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Book Launch: Transnational Histories of Rural Reform, 1900–1950
On 22 September 2025, the Institute for European Global Studies hosted a book launch for two new Oxford University Press titles by historians Julia Tischler (University of Basel) and Amalia Ribi Forclaz (Geneva Graduate Institute). Bringing together scholarship of major historiographical and societal significance, the event spotlighted how agricultural reform became a transnational project in the first half of the twentieth century—shaped by race, class, labor, gender, and international institutions.
Tischler introduced Cultivating Race: Transatlantic Agricultural Reform in South Africa, c. 1900–1950, tracing how agricultural “improvement” and productivity agendas moved through transatlantic networks and became embedded in environmental management and development policies that sustained racialized social orders in segregationist South Africa. Her remarks underscored that modernization cannot be understood apart from the international circuits of expertise that enabled it.
Ribi Forclaz presented Cultivating Fields of Progress: Agriculture and the International Labour Organization, 1920s–1950s, showing how the living and working conditions of agricultural populations became an international question in the interwar and early postwar decades. She emphasized the ILO’s role in advancing rural social policy while navigating tensions between welfare and productivity across colonial and postcolonial settings.
In an extended commentary, Juri Auderset (University of Bern; Archives of Rural History) brought the two studies into conversation, probing shared analytical layers: the entanglements of class and race in agrarian economies; the policing of social boundaries often described as “social pollution”; the imprint of imperial and postcolonial discourses on knowledge and policy; and the structuring force of gender in labor, land, and expertise.
A lively Q&A carried these debates forward, and the programme concluded with an apéro.