The Myth of “Modern Agriculture”: The Myth of Scale and Ecological Rupture
I. Shattering the Myth of Modern Western Agriculture
For the authors of The Migration of Crops in World Civilisations (hereafter Crop Migrations), the answer is no. Crop Migrations was co-authored by four agricultural historians, with the English-language original first published by Yale University Press in 2023. The authors challenge the Western-centred, progressivist teleology embedded in traditional historical narratives. This postcolonial-critical perspective helps, to a degree, dispel the myth of “Faster, Higher, Stronger” — including on questions of agriculture: does bigger scale always mean greater efficiency? Is higher yield always a good thing? Is genetic breeding always more advanced?
One of the book’s authors, Francesca Bray, specialises in the agricultural history and history of science and technology in China, and made early contributions to postcolonial critique in the field of Chinese history. By excavating the intimate relationship between technology and society, she challenged the mainstream narrative that late imperial China deserved to be beaten for being technologically backward. As lead author of the “Agriculture” volume (1983) of Science and Civilisation in China, edited by Joseph Needham, she sought to vindicate the biotechnological achievements of ancient China.
In acclaimed works such as The Rice Economies and Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, she emphasises the embeddedness of technology in society, culture and institutions. She found that early forms of division of labour resembling “sprouts of capitalism” had already emerged in East Asian rice societies, yet never displaced the smallholder model of intensive cultivation — small plots of cultivated land managed by household units sustained population growth, technological progress, and the flourishing of commerce and culture. She argues that mechanisation and scale are not the only path forward, nor do they suit every society.
Crop Migrations is concerned not only with East–West comparison but also, through its focus on “migration,” shows that mainstream modern Western agriculture — seemingly “far in the lead” — was never isolated from the supposedly “benighted and backward” non-Western world. Crops such as wheat, tulips and cinchona, often seen as markers of capitalism’s or modern technology’s “advancement,” have origins that are far less “Western” than is assumed; and the actual workings of large-scale industrialised agriculture are far less monolithic than one might imagine. From the small kitchen gardens practising multi-species rotation beside Southeast Asian rubber plantations, to the tuber crops that sustained day-to-day “cheap calories” for sugarcane workers in South America, the stories in this book reveal that global commodity supply chains and large-scale intensive farming are no panacea for development; on the contrary, they require the maintenance of “primitive” modes of production and life in order to enable the extraction of surplus value.
Having read this book, I believe that it is time to let go of the old obsession with whether “the West is the centre.” The history of agriculture needs to dissect, more directly, how large-scale monoculture has expanded across the globe since the colonial period — reshaping agricultural landscapes, dismantling rural communities, remaking the relationship between humans and the natural world, and leaving behind a trail of ruin. At the same time, we must ask what kinds of knowledge production and institutional arrangements have produced generational, epistemic and value ruptures, rendering other modes of production and life unimaginable.
II. The Plantationocene: Past and Present
Novel terminology is merely a handle for discussion; for now, let us continue using “Anthropocene” to refer to the most urgent ecological issues of our time, those most in need of scholarly engagement. On the subject of agriculture, I would propose introducing a more useful concept: the “plantationocene,” as put forward by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. The word “plantation” sounds like something remote — a colonial-era phenomenon confined to South America or Southeast Asia. Yet what these scholars seek to illuminate is an agricultural form or logic: the large-scale monoculture of crops for commodity production. This form of agriculture is ubiquitous across the globe and continues to expand.
Plantation agriculture is built on drastic ecological simplification and forced multi-species labour. It requires the wholesale erasure of the original inhabitants of a landscape — forests, wildlife and human communities alike — and the introduction and disciplining of species useful to humans: crops (often exotic plants or even genetically modified organisms), animals and imported labourers. Picture a vast blueberry plantation: only one species of plant is permitted to exist, serving the global commodity chain. Off-season cultivation is achieved through energy-intensive processes such as temperature control and cold-chain transport, drawing heavily on natural resources. Capital is poured in at high intensity from outside; seasonal temporary workers are hired; and labour is deskilled into simple, repetitive motions.
Plantations destroy soil, deplete water, and encroach on the habitats of wild flora and fauna, often triggering outbreaks of disease in crops and livestock. The depletion and exploitation of plantation workers also widens the gap between rich and poor and deepens social injustice. Some scholars have further noted that it was precisely the single-species, labour-intensive plantations, farms and slaughterhouses that inspired the modern factory assembly line. The plantation logic of breaking complex living organisms into standardised, controllable parts prefigures the discipline and alienation that corporate systems impose on their employees. For instance, on the Ford automobile production line, car assembly was divided into minute, fixed-tether tasks at individual stations, where electric lighting and shift work served the twenty-four-hour rhythm of machine production.
What makes the plantation logic so celebrated — beyond the profit motive of capital — is the high efficiency of its management model and its promise of a future of “material abundance.” But is it only through large-scale industrialised agriculture — through greater efficiency and higher yields — that the world’s population can live more prosperous lives? In Chapter 3 of Crop Migrations, “Scale”, the story of how Chinese tea was transplanted to colonial India offers a fascinating example.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the tea industry was a decentralised network of small- and medium-scale households (family-run operations with seasonal workers), local processors and tea merchants. At each node of this network, cultivating, processing and drinking tea were woven into the life and customs of local communities, while also allowing flexibility to respond to a vast domestic market and a shifting external one.
After British plant hunters “stole” tea plants from China, they attempted to transplant them to British India to build a tea industry, attracting substantial investment from capitalists in Britain proper. The economies of scale and capital-intensive sugar industry were already generating handsome profits for shareholders in the colonies, and could also serve as proof of the British Empire’s superiority and the legitimacy of colonial rule. Why not apply the plantation logic to tea?
Unlike China’s tea industry, long embedded in the social fabric, India’s tea estates were a rapidly manufactured artificial landscape: operators typically cleared vast tracts of forest in remote areas, tamed the wilderness, and recruited labourers from elsewhere. Along the way they encountered a relentless succession of problems — attacks from local animals, malaria from stagnant water — and for a long time the venture was beset by volatility, delivering no stable returns. Ultimately, the success of Indian tea hinged on contingency and marketing: domesticated wild Assam tea could be roasted by machine, cutting labour costs; and shrewd marketing persuaded every class across the British Empire to take up tea-drinking. At the same time, Chinese tea continued to be produced through decentralised, small-scale cultivation. It did face setbacks in exporting to the British Empire, but by actively adapting — introducing new products such as oolong tea — it was not eliminated by competition.
In this story, the diverse, small-scale growers in China’s tea industry demonstrated stability and resilience across both ecological and market dimensions, and were themselves producers of rich tea cultures. In India, by contrast, the success of the large-scale plantation was by no means inevitable; it was driven by ideology and market competition, its path strewn with setbacks, and profit ultimately depended on a series of contingencies.
Yet as capitalist ideology was recast in economic jargon such as “economies of scale” and “increasing returns to factors of production”, plantation logic reinvented itself as a more efficient, universally applicable template. After the Second World War, Western nations and international organisations launched a series of development aid programmes in the Third World, and a model of “hybrid seeds + fertiliser + pesticides + irrigation + mechanisation” spread under the banner of the Green Revolution.
This technical package likewise rests on the plantation logic of ecological simplification, scale and intense control: pursuing comparative advantage through single-crop cultivation, integrating crops into the global commodity market. Despite claiming to improve farmers’ livelihoods, this set of interventions in fact served capitalised agriculture, prioritising urban over smallholder needs; the price was the disintegration of rural communities and ecological degradation.
Whether in the guise of colonial exploitation or development aid, plantation-style agriculture abstracts crop cultivation into calculable inputs and outputs, thoroughly reorganising land, crops and labour to raise productive efficiency and pursue profit in commodity markets. The globalisation of this model of production constitutes the past and present of the plantationocene.
If we have already seen that small-scale, at least partially locally oriented, non-plantation agriculture is better for the environment and for people, then historians ought to be far more resolute in exposing the machinations of the plantationocene, and in seeking out the forgotten “non-plantation”: what social support systems, institutions and cultures historically made “non-plantation” practices possible, and how were they negated? Is it possible for us to step outside the collective unconsciousness of “getting bigger and stronger” and make the “non-plantation” new — make it imaginable?
III. Seeking the “Non-Plantation”: The Possibility of Care
Within the plantation’s boundaries, the once-complex interspecific interactions and dependencies among organisms are artificially reduced to a minimum; only what humans require is permitted to exist. Specialised agriculture becomes an assemblage of external inputs: commercial seeds, machinery, fuel, chemicals and pollinators go in; ever-higher yields come out. Yet this model’s ecological simplification is fragile and unsustainable.
Chapter 4 of the book, “Actors”, reveals the complex, agentic non-human actors in crop history; modern agriculture’s disregard for this agency often brings catastrophic consequences. Eucalyptus is a prime example: for landscaping, railway sleepers, the “restoration” of mine workings, paper-making and other purposes, Portugal has relentlessly cultivated this species from Tasmania, Australia, in vast monocultures. Yet as the climate has warmed, forest fires swept across Portugal in 2017, burning for an unconscionable time. The authors even suggest: who defines “invasive species”? Is eucalyptus not itself an “invasive plant”?
Eucalyptus, the “arsonist”, demonstrates non-human resistance to human desires for control: every creature has its own propensities or preferences, its own purposes and temporality; it may even be a non-purposive being. Multispecies studies and Feminist science and technology studies point out that we must confront absolute otherness.
The Anthropocene project of planetary engineering, including modern agriculture, assumes that human reason can calculate, design and control everything, thereby achieving limitless growth and expansion. Yet feminist theorists have proposed the logic of “care”, arguing that it is precisely the neglect of care that legitimises the violence of the Anthropocene, reducing human relations to others — and to other species — to nothing but arrogance and oppression. Traditionally, caring for others has been demeaned as women’s work: mere maintenance and repair. Yet care relationships are indispensable to the continuity of human society across generations. And it is in the relationship of care that the carer must first attentively heed the needs of the cared-for as “absolute other”, patiently listen to the other’s thoughts, and offer whatever assistance and service is possible — even when the other is so often the weaker party. In fact, the English word “care” can also be rendered as “solicitude”: care presupposes close, attentive regard. Care is at once arduous labour, an expenditure of emotion, and, more profoundly, a less ego-centred ontology.
The logic of care has, in fact, long resided in agronomy and agricultural practice. Chapter 5 of this book, “Composition”, introduces this perspective. In this regard, China’s agrarian civilisation made rich contributions in its past.
The Northern Wei Qimin Yaoshu (Essential Techniques for the People) already recorded mixed cropping and companion planting, requiring farmers to observe closely, tend their fields with care, and attend to the subtlest signs in the field so as to respond in good time. Faced with a growing population and the shocks of natural disaster and human misrule, the Ming-dynasty scholar Xu Guangqi — versed in both Chinese and Western learning — advocated composite, multi-functional farms in his Nongzheng Quanshu (Treatise on Agricultural Administration), in which diverse crops and other elements are interdependent and flexibly complementary, thereby withstanding shocks and sustaining prosperity. Here, human livelihood depends on weaving a complex web of relationships with crops, non-crop wildlife, soil, weather and other factors, rather than rigidly applying an input–output formula to manage agriculture as one would operate a machine.
The cases in this book remind us that farming methods radically different from the plantation — and the whole array of lifestyles and cultures associated with them — are possible; they were merely erased, little by little, in the march toward capitalist modernity.
More than a century ago, the American soil scientist Franklin H. King visited China and witnessed how smallholders, through intensive cultivation, secured their daily food while protecting the soil. He wrote Farmers of Forty Centuries: Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan, hoping that American agriculture might reflect on its limitless depletion of the land’s vitality and turn instead to East Asian experience, making good use of nature’s gifts.
Yet today, those who care about ecology and agriculture often feel utterly at a loss, with nowhere to look for guidance. Over this past century, how was the ecological wisdom of traditional agriculture denigrated, suppressed, and ultimately made to vanish? And as for what constitutes good farming, good production, and good living, does history still hold alternative knowledge and reflection?
And once history has been dismantled, the final question still remains: what should we pursue? What should we do? In the face of “the plantationisation of the earth’s surface”, how do we dock at “care” rather than “rupture”? In this regard, while the perspective of care and historical inquiry can enrich our imagination, theory and concepts are ultimately pale — reasoning on paper can already be delegated to AI. If the term “Anthropocene” has carried a breath of “ecological apocalypse” from its very inception, then a non-apocalyptic future, a non-plantationised earth, can only emerge from concrete choices and lived practice.
Author: Qieyi
Editor: Jieni