Is the US South merely the northern terminus of Latin America and the Caribbean basin? In his stimulating and original book Olsson remaps our understanding of the currents of rural reform and with it broader understandings of the evolution of international development. In particular Olsson tracks the similarities of Mexican countryside and the southern United States from the late nineteenth century, societies riven by dispossession, inequality, and revolt as they were buffeted by bruising encounters with a merciless global economy.

The pathological similarities of the two regions ran parallel through the early twentieth century. It was only during the cascading crises of the “long 1930s” that a clutch of reformers straddling the border got their chance to launch a sustained set of programs to pull both Mexico and the US South out of their shared torpor. These were meant to be far-reaching and not merely to enhance agricultural production but to improve other aspects of rural life and even attempt to foster economic and social justice. Among the cast of reformers some are well known, such as US Agriculture Secretary (and later vice president) Henry Wallace. A few are unlikely, such as arch white supremacist Josephus Daniels. He was turned into a reform partisan when, as FDR's ambassador, he saw the chronic problems of his home state of North Carolina reflected in Mexico. Others had considerable experience with either science or the soil. Olsson traces the remarkable way many of these ideas and practices were transferred as few reformers saw barriers between the shared problems of land tenure, environmental degradation, agricultural practices, and economic crisis. A strength of this narrative is that it places Mexican actors – politicians, activists, technocrats, and scientists – squarely at the center of a narrative that never swings completely to one side. Olsson's inclusive narrative reaches an inspired pitch where it traces the origins of the “Green Revolution” not to an outwardly focussed urge of the Cold War United States. Rather, Olsson locates it in a deeper historical context as part of long-standing efforts to improve cropping practices in the first half of the century in the United States as well as in Mexico.

In certain respects Olsson's emphasis on region is a more cosmopolitan heir to the earlier scholarly regime of regionalism in vogue during the 1930s, although this older school of thought was US-centered and debates over regionalism posited the importance of interconnected space within nation-states. There are times where Olsson's conception of a sort of greater Caribbean does shorten the book's horizons. There is no clear sense that the needs of the US West and Mid-west and the varied regions of Mexico were really that dissimilar from the zones Olsson discusses. Also, the confluence of national politics is underplayed. Regardless of the imaginations of reformers, the implementation programs prefaced on the fundamental similarities between the southern and Mexican countryside were possible because reformist regimes under Roosevelt and Cardenas were in power in respective capitals.

To be imagined, any region must be hewn out of a globe. Even as Americans were learning from (and in) Mexico, and vice versa, all were immersed in a global symposium on rural life. Rural reform already had a lengthy global history. Influential non-state actors in Olsson's narrative, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, had sustained extensive portfolios of agricultural reform in China and elsewhere. Many issues being confronted in the greater Caribbean of Olsson's analysis were being faced in other parts of the world. The author does note that the intensification of programing between the US and Mexico is in significant measure due to the geopolitics of the era. As the world scene darkened in the late 1930s the rising beat of conflict constrained work in other regions and increased the strategic import of Latin America. The intense efforts in Mexico and the American South during the 1930s are both the product of interaction between rural societies straddling the Gulf of Mexico and one node of a complicated global dialogue on how to contend with the problems of rural life.

What Olsson has provided is a book that brightly illuminates the complex interplay of actors and ideas behind attempts to steer change to agriculture and society in Mexico and the United States. Agrarian Crossings also enriches a set of debates surrounding lively historical themes such as progressive reform and international development that, by their nature, straddle borders.