Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T01:27:43.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Myth of the Peasant in the Global Organic Farming Movement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2017

Gregory A. Barton
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Organic farming activists have promoted the idea that ancient peasant wisdom informed the basic principles or Albert Howard’s Indore method, and of organic farming generally. The myth of the peasant origins of organic farming has influenced environmental activists and historians alike and concealed the remarkable contributions of Albert Howard and his first and second wives, Gabrielle and Louise Howard. A few statements made by Howard himself, and by his second wife, Louise, inspired the myth of peasant origins of organic wisdom. But a closer look at the published and unpublished writings of the Howards show that the formulation of the Indore method, which lies at the heart of organic farming, is a strict scientific protocol with its roots in the scientific work of Albert Howard and his cohorts.

Keywords

organic farmingpeasantsagricultural historyAlbert Howardenvironmentalism
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 41 , Special Issue 1: Knowledge Brokers and Knowledge Production in Colonial Orders , April 2017 , pp. 75 - 91
Copyright
© 2017 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Gregory A. Barton is Professor of History at Western Sydney University and Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg. Address: Professor Gregory A. Barton, Western Sydney University, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW, 2751, Australia. 61 (02) 9772 6322. The author thanks the Matthai family for making private family archives available for this work.

References

Bibliography

Unpublished primary sources Google Scholar
Letters of Gabrielle Howard to her mother, 1913–29. Private collection held by the Matthaei family, Birmingham, UK.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Barton, Gregory A. “Albert Howard and the Decolonization of Science: From the Raj to Organic Farming.” In Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science in the British Empire 1850–1970, edited by Brett Bennett and Joseph Morgan Hodge, 163–186. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barton, Gregory A. “The Appeal of Orientalism.” British Scholar 3:1 (2010): 1–4.Google Scholar
Barton, Gregory A. Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.Google Scholar
Barton, Gregory A. “Sir Albert Howard and the Forestry Roots of the Organic Farming Movement.” Agriculture History 75:2 (Spring. 2001): 168–187.Google Scholar
Beattie, James. “Review of Environment and Empire, by William Beinart and Lotte Hughes.” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 11:2 (2009): 200.Google Scholar
Beinart, William and Hughes, Lotte. Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Berkhofer, Robert. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Knopf, 1978.Google Scholar
Boyd, James G. “In Search of Shambhala? Nicholas Roerich’s 1934–5 Inner Mongolian Expedition.” Inner Asia 14:2 (2012): 260.Google Scholar
Conford, Philip. The Development of the Organic Network: Linking People and Themes, 1945–95. Edinburgh: Floris, 2011.Google Scholar
Conford, Philip. Origins of the Organic Movement. Edinburgh: Floris, 2001.Google Scholar
Cromer, Evelyn Baring. Modern Egypt. New York: Macmillan, 1908.Google Scholar
Duara, Prasenjit. “The New Politics of Hinduism.” Wilson Quarterly 15:3 (1991): 42.Google Scholar
Eisenhower, David and Eisenhower, Julie Nixon. Going Home to Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight David Eisenhower, 1961–1969. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010.Google Scholar
Francis, Daniel. The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture. Vancouver: Arsenal, 1992.Google Scholar
Frye, Joshua. The Origin, Diffusion, and Transformation of “Organic” Agriculture: A Study in Transnational Social Movement Framing and Outcomes. Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag, 2007.Google Scholar
Hay, Stephen N. “Rabindranath Tagore in America.” American Quarterly 14:3 (1962): 444–446.Google Scholar
Howard, Albert. An Agricultural Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940.Google Scholar
Howard, Albert. Crop Production in India: A Critical Survey of its Problems. London: Oxford University Press, 1924.Google Scholar
Howard, Albert. “The People of the Hunza Valley.” Newsletter on Compost, supplement no. 9 (June 1944). Private Archive.Google Scholar
Howard, Albert. The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture. New York: Devin-Adair, 1947.Google Scholar
Howard, Albert and Wad, Yeshwant D. The Waste Products of Agriculture: Their Utilization as Humus. London: Oxford University Press, 1931.Google Scholar
Howard, Louise E. Sir Albert Howard in India. Emmaus: Rodale Press, 1954.Google Scholar
Inden, Ronald. “Orientalist Constructions of India.” Modern Asian Studies 20:3 (1986): 401–446.Google Scholar
Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. London: Macmillan, 1901.Google Scholar
King, F. H. Farmers of Forty Centuries: or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. Madison: Mrs. F. H. King, 1911.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Todd and Bicknel, Kent. “The Asian Soul of Transcendentalism.” Education About Asia 16:2 (2011): 12–17.Google Scholar
Lockeretz, William. ed. Organic Farming: An International History. Wallingford: CABI, 2007.Google Scholar
Lunn, Eugene. “Cultural Populism and Egalitarian Democracy: Herder and Michelet in the Nineteenth Century.” Theory and Society 15 (1986): 479–517.Google Scholar
Marshal, Peter. The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.Google Scholar
McCarisson, Robert. “Faulty Food in Relation to Gastro-Intestinal Disorder.” Journal of the American Medical Association 78 (January 7, 1922): 1–8.Google Scholar
O’Connel, Joseph T. “Gaudiya Vaisnava Symbolism of Deliverance from Evil.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 93 (1973): 340–343.Google Scholar
Pearce, Roy H. The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Rodale, J. I. The Healthy Hunzas. Emmaus: Rodale Press, 1955.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.Google Scholar
Smith, Sherry L. The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Tanner, C. B. and Simonson, R. W.. “Franklin Hiram King—Pioneer Scientist.” Soil Science Society of America Journal 57:1 (1993): 286–292.Google Scholar
Taylor, Renee. Long Suppressed Hunza Health Secrets for Long Life and Happiness. New York: Award Books, 1964.Google Scholar
Thapar, Romila. “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity.” Modern Asian Studies 23 (1989): 209–231.Google Scholar
Trachtenberg, Alan. Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Indians, Making Americans, 1880–1930. New York: Hill & Wang, 2004.Google Scholar
Trägårdh, Lars. “Varieties of Volkish Ideologies: Sweden and Germany 1848–1933.” In Language and the Construction of Class Identities: The Struggle for Discursive Power in Social Organisation, Scandinavia and Germany after 1800, edited by Bo Stråth, 25–54. Gothenburg: Gothenburg University, 1990.Google Scholar
Veer, Peter van der. “Introduction.” In Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, edited by Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, 1–19. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Wines, Richard. Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Wrench, G. T. The Restoration of the Peasantries: with Especial Reference to that of India. London: C. W. Daniel, 1939.Google Scholar