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Sebastian Ritscher
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OCEANS OF GRAIN

Scott Reynolds Nelson

How American Wheat Remade The World

A revelatory global history shows how cheap American grain toppled the world's largest empires.
To understand the rise and fall of empires, we must follow the paths traveled by grain - along rivers, between ports, and across seas. In Oceans of Grain, historian Scott Reynolds Nelson reveals how the struggle to dominate these routes transformed the balance of world power.

Early in the nineteenth century, imperial Russia fed much of Europe through the booming port of Odessa. But following the US Civil War, tons of American wheat began to flood across the Atlantic, and food prices plummeted. This cheap foreign grain spurred the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, and the European scramble for empire. It was a crucial factor in the outbreak of the First World War and the Russian Revolution.

A powerful new interpretation, Oceans of Grain shows that amid the great powers' rivalries, there was no greater power than control of grain.

Scott Reynolds Nelson is the UGA Athletics Association professor of the humanities at the University of Georgia. He is a Guggenheim fellow and the author of five books, including Steel Drivin' Man, which received the Merle Curti Social History Award and the National Award for Arts Writing. Nelson lives in Athens, Georgia.
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Published 2022-02-22 by Basic Books

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Tom Philpott's interview with Nelson Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson's op-ed for HNN was picked up by Raw Story Read more...

Our guest, Scott Nelson, is a scholar of useful stuff, raw materials, food commodities, over time. He says: in fact those nutritious and shippable grains between Ukraine and Russia are very nearly the whole story, underlying Russia's long lust for empire and Ukraine's claim to its share and its identity. What it takes to size up a food war, Scott Nelson says, is the memory and the imagination of a grain dealer, and he says the ruthless President Putin has it all. Oceans of Grain is Scott Nelson's provocative account of the history that brought us to Ukraine. Read more...

Nelson appeared on BBC Radio 4's Food Programme Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson's interview with the Keen On podcast posted to Lit Hub: Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Scott Reynolds Nelson, the author of Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World. Read more...

American cotton changed the world in the first half of the nineteenth century, American wheat in its second half. Scott Reynolds Nelson's globe-spanning exploration of the powers of a humble grain to topple empires, enable industrialization, build cities, and redirect trade flows is the kind of commodity history one wishes for: attentive to politics, connected as well as comparative in perspective, and with a knack for telling details. After reading this fast-paced book, the wars, revolutions, and empires of the nineteenth century will never seem the same.

For a discussion on the current impacts of Ukraine the global grain market, Scott Reynolds Nelson and the "highly recommend[ed]" OCEANS OF GRAIN were featured today on Bloomberg TV. Read more...

Dense with history, politics, economics, the University of Georgia humanities professor's fifth book still remains light and engaging as it cycles through centuries of grain... it pushes readers to think more like grain traders, and to see the world not as clearly mapped nations but rather the crucial journeys of our food across oceans, rivers, and ports that really write history. Read more...

OCEANS OF GRAIN appeared prominently in an article for The Big Issue (UK)! Read more...

Readable, original and provocative, this is a book that deserves attention. Read more...

Oceans of Grain' is provocative. Well researched and readable, Nelson has written a book that will fascinate both professional historians and regular folk. Read more...

I spoke with Prof. Nelson the very day Russia invaded Ukraine and we talk about the history of the black paths that fed the world with bushels of grain, but also became the most fought over space in Eastern Europe. Scott's new book Oceans of Grain (Basic Books) is out this week and it couldn't have come at a better time to help us understand our world today. Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson is cited in this article: Planet Hunger: Inside the Global Food Crisis Read more...

Grain traders wandering across the steppe; boulevard barons and wheat futures; railroads; the first fast food breakfast; and war socialism. It's all crammed into this discussion of wheat, and what it wrought, with Scott Nelson. Read more...

Author's article: Ukrainian Wheat Is Once Again Changing the Course of History Read more...

Chinese (simpl.): China Translation & Publishing House ; Chinese (compl.): Rye Field ; Japanese: Nikkei Business Publications ; Portuguese (P): Zigurate ; Russian: Direct Media ; Turkish: Sia Kitap

Scott Reynolds Nelson reveals the deep international career of wheat as a maker and breaker of empires and of people from Roman times until the twentieth century. Oceans of Grain is a book of astounding reach and depth, wholly original, gripping to read, and destined to become an instant classic. Rice and maize should be so lucky.

Witty and wise, it reveals how conspirators and heads of state, workers and entrepreneurs, and philosophers and economists turned the human struggle for daily bread into wars and empires, revolutions and conquests, feasts and famines.

...and Scott Reynolds Nelson, the Georgia Athletic Association Professor of history at the University of Georgia and the author of Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World, walks us through the history of wheat in Russia and Ukraine. Read more...

an article in Spain's Politica Exterior that ran last week is drawing new attention as the invasion of Ukraine reaches its 100-day milestone and reviews the book. Read more...

an incredibly timely history... Nelson makes a persuasive case that grain production, storage, transport and trade was the defining factor in the rise and fall of civilisations from Rome to Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia... Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson in his gripping Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World... is quite serious about the world-ordering power of wheat. Moreover, his grain obsession is infectious. You begin the book a sober reader, calmly appreciating the complexity of historical causation, and you finish it a raving wheat monomaniac... This book is all gas and no brakes, but it's hard not to cheer as it vrooms by the stands. Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson's interview for WNYC's The Takeaway with host Melissa Harris-Perry Read more...

original and intriguing... [Nelson] makes a strong case that the wheat trade's contribution to history has not been given its due. Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson's timely op-ed on Russia's covetous history with Ukraine and the Black Sea is the lead homepage feature on History News Network! Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson interviewed with Stephen Mihm for his Bloomberg Opinion column: Why Ukraine's Wheat Fields Sow Dictators' Megalomania - A Q&A with Scott Reynolds Nelson, author of "Oceans of Grain," on how the region's rich black earth has darkened and convulsed global history. Read more...

[a] sweeping and timely new history... vitally provocative. Read more...

"Oceans of Grain" is an eye-opening feat of historical reconsideration. Whole rosters of past events take on new orientations in Nelson's telling, and whether history readers fully agree with all aspects of this grain-centric interpretation, they'll be thinking about it long after they finish reading. Read more...

Author's online essay for The Spectator (UK): After invasion, famine - Russia is blockading Ukrainian grain ships. North Africa and the Middle East will suffer Read more...

Oceans of Grain is world history at its best, challenging in its density of ideas but rich in insights. It goes beyond the rise of American wheat to reinterpret world history as an epic of control of the flows of nutrition. Read more...

Scott Reynolds Nelson's signature mastery of scale is on full display in Oceans of Grain. Here we watch him play out the revolutionary implications of the American seizure of the international wheat market in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. This remarkable book rearranges what you think you know about the United States and the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.