Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World

An 'incredibly timely' global history journeys from the Ukrainian steppe to the American prairie to show how grain built and toppled the world's 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.

“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