The Staff of Life
Scott Reynolds Nelson - Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World
The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2022
It was hard to read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s original and intriguing “Oceans of Grain” without thinking of Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”: “The crops, the grains. Fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat.” Karl Marx looked at history and found class. Mr. Nelson tends to find wheat. Thus, in the 19th century, he writes, “the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of Austria and Turkey, and the European struggle for empire all [had] more to do with the injection of cheap foreign grain into Europe than most historians have recognized.”
Mr. Nelson has, he relates, been heavily influenced by the writings of Alexander Helphand (1867-1924). The pseudonymous “Parvus” was a radical journalist, a revolutionary (in 1917 he helped inspire Germany to send Lenin and some comrades to St. Petersburg to foment the revolution that would knock Russia out of the war), a hugely successful businessman and much more besides. In Parvus’s opinion, grain-trading routes (trading grain was one of his businesses) had preceded, made and shaped empires. They could also break them. Mr. Nelson agrees.
Like others who believe they have identified a key to the past, Mr. Nelson can take his argument too far. To take just one instance, he describes the British-led landings on the Gallipoli peninsula during World War I as an attempt to defend access to Russian oil in Baku and “to clear the vital path connecting the gullet cities in France and England to grain waiting on the Black Sea.” However marvelous the term “gullet city”—Mr. Nelson has a way with a telling and descriptive phrase—these motives (which were real enough) weighed rather less than the more ambitious objective of bypassing the stalemate on the Western Front. More ambitiously still, some were even anticipating how they could pick apart the Ottoman carcass.
While Mr. Nelson can overreach, he makes a strong case that the wheat trade’s contribution to history (the book is about much more than the American grain referred to in its subtitle) has not been given its due. And even those who disagree with his thesis ought to appreciate the extraordinary detail and entertainingly wild digressions that run through a narrative that has room for, to take a random sample, Roman milestones, Prussian logistics, one of Britain’s greatest financial scandals, quite a bit of Marxism, the spread of white bread and Isaac Newton’s (possible) prediction that the world would end in 1866.
The beginnings of Mr. Nelson’s tale date back to antiquity, with grain (and, less productively, the plague) carried along paths that may have been the basis of nascent empires and often came to be absorbed by them. Controlling these routes could be a wellspring of wealth and power, as later demonstrated by the rise of Byzantium, with its “pinch point” across the narrow Bosporus strait that connects the Black Sea (used to transport grain grown in the fertile black-earth zone stretching across parts of what is today southern Russia and Ukraine) with, ultimately, the Aegean and Greece’s hungry cities.
Fast forward through the centuries (Mr. Nelson proceeds at a more leisurely pace) to find Catherine the Great’s Russia purchasing grain on, essentially, credit, to feed the armies that won her the territories that could be used to farm wheat for export, much of it eventually funneled through the purpose-built port of Odessa to enrich Catherine’s realm. Wheat exports to Europe from the young United States meanwhile were constrained by, among other factors, protectionism, distance, the dominance of the cotton trade and political efforts by pro-slavery interests to slow the westward expansion of wheat cultivation. It would, they feared, increase the clout of the free states.
One by one these obstacles fell away. Distance was overcome by better ships, the rediscovery of ancient preservation techniques and the development of railroads linking the Midwest to the eastern seaboard. Tariffs started falling in the aftermath of the potato blight, which had led to the “hungry forties” across much of Europe, triggering catastrophe in Ireland and political turmoil elsewhere. And, of course, the South lost America’s Civil War. Cheap grain from Russia had already transformed much of Europe’s diet and facilitated the concentration of populations in cities that became centers of industry, commerce and capital, a process accelerated by the addition of bargain-priced American grain into the mix.
As we know, progress can come with a dark side. Mr. Nelson recounts how a “cereal corridor” from Antwerp in Belgium contributed to Prussia’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War, a giant step along the way to 1914. The cascade of American grain, especially when paired with disruptive financial and other innovation (from underwater telegraphy to blasting out new trade routes with nitroglycerin) was, whether directly or indirectly, the source of mayhem as well as advance, responsible for busts, such as in the value of European farmland, as well as booms. The consequences of economic upheaval are rarely economic alone. The damage done to Austria-Hungary’s lucrative flour trade was yet another factor undermining a tottering empire. On the other hand, imported grain was now so cheap that Europe’s powers could safely tax it. “Grain tariffs,” writes Mr. Nelson, “helped build railroads and battleships.”
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Nelson maintains that “grain was key to almost every stage of World War I.” Even if “key” and “almost every” overstates matters, he is right to stress the importance of food supplies (or the lack of them) to how the war was fought and to its outcome. He is also right to highlight Russian concerns over the Bosporus pinch point as a cause of the conflict, although quite how proximate a cause is, like so much else about the early summer of 1914, infinitely debatable. Grain too played a critical role in the chaos that finally overwhelmed the Russian empire in 1917, and in the contest for its domains that ensued. That no small part of that revolved around Ukraine’s rich wheatlands is not, this week, a reassuring thought.