Oceans Of Grain. How American Wheat Remade The World

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: Fine
Publisher: Basic Books
Publisher Place: New York
Publisher Year: 2022
Edition: First Edition

Description: 356 pages. Book and Jacket appear to have hardly been read and are both in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: An "incredibly timely" global history journeys from the Ukrainian steppe to the American prairie to show how grain built and toppled the worlds largest empires (Financial Times). 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, on the Black Sea in Ukraine. 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.

ISBN: 9781541646469