This roundtable offers a critical appraisal of Samantha Iyer’s new book Agrarian Superpower: Food, Development, and the Global Ascendancy of the United States (Columbia University Press, 2026). Through the prism of food and agriculture, the book examines how the United States emerged as a global power by the mid-twentieth century out of the prior era of British imperial dominance. It takes as its starting point an often ignored, yet fundamental characteristic of the United States after the Second World War: In contrast to imperial Britain, an industrial power that was dependent on its colonies and former colonies for food and other raw materials, the United States became an agrarian superpower in a world of national economies. Over the course of the twentieth century, its farmers produced bewildering quantities of crops using the ingredients of fossil fuels, biotechnology, and government farm credit. With the establishment of its food aid program in 1954, the United States became the dominant exporter of food staples to industrializing countries in the Third World. Two former British territories—Egypt and India—became two of the largest importers of U.S. food aid after their independence. The book investigates the origins and effects of this U.S.-centric food order by examining changing modes of producing, organizing, calculating, distributing, and consuming agricultural surpluses in Egypt, India, and the United States, from the late nineteenth century to the early 1970s. It argues that food aid became such a powerful instrument of U.S. global power during the Cold War because it offered a tool for managing Third World national economies.

A distinguishing feature of the book is its method—not global, imperial, transnational, or international history but what the geographer Gillian Hart calls “relational comparison.” Three prominent historians will interrogate the book’s arguments and assess its method within the framework of a number of fields. Aaron Jakes with analyze the book in relation to the historiography of Egypt, capitalism, and agrarian life. Christopher Otter will assess the work against the scholarship on agro-food systems and the agricultural history of the British empire. And Angela Zimmerman will consider how the book speaks to the debates on scale and agency in more-than-national history.