Plants and animal breeding from the second half of the 18th century to the end of the 20th century. Global, comparative and connected perspective

Call for Papers for the Fourth biennial conference of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO)

(EHESS, Paris, 10-13 September 2019)

Plants and animal breeding from the second half of the 18th century to the end of the 20th century. Global, comparative and connected perspective

Paper proposals should be submitted via the conference website:

https://eurhoparis2019.sciencesconf.org/user/submit

before February 1, 2019. Pease mention the code number of the panel: 232285

Selecting, electing, eliminating : the history of trees, crops, microbes and cattle breeding from the Enlightenment to nowadays, have been recently reappraised at the crossroad of history of science and technology, rural history and environmental history. A growing amount of scholarly work have shed new light on the normativity and the cumulative impact of the different sciences and practices related to breeding. Domestic biodiversity, local seeds and ancient breeds as precious assets in the perspective of global change, and the ecological criticism of the impact of agricultural modernization, have reassessed the political significance of selecting processes, stimulating new critical approaches and, most of all, new connections with biological, social and political processes. The history of breeding has thus been related with discussions on biopower and organisms’ industrialization, with the biological and social standardization and impoverishment of rural landscapes, and with unexpected multispecies encounters with a “third nature” (see Tsing’s notions of plantationocene and third nature), both in industrialized and in colonial and postcolonial countries.

A rich set of local or thematic studies has been collected since the turn of the Millennium, enhancing the heuristic interest of a systemic study of selection as a social, technical, and political praxis of nature, at the heart of the deep contradictions of the process of the utilitarian reduction of Nature under the rule of capitalism (labeled “second nature” by Cronon). But the fieldworks developed by historians on agronomy, breeding sciences, forestry or the industry of seeds, still lack a synthetic survey, although their comparison raises important questions concerning the relevant scales for such studies, diverging proposals of periodization, and the compatibility of the different critical patterns involved, from the concept of rationalization to the ones of eugenics or biopouvoir. Moreover, the strong link between applied biosciences and State power, especially on animal sciences, has divided the field into two kinds of studies, empiricist and monographs on the one hand, and more theoretical and transnational studies on the other.

This panel would thus aim at gathering researchers from different backgrounds and studying different objects – biocultural diversity, agrosystems, scientific institutions, political systems and governmentality, dissemination or eliminations mechanisms, market stimuli, conceptions of race, utility or value... -, in order to develop a shared discussion on the global chronology of selection and its effect on productive systems since the 18th century, with a specific focus on the transnational processes, with global, comparative and connected histories of breeding. Although epistemological diversity is an undeniable advantage in such a complex matter, our proposal is motivated by the need to confront selection practices and theories, processes and impacts, diverging and converging phases, especially between central and peripheral territories in the bioeconomy of late modern history.

First confirmed speakers include Christophe Bonneuil (CNRS & EHESS), Marianna Fenzi (Berkeley Univ.) and Pierre Cornu (LER, Pr. Univ. Lyon 2, France).