Moving Crops and the Scales of History is a very unusual effort in at least two ways. First, it is co-authored by four scholars, which is rare in the humanities. But the book itself explains why: it is transnational and global in every aspect. Not only does it demonstrate the ways in which crops have traveled globally; it also reveals the methods, both similar and different, employed by various peoples in cultivating crops. The time span is thousands of years; the geographical scope includes every inhabited continent. It is, therefore, understandable that scholars with varying regional expertise were brought together to produce this work: Francesca Bray, an anthropologist and historian from the University of Edinburgh, focuses her research primarily on agriculture in Asia; Barbara Hahn, a historian, works at Texas Tech University with a focus on the US South and global history; John Bosco Lourdusamy, a historian at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, has made contributions to the study of science, technology, and medicine in colonial India; Tiago Saraiva is a historian of science and technology at Drexel University whose research explores the global connections between science, technology, crops, and politics.
