ABSTRACT The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), once the overlooked stepchild of post-war global governance, is now at the centre of attention among historians, parsing the key figures, central policies, and ongoing challenges across the FAO’s embattled life-time. However, to date, there has been little engagement with the material, territorial and ecological preconditions that required the construction of global food governance in the first place. The present article contributes to FAO scholarship via a more grounded historical sociology of agriculture and international (dis)order. To do so, I frame the evolution of the modern ‘global countryside’ through four distinct yet inter-locking frontiers: territory, commodity, technology, institutions. In using the case of US state-formation as a springboard, I argue that the contradictory entanglement of territorial and commodity frontiers during the settler-colonial period led to a collective anxiety about US (and global) agrarian development, which called forth ever-more innovative solutions through the expansion of technological and institutional frontiers. This spiral of emergence, entanglement, crisis, and resolution culminated in the first post-war conference on international cooperation, and the eventual consecration of the FAO. Yet the contradictions of the post-war international system – at once deeply inter-dependent yet radically hierarchical – ultimately doomed the hopes for a more cooperative global food order. A more critical approach to the making of the FAO thus offers important lessons on the current dilemmas facing today’s global food system.