Abstract
AbstractThis article analyzes the role of soil in the making of authoritarian regimes and illustrates twentieth-century practices and discourses related to fertility across the globe. It compares two different approaches to and understandings of soil fertility: the first emerged in North Libya under Italian Fascist rule (1922–1943), the second in Central Brazil during the civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). We compare two soil-forming processes that changed physical and chemical properties of the original matter and were embedded within specific ideologies of modernization. In both cases, state agendas of agrarian production played a paramount role not only in socioeconomic projects but also as an instrument to suppress opposition. Technocratic and political aspects of building and maintaining fertility were interwoven, although in different patterns in the two countries. We show how the rejuvenation of land bled into the regeneration of communities through processes that anchored the self-definition and development of these authoritarian regimes, and argue that attempts at landscape transformations through agricultural activity and strategies of fertilization are inescapable features of dictatorships. In so doing, we elaborate the concept of “authoritarian soil.” The juxtaposition of these non-synchronous cases reveals how agricultural modernization developed throughout the twentieth century. Our study is rooted in environmental history and contributes to the ongoing dialogue between that field and science and technology studies. Its cross-temporal, comparative methodology draws upon sources and historiographical debates in English, Italian, and Portuguese.
Highlights
This paper will address a set of interrelated research questions: What kind of soil-based socio-ecologies have mirrored the twentieth-century authoritarian regimes? What can be historically inferred about dictatorships by analyzing trends of soil fertility? How did scientific expertise and political propaganda envision and transform arid soils in order to nurture and serve dictatorial power? Can we consider fertility an indicating factor in measuring the success or failure of both an ecological scheme and a political regime?. We argue that this exploration of the role played by agriculture in Italy and Brazil under the Fascist and civil-military dictatorships, respectively, demonstrates the ubiquitous, co-constitutive relationship between soil fertility and all dictatorial regimes, no matter when or where they unfold
We do not consider Italian fascism and Brazilian civil-military dictatorship as space-time stages in which certain soil transformations took place; we focus on ways in which soil-related discourses and techniques “became constitutive” of totalitarian states and embodied authoritarianisms.[47]
This paper has shown the intimate connection between the far right and soil in the twentieth century by exploring place-based dictatorial narratives, governmental projections, and guidelines for the nationalization of peripheral areas through agricultural expansion and colonial appropriation
Summary
The formal agreement between the Colonization Agency and each colonizer made clear to farmers that they were part of a grand colonial, demographic, and developmental scheme, and because of that they were a manifestation of the interests of the supreme and all-inclusive state.[74] Regenerating nature implied the regeneration of people, and, as stated in one administrative file concerning the foundation of rural villages in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica: “Man and land were expected to undergo a parallel development”—to grow together.[75] Colonization itself was conceived as an opportunity to give humans back to the land, and through them, to make the soil fertile and able to nurture Fascist vegetation and Fascist communities.[76] In such an integral totalitarian society, just as no room was left for undesirable plants such as infected trees and unacclimated specimens,[77] there was no place for unhealthy, undisciplined, or morally questionable Italians with limited reproductive and working capacity.[78] New Italian colonists, made stronger by war and the colonization enterprise, would show the world that they represented the new type of Italian created by the Fascist regime: sober, warrior-like, vital, and prolific.[79] Indigenous tribes and communities were either expunged from coastal regions occupied by Italians, acculturated, subjugated in state reclamation projects and private plantation schemes, or, if
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