The Green Revolution, a historical event roughly occurring between the 1950s and the late 1960s, significantly transformed agricultural regimes in several countries of the Global South – most notably Mexico, India, and the Philippines. Through the help of agricultural innovations pioneered by American foundations, these countries experienced a dramatic production shift in traditional local crops, such as rice and maize, pushing their yields well beyond subsistence level and becoming global producers. Just as importantly, these epistemic transformations also led to socio-environmental changes, whose effects are still tangible today. These events were part of a worldwide trend that environmental historians John McNeill and Peter Engelke have defined as the Great Acceleration – the world's unprecedented socioeconomic and environmental global transformation since post-World War II. This course aims to retrace the historical trajectory of the Green Revolution, expanding its reach to countries that conventional historical narratives have often overlooked. Whereas countries such as Mexico, India and the Philippines have been extensively documented, through the help of American foundations, other nations such as Brazil and Indonesia also pioneered different agricultural innovations that reshaped their national nutrition regimes and affected their ecologies. This course is divided into two main modules. First, after introducing the mainstream concept of the Green Revolution and analyzing its most conventional cases, it will drift towards less known terrains, utilizing a recent corpus of historical production and a relatively unexplored array of primary sources.
- Teacher: Claudio De Majo