Scott Reynolds Nelson - Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World

I N THE SPRING of 2011, I first flew into Odessa to research an international financial crisis, but not the one you have probably heard about. Two and a half years earlier, on October 1, 2008, I had written an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education predicting that problems with the mortgage market suggested a deeper problem with international trade that could hinder bank lending and lead to a global depression. I knew this, I wrote, because I saw similarities between modern problems with mortgage banking and my obsession: the panic of 1873. My editor asked me to conclude with a few paragraphs about what might happen if 1873 were similar to 2008. I predicted a steep decline in trade, widespread unemployment, hoarding of cash by financial firms, shifts in the currency used for international trade, scapegoating of immigrants, and finally a surge of nationalism and tariffs. Newspapers all over the world translated and reprinted my article even as the stock market began to plunge.

By 2011 I had finished a book about the American origins of financial panics, which I argued had much to do with drastic changes in commodity prices. Newspaper reporters were flying to the Arab world because of protests there, but as a historian I was heading to Odessa. Egyptian protesters called for bread, freedom, and social justice in 2011. I was thinking about calls for bread, freedom, and justice in the French Revolution of 1789, the downfall of Sultan Selim III in 1807, the European Revolutions of 1848, the Young Turk Revolution in 1910, and the Russian Revolution in 1917. Wars and revolutions now, just as in the past, have much to do with wheat. That is the topic of this book.

Taking off from Budapest on an antique commuter plane, a dozen Hungarian tourists and I headed south over the Eurasian steppes. Through my window, I could see endless wheat fields laid out below like a massive Tetris game, with interlocking squares and rectangles of land straddling the main highways. The railways and roads that sliced through the black soil followed a straight path southward to the Black Sea. Neither the Russian Revolution nor the Second World War nor the Orange Revolution of the 2000s had erased those sharp grid lines laid down in the nineteenth century.

Ukraine has what may be the richest soil in the world. Called chernozem, it is a dark, beautifully aerated loam that allows worms and bacteria to thrive. In 1768, the tsarina Catherine II sent more than a hundred thousand Russian troops through this region and across the Black Sea to capture it. She had an audacious plan to build the Russian Empire by borrowing food, seizing the steppe, planting wheat here, and then feeding all of Europe. Five thousand miles away, American colonists had a similar plan, and both seemed utterly utopian. Then a revolution in Paris over the price of bread, the rise of Napoleon, and the burning of thousands of wheat fields in Europe changed all that. Odessa became a grain-exporting boomtown and made the tsars who followed Catherine and their landowning nobility rich. Wheat grown in those black rectangles traveled by oxcart to Odessa, where workers loaded the sacks onto Greek-owned ships bound for Livorno, London, and Liverpool to feed European cities at war. Wealth poured into Russias newly built port. In a few decades, French migr architects, refugees from the Revolution, had designed the Vorontsov Palace, along with Alexander Square, the Odessa Opera House, and the majestic summer dachas of southern Russias moneyed estate owners and grain traders. The most beautiful dachas surrounded the imperial botanical gardens.

After Napoleons defeat, these vast fields of Russian wheat did not delight European landlords. They faced what is called Ricardos paradox, in which rents drop when food gets cheap. For forty years taxes on foreign grain slowed cheap sacks of Russian Azima and Ghirka wheat. But then a water mold, unknowingly carried in from America, killed potatoes and brought food insecurity that forced European states to open the trading floodgates to wheat again in 1846. A century-long contest emerged between the wheat fields of Russia and the wheat fields of America to feed Europes working class.