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.
"Oceans of Grain is provocative. Well researched and readable,
Nelson has written a book that will fascinate both professional
historians and regular folk."
--American Essence
"In the vein of other groundbreaking historical revisionist books,
Oceans of Grain runs a fine toothed comb through history to tell an
unexpected tale of what caused some empires to crumble while others
survived and thrived: grain. ...much as he does in his previous
book, Steel Drivin' Man, Reynolds Nelson introduces new key actors
that shed important light on the story. A quick read despite its
length, Oceans of Grain's reinterpretation of a humble commodity's
history makes a case that wheat has had as much of an impact on our
country and our planet as cotton--and that the fight for the power
of grain is far from over."--Civil Eats
"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."--Daniel Immerwahr, New York Review of Books
"[A] sweeping and timely new history...vitally provocative."--Irish
Times
"A sweeping and timely new history...vitally provocative."--Irish
Times
"Readable, original and provocative, this is a book that deserves
attention."--David Abulafia, The Spectator
"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..."--Financial
Times
"Original and intriguing...[Nelson] makes a strong case that the
wheat trade's contribution to history has not been given its
due."--Wall Street Journal
"Oceans of Grain is an eye opening feat of historical
reconsideration."--Smoke Signals
"Oceans of Grain is the best work of history I have read in a very
long time. 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. It takes readers
from the granaries and ancient trade pathways of Europe to the US
Civil War and the overthrow of slavery, the founding of empires,
the slaughterhouses of the First World War and the Russian
Revolution, and, finally, to our contemporary, interconnected, and
profoundly unequal world. Along the way, Scott Reynolds Nelson
introduces us to the individuals who made and remade this world.
Some are welcome new acquaintances and others--like Abraham Lincoln
and Vladimir Lenin--are shown in such new light that it feels as if
we are meeting them for the first time."--Angela Zimmerman, George
Washington University
"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."--Sven
Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton
"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."--James C. Scott, author of Against the Grain
"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."--Stephanie McCurry, Columbia University
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