Bitter Harvests: Political Economy in the Interwar Agrarian Periphery

The global economy limped into peace following the conclusion of hostilities in 1919. Though many of the post-war crises stabilized by the early 1920s, agriculture never recovered its gait. This proposed panel draws on labor, industry, and international finance perspectives to investigate how rubber and cotton markets sought to establish some control over their economic context. Uniting all three papers is the shared specter of a fading British Empire’s influence over global agriculture.
The first paper, “Managing Labor Unrest in Britain’s Planter Empire” by Siddharth Sridhar, explores how Tamil workers in Britain’s plantation colonies in the Bay of Bengal organized to resist planter authority on tea and rubber estates. Struggling for economic self-determination, Tamil laborers challenged the synthesis of “scientific” management with a racialized order that undergirded European planters’ authority. With Ceylon choosing conciliation versus repression in Malaya, Sridhar argues the nations established divergent political trajectories.
The second paper, “Making the Grades: Cotton Standardization Policies in the US and Egypt, 1914-1939” by Abram Smith, compares the Interwar US and Egyptian governments’ public policies towards cotton standardization. Conceptualizing standardization as a tool for economic governance in agriculture commodity chains, Smith shows how the unique and evolving nature of cotton production in both countries and their shifting positions in the global market resulted in divergent grading standards suitable for their respective exporters.
The final paper, “The Cotton Divide: Haute Finance and the Farm Bloc, 1920-1929” by R. A. Ferguson and Nathanael Mickelson, investigates the links between the Liverpool cotton futures market, U.S. cotton prices, and divisions policy divisions within the U.S. Congressional Farm Bloc. It argues that, beneath support for the McNary-Haugen Act, an undercurrent existed for cotton producers that favored an export-based agricultural policy that became politically potent in 1933.