AHA Session 21
Thursday, January 8, 2026: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Spire Parlor (Palmer House Hilton, Sixth Floor)
Chair:
Jo Guldi, Emory University
Papers:
Comment:
Jo Guldi, Emory University
Session Abstract
Throughout the 20th century, countries throughout the socialist world attempted to induce revolutionary change in rural societies. This meant remaking the economic relationships between cities and the countryside, redistributing land, and transforming food supply chains and distribution networks. Political leaders, economic planners, and farmers alike argued that these measures would release the revolutionary potential of rural societies and undo grave inequalities. This panel argues that assessing these different projects requires putting them within the context of wider 20th century agrarian transformations. A comparative and transnational approach to studying socialist countrysides helps us to attend to the problems - and successes - that they shared, the important ways in which they diverged, and how actors on the ground understood the domestic and international significance of the work they were engaging in. The people that shaped these projects referred to one another’s efforts, consciously compared themselves to developments in capitalist societies, and courted attention from reformers across the world. By looking at top-down, technocratic attempts to transform the Kazakhstani grasslands, Bratcher shows that the Soviet Union attempted to stage its own Green Revolution in Central Asia. Nasser demonstrates how Indian observers misread and misunderstood Chinese socialism and agrarian reforms in their search for a more suitable economic model. Mahler’s paper displays how despite their new coercive capabilities, Chinese state actors often failed to accurately gauge food production in the face of peasant resistance in the mid-1950s. Finally, by studying the intimate relationship and mutual influences between the Chinese and American pig feed industries throughout the 20th century, Teo’s work highlights the chimerical nature of agribusiness in both capitalist and socialist societies. Taken together, these four papers uncover key tensions between different state-led efforts to transform the countryside and various human and nonhuman interests, collaboration, and resistance. In doing so, this panel grapples with the multiplicity and contradictions inherent to different socialist societies’ approaches to rural reform, land economics, and agriculture. These were projects that were both exploitative and emancipatory; they sought to end scarcity and starvation while reinforcing the state’s capacity for relentless extraction and capital accumulation. Putting them in a comparative context with one another and with capitalist projects the world over will help us to appreciate these nuances more.
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