Oceans of Grain:
Scott Reynolds Nelson (Basic, $40, 356 pages)
World food prices are currently affected by the war in Ukraine, which is sometimes called the breadbasket of the world. The importance of the wheat trade should not be underestimated and a useful tonic to such faulty thinking is Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Oceans of Grain. Nelson argues that wheat – never mind the focus on American wheat in the subtitle — made the world as we know it: “The rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of Austria and Turkey, and the European struggle for empire,” in the 19th century, had “more to do with the injection of cheap foreign grain into Europe than most historians have recognized.” Nelson acknowledges the influence of Parvus (a pseudonym), who wrote more than a century ago about how grain-trading routes had shaped empires. Thus, in Nelson’s telling, strategies to gain or block wheat was the crucial factor in the fall of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, the outbreak of World War I and the start of the Russian Revolution. While perhaps exaggerated as all single-explanation narratives tend to be, Nelson’s story is a fascinating read about how grain traveled by river, across seas and oceans, and between ports, and in many ways this is a story about the importance of controlling waterways. Nelson may confuse cause and effect: did empires control waterways in order to control wheat or did they happen to control wheat because they controlled waterways (for military reasons)? Despite digressions, incredible detail about the minutiae of logistics, and more than a whiff of Marxism, Nelson’s Oceans of Grain pays off with a broad view of the grain trade from ancient Byzantium and Greece through to Catherine the Great’s Russia to America providing abundant, cheap wheat after the development of its railways. Ancient preservation methods long lost were rediscovered, making the grain-trade viable once again which led to urbanization, and tariffs on grain funded critical infrastructure (and armies). The Russian war against Ukraine may not be about grain, but it does affect global trade in (all) foodstuffs, and reading Oceans of Grain may lead to an appreciation for the long-term effects of the disruption in the wheat trade may have.
