The hungry harvest : philanthropic science and the making of South Asia's Green Revolution, 1919–1964

This dissertation examines how international development agencies and American philanthropic organization collaborated with the new Indian and Pakistani states in undertaking unprecedented interventions in the agricultural and nutritional sciences after Partition in 1947 and into the early years of the Cold War. Contrasting with existing scholarship on the changes that swept the world food economy in the mid-twentieth century, my work uncovers the linkages between late colonial and post-independence understandings of famine, population growth, and economic development in South Asia. I propose a broader framing of the Green Revolution of the 1960s, examining the resonance of eugenic theories within population control efforts and tensions between the nutritional and agricultural sciences through decolonization. To that end, I track the influence of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, the Population Council, and UN agencies, such as the WHO and the FAO, in inaugurating programs of rural development, nutritional research, and resource management. I argue that efforts led by Indian nationalists, British colonial officials, and American philanthropists in the context of the global population 'crisis' of the 1940s and 1950s generated scientific institutions, networks, and ideas vital to the later Green Revolution.