Vol. 22 (2025): Soy and Agro-Food Change: (Sub-)National Pathways in a Global Perspective

Editors: Ernst Langthaler and Markus Schermer

Editorial Office: Veronika Helfert and Brigitte Semanek

Copy-editing: Stephan Stockinger

Any assessment of agro-food change faces the challenge of the multiplicity of time, space, and agency addressing short-, medium-, and long-term periods, spatial formations from local to global, as well as multiple human and non-human agents. To reduce this complexity in this special issue of the Rural History Yearbook, soy as a commodity provides a lens for assessing agro-food change in the era of globalisation since the 1870s. Soy serves best as a marker of agro-food globalisation, because it evolved from an East Asian food crop to the world’s biggest agricultural commodity and allows us to grasp intersections of multiple scales of time, space, and agency. The volume assesses agro-food globalisation from a historical social-science and humanities perspective. It aims to overcome the ‘methodological nationalism’ of country-focused agro-food studies as well as some globalist tendencies in food regime research by emphasising (sub-)national pathways of agro-food change. International scholars across disciplines address the history of soy in and between Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. They highlight fundamental continuities and changes, important sites and their connections, as well as more-than-human key actors of the global soy complex, also in light of the current ‘polycrisis.’

The volume is also published as a print-version in StudienVerlag. Coverdesign by himmel. Studio für Design und Kommunikation, Typesetting: Marianne Oppel. Cover: StudienVerlag/Karin Berner. Cover image: William J. Morse in einem Soja-Versuchsfeld, Louisiana Experiment Station, 1933. Source: William Shurtleff/Akiko Aoyagi, William Joseph Morse: History of his Work with Soybeans and Soyfoods (1884–2017), Lafayette 2017, 449.

ISBN: 978-3-7065-7011-4