Genetic geographies. A historical comparison of agrarian modernization and eugenic thought in Germany, the Soviet Union, and the United States

Abstract

The article deals with the role of genetics in the state-led agricultural modernization efforts that took place in different industrialized countries during the course of the 1920s and 1930s. A comparison between Germany, the Soviet Union and the United States shows substantial similarities in their attempts to increase the productivity of agriculture on different geographical scales. Following advances in scientific knowledge about the geography of cultivated plants, these countries sent out numerous expeditions to collect plant breeding material from all over the world. At the same time, states tightened their grip on farmers’ and breeders’ activities inside the country by establishing legal rules for the use of plant varieties and seed. But this was only one side of a larger “genetic modernization” project. In all three countries, concepts of agricultural modernization were substantially linked to social-darwinist thought which embraced programs of eugenics and “racial hygiene”. These links are outlined for each of the cases, highlighting the widely differing intermingling of scientific concepts and terminologies with political ideologies. It is then discussed what role geography and in particular geopolitical thinking of the time were to play in the development of “genetic modernization”, and more specifically, with regard to the nexus between agriculture and eugenics. While the discipline’s involvement in both fields remained comparably marginal in practical terms, clearly there were conceptual contributions toward the development of the broader field. Going back to Ratzel’s and Kjellén’s work, it is argued that geography had an important role in the establishment of a political field in which ideas of managing human reproduction were fused with concepts of economic development and environmental determinism.