Books by Courtney Fullilove
Publications by Courtney Fullilove
In: Curry HA, Lorek TW, eds. Agricultural Science as International Development: Historical Perspectives on the CGIAR Era, 2024
The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in re... more The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in relation to the postwar Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Planners, drawing on climate models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But their rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the improvisation of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. The chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of (1) the geopolitical logic of international agricultural research and (2) dryland agricultural science as the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.
Technology and Culture, 2024
This essay theorizes crop seeds as deep time technologies, surveying a range of materialist appro... more This essay theorizes crop seeds as deep time technologies, surveying a range of materialist approaches to the study of agriculture, from historical materialism to agroecology and actor-network theory. Recent studies of plant domestication suggest that the long history of human-plant relations and agrarian knowledge defy the reduction of seeds to products of nature or objects of property. Approaching seeds as technologies allows us to understand the actors and processes of improvement that demarcate biological material according to commercial and scientific logics. Framing seeds as a collaborative technological project with a 19,000-year history unseats industrial time as the dominant frame in the history of technology. It recasts political economy not simply as a construction of human social relations of production but also as it imagines the material used to produce life itself.
Isis
This essay considers the preservation of prickly alkanet, a wild plant that is a constituent of P... more This essay considers the preservation of prickly alkanet, a wild plant that is a constituent of Palestinian cuisine. While tracking the dominant practices of biodiversity preservation that justify the documentation and collection of plants in national and international systems, it ultimately suggests recipes rather than seeds as targets of preservation. For, in seed saving oriented toward community control of resources, knowledge of the plant begins with the ability to prepare it for the table, not with the ability to analyze it in a lab or cultivate it in a field. As a logic of biodiversity preservation, cooking thus serves as an expression of community solidarity and a counter-hegemonic form of knowledge, prioritizing the local sharing of resources and rituals above floristic nationalisms and the extractive complex of international food security. Such an approach calls into question the orientation of modern agricultural development, which has prioritized increasing yield in primary cereal crops. www.fao.org/climate-smart-agriculture/en/ (accessed 2 Jan. 2021). On global conservation strategies see, e.g., Gea Galluzzi et al.,
Towards Responsible Plant Data Linkage: Data Challenges for Agricultural Research and Development
This essay argues that shortcomings in our approaches to global agriculture and its data infrastr... more This essay argues that shortcomings in our approaches to global agriculture and its data infrastructures are attributable in part to a constricted application of population concepts derived from biological sciences in the context of international development. Using Palestine as a case study, this chapter examines the category of baladi seeds as a community-generated characterization of population, and one which arguably defies reduction to data. Drawing on quantitative research on farmer participation in informal seed production for wheat in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) and oral histories of farmers in the West Bank, this chapter analyzes the relation between participatory plant breeding initiatives, heritage narratives, and international agricultural research in rendering baladi seeds legible for archiving. It considers the multiple technological practices through which these institutions characterize and manage access to cultivated seeds, and how they differently app...
Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach (ed. John Krige), 2022
The Cambridge History of America and the World, 2021
Patent Cultures Diversity and Harmonization in Historical Perspective, 2020
Unlike rival systems in France and Britain, early United States law from 1790 until 1880 required... more Unlike rival systems in France and Britain, early United States law from 1790 until 1880 required patentees to supply working models of their inventions. Although the US system was widely copied later in the century (e.g., by Germany and Japan), by that time the models requirement was widely obsolete. Thus by the time of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property in 1883, the prior tradition of making and examining models was virtually irrelevant: it curtailed the possible scope of patents, excluding, for example, patents on pure processes. So for these and other reasons inventors’ lobbies vehemently opposed it. Nevertheless the culture of patent models is worth studying both for the light it sheds on shifting concepts of innovation, and as an instrument of international publicity for the US patent system: the requirement of a model shifted attention from motive concept to the apparatus represented. The models requirement, moreover, sustained a culture of invention populated by professional model makers and lawyers clustered in the nation’s capital, as well as a popular public museum.
Osiris, 2018
This essay considers the political economy of transnational scientific research based on global c... more This essay considers the political economy of transnational scientific research based on global collection of biota for laboratory manipulation, focusing on a program to develop pest-resistant wheat using fungal endophytes common in a range of wild but closely related grasses. This effort extends long-standing efforts to commoditize living substances of increasing scope and complexity, and it is supported by efforts to collect and preserve biological diversity. The essay explores how imperatives of capital shape biodiversity as a policy category and determine which forms of life are saved, materially altering our records of life on earth. These newly legible and malleable organisms become more perfect commodities, suitable for standardization and transmutation into finance capital. Yet endophytes are also of interest in part because of their resistance to such control, throwing into sharp relief the reductive imperatives of commoditization while also provoking new ways of justifying capital accumulation and flow. This essay questions the extent to which histories of capitalism and science as conjoined projects rooted in the biological species concept can explain contemporary practices of biodiversity preservation and the microbiological research they support. Microbiological research provides new renderings of life on earth that may challenge or reconfigure metaphors and practices common to capitalism and science.
Diplomatic History, 2017
If, as anthropologists have emphasized, gifts are never free, the freighted quality of their exch... more If, as anthropologists have emphasized, gifts are never free, the freighted quality of their exchange was explicit in the U.S. Japan Expedition of 1853-4 led by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, the object of which to compel commodity exchange. This essay explores diplomatic gift exchange during the expedition as a theater in which disputes over value were performed. Gift exchange supported licit and illicit commerce, each reflecting varied imaginations of the global: as a patchwork of militarized nation states, a hierarchy of civilizations, an grid of marketplaces, and a zone of common nature.
ABSTRACT To date historians have regarded the museum in the mid-nineteenth-century patent office ... more ABSTRACT To date historians have regarded the museum in the mid-nineteenth-century patent office building as a curious if not negligible precursor to the Smithsonian National Museum, which ultimately inherited its collections. This paper rejects this teleological interpretation by viewing the collections through the eyes of their progenitor and long-time custodian, John Varden, whose personal collections formed the kernel of the great cabinet. Varden’s personal collection of the hair of US presidents and distinguished persons, and its subsequent display and concealment, provides a heuristic to examine prevailing ideologies about the value of museum collections with respect to science and history. The displacement of curiosity by typicality and presentation by representation banished Victorian relic culture from the modern national museum’s displays.
Whether historians investigate consuls, missionaries, merchants, naval squadrons, or scientists ,... more Whether historians investigate consuls, missionaries, merchants, naval squadrons, or scientists , they can discern a striking transformation in the global reach of the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War. A burgeoning amount of new and forthcoming scholarship on American globalization during this era has created an opportunity to rethink orthodox narratives of American history and globalization. This "Interchange " conversation illustrates how historians have been pursuing productive imperatives to move American history beyond the container of the nation-state and also considers how we should reintegrate a globalized U.S. history into our more traditional narratives. The conversation also places the history of American globalization in a larger context, allowing us to interrogate the more complex history of globalization. Attending to the limits of globalization can reveal important histories foreclosed by a rush to demonstrate mere interconnection. Global interconnection was not some kind of already existing condition to be discovered by historians. Globalization entailed work—a contingent and grounded process that deserves a full history. And globalization included varying vantage points and power dynamics. The JAH is indebted to all of the participants for sharing their thoughts on this subject.
Book Reviews by Courtney Fullilove
Isis, 2024
The Mexican boll weevil ate the cotton crop in the U.S. South in the early twentieth century. It ... more The Mexican boll weevil ate the cotton crop in the U.S. South in the early twentieth century. It also inspired a litany of blues anthems by the likes of Charley Patton, Blind Willie McTell, Leadbelly, and Ma Rainey, amounting to a corpus of stories about the insect's place in the world: its reproduction, climatic preferences, address to farmers, and search for a home. Identified by the authors of Moving Crops and the Scales of History as an "actant," in the lexicon of Bruno Latour, the boll weevil joins cotton brokers and farmers in setting the market price of cotton. The authors, who bring the tools of science and technology studies and historical anthropology to the study of agriculture, invoke jazz to characterize their explorations of crops as a series of "riffs"; and this is one way to characterize the recursive qualities of the text, which loops through groupings and regroupings of crops as "natural and social," "material" and "symbolic," "rooted and mobile," "controlled and uncontrollable" entities (p. 1). To contain this dizzying array of oppositions, the authors give us the heuristic of the cropscape: an "evermutating assemblage of nonhumans and humans, material, social, and symbolic elements, within which a particular crop or set of crops in a particular place and time flourished or failed" (p. 249). Here the authors reflect general trends in the history of science toward actor-network, multispecies, and ecological frameworks for understanding human history, even as they forge a theoretical construct derived from landscape and indebted to Annales school geography, cultural Marxism, and material culture studies. Having abandoned the naiveties of civilization, progress, and heroic agency, the word of the day is "assemblage," and it is for the reader to determine the utility of this reorientation from serial ideological commitments to strange bedfellows. This is a book to be read by scholars who have bracketed agriculture as an unremarkable province of technological, economic, and institutional development. Jettisoning the whiggish presumption of development itself, the authors demand that we take up cultivated plants as "products of work" and "life forms" basic to human history, whose subjection to "intense human discipline" is countered by their "irrepressible propensity to slip free" (p. 1). Just as the book refuses teleological distinctions between nomadic and sedentary, ancient and modern, and local and global, it rejects tidy theoretical moorings. Over the course of three pages about temporality, we visit Aristotle, the longue durée, "subaltern immobilities," and the Columbian Exchange (pp. 12-14). Throughout its many theoretical and empirical engagements, Moving Crops and the Scales of History reads as an attempt to realize the aspiration of Fernand Braudel to engage the "plural temporalities of history" (p. 58). Even so, the authors insist that these and other frameworks provide the possibilities for producing decolonial histories, the inspiration of which owes as much to Ibn Khaldun as Arnold Toynbee (p. 32). All this moving around can wear a reader out, and perhaps that's as it should be in a work of this ambition, which distills long-running conversations between the four authors and their deep engagement in multiple historiographical traditions and objects of study. Having consumed dates, tobacco, rice, cocoa,
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Uploads
Books by Courtney Fullilove
Publications by Courtney Fullilove
Book Reviews by Courtney Fullilove