ABSTRACT

Agricultural frontier expansion accelerated between 1700 and 1900 CE. The first truly integrated world market induced an unprecedented wave of commodification of land, labor and food after 1870. The production and import of bread grains and livestock into Europe from settler economies and tropical products from the colonies was the foundation of first global food regime. This agricultural expansion signaled the final wave of massive frontier expansion, and simultaneously announced the closing of spatial frontiers, the end of ‘free land.’ The increase in global stock of agricultural land slowed down in the twentieth century after the closing of major frontiers in North America, Siberia, the Argentinian Pampas and Chinese Manchuria. Still, the land used for pasture, arable crops and tree crops increased by about 25 percent between 1950 and 2000. The process of state-led peasantization started in the nineteenth century and reached its final stage in the decades after World War II, sometimes called the era of developmentalism and modernization.