, and how, then surely food must take center stage in our inquiry. Thomson’s study’s methodological precision, deep knowledge of agricultural policy, and sensible findings make it indispensable for those of us interested in understanding the dynamics of the developing authoritarian world.