Agricultural intensification : saving space for wildlife?

Conservation agriculture in Central Asia—What do we know and where do we go from here?

Worldwide, farmers are called upon to abandon harmful pesticides and adopt conservation agriculture for improving environmental sustainability, soil fertility, pest management and farm profits, among other benefits. Whereas the positive environmental benefits of conservation agriculture are non-questionable, pest management benefits are still a subject of debate. Abandonment of the plough and harmful pesticides towards conservation agriculture presented new challenges to farmers in terms of pest management. Pest problems are frequently reported as the main yield limiting factor for conservation agriculture in many production systems of the world, especially among the resource poor farmers. Here we first review the pest management benefits of conservation agriculture principles, with special focus on weeds and animal pests. In conservation agriculture, emphasis should be placed on use of different multiple and varied tactics incorporated into the cropping system design to avoid damaging levels of pests, thus minimizing the need for curative solutions. Conservation agriculture embraces integrated pest management, as it aims to incorporate reduced pesticide applications with cover crops, conservation tillage and crop rotation to strengthen natural pest control. We show that effective long term weed management in conservation agriculture systems is based on an integration of measures for limiting competitiveness of the weeds that are already in the field and growing with the crop, preventing the introduction of new weeds, and preventing the multiplication of the weeds that are already there. Although the abandonment of tillage towards no-till requires an initial investment on herbicides for weed control, herbicide requirement tends to decline over time with proper application of conservation agriculture. Proper selection of planting date, density and spatial arrangement of a crop can maximize the space it occupies early in the season and put competitive pressure on weeds. Crops can be rotated in sequences that are not only profitable, but highly effective at breaking animal pest cycles. Mixed cropping reduces pest populations by increasing environmental diversity and lowering the overall attractiveness of the environment. We then highlight some possible solutions to the major challenges for pest management through conservation agriculture practice. Promotion of integration of conservation agriculture principles with cultural measures is essential for pest management in conservation agriculture systems. In conservation agriculture, it is important for farmers to employ several strategies simultaneously so that if one strategy fails, then the other ones operate to prevent yield loss. The focus should not be just on how to fit various pest management tactics into the conservation agriculture production system, but also on how the system can be modified to accommodate various pest control tactics. We demonstrate that farmers practicing conservation agriculture have several cultural methods that they can put together to build up a good pest management strategy. Although cover crops and mulches are generally viewed as the first line of defense against weeds, the reduction in weeds is not enough to eliminate the need for chemical control. Cover crops can be used to reduce animal pest dispersal, colonization and reproduction on crops through maintenance of the cover crop as a sink for various pests, confusing the pests visually and by causing microclimate changes that reduce pest success. Fertilizer timing and placement strongly influences crop competition; and deep banding of fertilizer has the potential to enhance not only fertilizer use efficiency, but also crop resistance to animal pests and competitive ability against weeds. Proper selection of planting date, density and spatial arrangement of a crop can put competitive pressure on weeds and break animal pest cycles. Sanitation practices are important tools in conservation agriculture because of their ability to eliminate necessities that are important to the pests’ survival. The development of pest resistance will likely be minimal if host plant resistance is integrated with other control measures through conservation agriculture practice. A more holistic, integration approach of control tactics in conservation agriculture, which goes beyond the three principles, is essential for effective pest management.

The paper is centered on the concept of conservation agriculture (CA), which is defined as a sustainable cultivation system for the future. Conservation agriculture (CA) is a sustainable farming system that promotes minimal soil disturbance, permanent soil cover, and crop rotations to maintain soil health and productivity. This approach focuses on maximizing natural resources, reducing inputs, and improving the efficiency of nutrient use. CA practices have been found to reduce soil erosion, conserve water, and increase soil organic matter, leading to improved crop yields and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to improving agricultural productivity, CA can also contribute to broader sustainable development goals, including poverty reduction, food security, and biodiversity conservation. However, the adoption of CA requires a shift in mindset and significant investment in equipment, training, and research. Conservation agriculture (CA) started in 1930 and it didn’t gain popularity till 1950. But from 1950 to 1990, there was very little rise- CA was practiced in only 2-million-hectare land. From 1990 to 2015, CA was practices in almost 180- million-hectare land with 10-million hectare annually around the world. The places where CA is practiced the most is Brazil, next is America followed by Australia. In India, CA is practiced at 3-million-hectare land in different forms. Various types of machinery and techniques are used in conservation agriculture such as zero tillage, crop diversification and intensification, multi crop zero tillage plant, mechanical transplanter, happy seeder and laser land leveler. The use of machinery in CA has several benefits, including improved soil health, increased crop yields, and reduced labor and input costs. However, the adoption of CA machinery requires significant investment in equipment and training, and there may be limitations in some regions due to soil conditions and crop types. However, promoting CA technologies still faces challenges such as the lack of appropriate seeders for small-scale farmers, competition between CA use and livestock feeding for crop residues, burning of crop residues, a shortage of skilled manpower, and overcoming the traditional mindset about tillage. Drawback of conservation agriculture is Limited adoption, limited knowledge and skills, dependence on herbicide and initial investment costs and so on.

Crop production and nutrient use efficiency of conservation agriculture for soybean–wheat rotation in the Indo-Gangetic Plains of Northwestern India

Crop Rotation Experiment was established on experimental facilities of the Institute for Engineering and Environmental Problems in Agricultural Production – branch of Agro-Engineering Centre VIM, Saint-Petersburg. The objective of the study was to consider the requirements for growing organic potatoes. In an experiment with potatoes (Solánum tuberosum) variety Udacha, the influence of 3 factors was studied: the effect of organic fertilizers; action of bio-fungicide; row spacing depth. The compost studied was produced in the Institute from chicken manure using an aerobic fermentation unit. Doses of composts corresponded to 0; 80; 110, 160 kg N/ha. Potato tubers were treated with a bio-fungicide using a sprayer installed on a potato planter, and the leaves were treated during the growing season. Organic technology for cultivating potatoes was developed at the institute and used in experiment. The experiment has been equipped with automated tools for collecting information. Weather conditions differed from each other during the experiment. In 2021, conditions were dry during the potato development period. Weather conditions in 2020 and 2022 were similar. Monitoring shows that deep cultivation of row spacing contributed to better absorption of precipitation. This created more convenient conditions for potato development. Compost helped to increase the content of mineral forms of nitrogen in the soil. Due to high soil fertility, the yield of standard potato tubers in the variant without compost and bio-fungicide reached the level of 20.3 – 20.5 t ha-1 in 2020 and 2022 and 13.4 tha-1 in 2021, a dry year. Compost provided a significant increase in potato yield from 4 to 9 tha-1, depending on the dose of compost and year. The array of experimental data was generated for 2017-2022. After mathematical processing, the dependence of potato yield on the hydro-temperature coefficient in May and the dose of compost used was obtained.

Intensive agriculture significantly contributes to climate change by exacerbating ecological issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil erosion, fertility decline, pollution and biodiversity loss. Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a pivotal role in maintaining soil health, supporting crop development and enhancing the ecological services provided by soils. Retaining SOC is essential for sustainable agriculture and mitigating climate change impacts. Factors such as soil management practices, crop types, climate conditions and soil characteristics influence agriculture's role in the global carbon cycle. Conservation agriculture (CA), a sustainable farming system emphasising minimal soil disturbance, continuous soil cover, crop residue retention and diversified crop rotations, offers a promising solution to these challenges. CA has been widely studied for its potential to improve agroecosystem resilience and mitigation capabilities. However, gaps remain in understanding its effects on crop yield and environmental quality. This study presents a comprehensive and systematic review of CA's impact on SOC, greenhouse gas fluxes, soil quality and crop productivity. Through an extensive analysis of existing literature, the review highlights that CA practices significantly enhance soil properties, including physical (e.g., soil bulk density, water retention, aggregate stability), chemical (e.g., pH, nutrient availability, C:N ratio) and biological (e.g., microbial activity, enzymatic processes) aspects. These improvements are critical for maintaining soil health and boosting agroecosystem resilience to climate change. The findings underscore CA as an effective strategy for preserving SOC, improving soil quality, reducing agriculture's environmental footprint and enhancing climate change adaptation in agricultural systems.

Decreasing the carbon footprint of an intensive rice-based cropping system using conservation agriculture on the Eastern Gangetic Plains

<p>Tamilnadu State in India is one of the earlier beneficiaries of Green Revolution which contributed to multifold increase in agricultural productivity. Though the State has been progressive, it has also experienced the ill effects of over exploitation of natural resources through intensive agriculture. There is an urgent need to shift its focus from over exploitative intensive farming to more sustainable farming with optimal use of resources without causing imbalances. Conservation Agriculture (CA) offers potential solution which not only enhances the productivity but also maintains the environmental safety and ecological sustainability. With this at the backdrop, the present study was conducted during 2013-2014 in all the seven agro-climatic zones of Tamilnadu State in India covering 350 respondents to understand the knowledge and adoption levels of Conservation Agriculture among the farming community in the State. Three Conservation agricultural technologies namely, Minimum Tillage, Crop Rotation and Permanent Soil Cover were identified. Knowledge of the farmers about these technologies and their adoption by the farmers were studied. As regards the awareness and knowledge level of respondents majority of them do not have knowledge on minimum tillage (72.6%) and permanent soil cover (75.1%) but a vast majority is knowledgeable on crop rotation (71.1%). Farmer characteristics such as age, educational status and innovativeness of farmers played a significant impact on the knowledge levels of CA whereas number of years of experience in farming and land holding pattern did not have significant influence on the knowledge levels of farmers on CA. Among the knowledgeable farmers only 11.5% of farmers adopted minimum tillage, 27.6% of farmers adopted permanent soil cover and 78% adopted crop rotation. None of the farmers adopted CA as a whole comprising all the three components.</p>

Farmers in both developed and developing countries are confronting new challenges related to the globalised economy, accelerating production costs and now climate change. Conventional farming practices that involve tillage for land preparation and weed control, removal or burning of crop residues and mono-cropping are associated with soil erosion and degradation of the soil health needed for efficient water productivity and sustainable crop production. Over the past 30 years, a new approach to farm management to address these issues includes reduced tillage, retention of crop residues and the use of more diversified crop rotations. This is now referred to as Conservation Agriculture. The results of research to compare the productivity and profitability of Conservation Agriculture (CA) with that of conventional farming are outlined in this chapter. Since achieving the benefits of CA requires major changes in attitude from conventional production, the successful extension and farmer adoption of CA requires farmer participation in the development and adaptation of CA technologies.

Prior to the introduction of the selective herbicide, 2,4-D (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid), in the 1940’s, weed control in agricultural crops was primarily achieved through mechanical cultivation of the soil. Since that time, an increasing number of effective herbicide options, paired with tillage operations, have allowed agricultural producers in developed countries to significantly increase crop yields while reducing labor demands. Continuation of these practices that rely on intense soil disturbance, however, have helped fuel concerns over agricultural sustainability in light of the severe soil degradation that occurs under these conditions. In response to continued soil depletion and other environmental impacts from agricultural production, conservation agriculture has been promoted as a means of maintaining high crop productivity and increasing economic potential while preserving natural resources and limiting future environmental damage. To achieve goals proposed with conservation agriculture, innovative weed control strategies including chemical methods have and will continue to be an essential component in the development of sustainable agricultural practices. An understanding of the fundamental components of conservation agriculture is imperative in order to appreciate the necessity for weed control strategies in these practices as well as the difficulties associated with their development. To that aim, our purpose, in part, is to identify the key components of conservation systems and the evolution of herbicide needs within these practices. Secondly, we present the strategy of high-residue cereal cover crop implementation that can be utilized in conjunction with chemical weed control methods to address the changes in weed control requirements in agricultural settings. Finally the research synopses detail recent and ongoing efforts to ensure the availability of effective herbicide applications within conservation agriculture.

In the dryland regions of North China, water is the limiting factor for rainfed crop production. Conservation agriculture (featuring reduced or zero tillage, mulching, crop rotations and cover crops) has been proposed to improve soil and water conservation and enhance yields in these areas. Conservation agriculture systems typically result in increased crop water availability and agro-ecosystem productivity, and reduced soil erosion. To evaluate the potential of conservation agriculture to improve soil water balance and agricultural productivity, the DSSAT crop model was calibrated using the data of a field experiment in Shouyang County in the semi-arid northeastern part of the Yellow River Basin. The average annual precipitation at the site is 472 mm, 75% of which falls during the growing season. The site had a maize-fallow-maize rotation. data from two crop seasons (2005 and 2006) and four treatments for calibration and analysis were used . The treatments were: conventional tillage (CT), no-till with straw mulching (NTSM), all-straw incorporated (ASRT) and one-third residue left on the surface with no-till (RRT). The calibration results gave satisfactory agreement between field observed and model predicted values for crop yield for all treatments except RRT treatment , and for soil water content of different layers in the 150 cm soil profile for all treatments. The difference between observed and predicted values was in the range of 3 % -25% for maize yield and RMSE was in the range of 0.03-0.06 cm 3 /cm 3 for soil water content measured periodically each cropping season. While these results are encouraging, more rigorous calibration and independent model evaluation are warranted prior to making recommendations based on model simulations. Medium-term simulations (1995-2004) were conducted for three of the treatments using the calibrated model. The NTSM and ASRT treatments had similar or higher yields (by up to 36%), higher crop water productivity by up to 28% and reduced runoff of up to 93 % or 43 mm compared to CT treatment . Keywords: tillage, conservative agriculture, soil and water conservation, mulch, residues, CERES model , DSSAT model DOI: 10.3965/j.issn.1934-6344.20 1 0.0 2 .0 05 -0 17 Citation: Vinay Nangia, Mobin-ud-Din Ahmad, Du Jiantao, Yan Changrong, Gerrit Hoogenboom, Mei Xurong, et al . Effects of Conservation Agriculture on Land and Water Productivity in Yellow River Basin, China. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 20 1 0; 3 ( 2 ): 5 <span style=line-height: 130%; font-family:

<i>Background and Objective</i>: The plight of farmers are worsening by the impact of climate change. This is evident in all agro-ecological zones in Ghana. Warming and variability in rainfall pattern is causing floods and long dry spells of drought with resultant effects of reduced food crop and livestock production. Conservation Agricultural (CA) practices was therefore introduced to address the challeges of conventional tillage. CA has therefore been identified as a substitute to conventional agriculture for sustainable agricultural productivity. The objective of the study was to assess the rate of adoption of CA practices in the Bawku Municipality in the Upper East region of Ghana. <i>Methodology</i>: The study was conducted in the Bawku Municipal area of Ghana. The research design used for the study was the mixed methods. The purposive sampling technique was used to select the Bawku Municipality as the major area where agricultural conservation practices occurs in the Upper East region. The simple random sampling technique was used to select ten (10) communities in the Municipality, whilst the systematic random sampling was used to select forty (40) respondents from each community for the study. The target population for the study was maize farmers in the Bawku Municipality. In all, a total of 358 respondents were interviewed for the study. Data was taken on socio-cultural and socio-economic characteristics of respondents. Data analysis was done using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). Descriptive statistics, such as frequencies, percentages, and means were computed. Cross tabulations of variables were also computed and the chi-square tests used to establish relationships. <i>Results</i>: The study revealed that age, sex, level of education, religion, household size, government policy, access to credit, source of income, farm size, and access to extension services were found to have significantly influenced adoption of CA practices. The results of the study indicated that majority of farmers were aware and had knowledge about CA practices. “No-tillage with cover crops, minimum tillage with cover crops, and crop rotation with cover crops” were the main practices of conservation agriculture in the study area. The study further revealed that majority of the farmers indicated that the practices of conservation agriculture reduces soil erosion, increases soil fertility, increases soil organic matter and improves agricultural productivity. <i>Conclusion</i>: Majority of farmers adopted CA practices in full. It is recommended that the Ghanaian government should boost CA practices by instituting an annual national award scheme to award hardworking CA practioners in Ghana.

Agriculture faces an enormous global challenge of feeding nine billion people by 2050. This means a comprehensive intensification of agriculture is required. Ecological intensification is gaining momentum as a clearly defined vision for increasing agriculture productivity and sustainability. How ecological intensification could be tailored to benefit smallholder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains the major question. In this study, we develop pathways relying on ecological intensification technologies and suiting different farm types of smallholder agriculture. This study relies on multiyear engagements with agricultural experts and smallholder farmers in Ha Lambani, South Africa and leads to the identification of farmer groupings. We analyse 40 in-depth semi-structured interviews with farmers which leads to the identification of farming patterns and constraints. We present how farming systems analysis of challenges and constraints helps to identify and link specific ecosystem services with suitable ecological intensification options. We conclude that the expert-based classification of farmers offered a more contextualized representation of farming system heterogeneity, where tailored ecological intensification technologies could play a major role in improving agricultural productivity. Beyond this community, it emphasizes the need to consider farmers type heterogeneity as a strong decision parameter for targeting ecological intensification.

Conservation Agriculture (CA) is promoted worldwide on the basis of its contribution to economic, social, and environmental sustainability of agricultural production. In Ghana, despite the increasing interest in the promotion of CA and its practices, its rate of adoption is still low, mainly due to the conflicting evidences regarding its effectiveness. This paper contributes to the numerous debates by examining the impact of CA practices on hired labour, rates of inorganic fertilizers applied by adopters, maize yield, and profit of adopters. Using a cross-sectional data, a multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model was employed to compute the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) and Average Treatment Effect on Treated (ATET) for yield, hired labour, inorganic fertilizer rate, and profit of adopters of CA practices. The study reveals that CA practices impact positively on hired labour employed on the farm, but have a negative impact on profits of adopters. No impact whatsoever of adoption of CA practices is observed on maize yield and also inorganic fertilizer application rates. Technical assistance, and training of farmers on strategies that minimize costs of production must be intensified to raise profits of adopters.

“World history” is a vigorous new disciplinary perspective. It has emerged in the last decade or so as economic, postcolonial, and environmental historians bring their newfound willingness to study power and conflict into the global arena—not least in exploring the relationships between population change and economic growth and development. Models of demographic transition have typically assumed that there is a reciprocally beneficial relationship between aggregate GDP growth and forms of human and social development associated with desirable mortality and fertility reductions for the world's populations. World history offers a different, intrinsically conflict-ridden and violent account of economic change. Empire of Cotton is an impressive illustration of the genre, offering a new account of economic history during the last several centuries for students of population and development to ponder. It is a challenging general interpretation of the growth of capitalism and its effects on the populations that were increasingly drawn into the world's commercial economy. Beckert's underlying story is of how populations became commodified as labor. The focus is on cotton, the single product that was first and most intimately involved with the global transformative process that we call industrialization. For this paradigm case, Beckert documents just how closely capitalists, along with nation states and their governments and officials, have joined together for almost half a millennium in a truly global, but highly self-serving and divisive, pursuit of wealth and power. This was true not only of Britain's pioneering industrialization nor only of cotton manufacturing, but also, Beckert argues, of all other successfully developing economies: “the capacity of states to foster a domestic cotton industry turns out to be the key division between places that industrialised and those that did not” (pp. 155–6). The central player for Beckert is the state rather than private-sector actors: he sees the public/private divide, beloved of free-market proponents, as of little practical value for a realistic understanding of how economic growth actually occurs. Beckert hammers home the inconvenient truth that capitalist “free trade”—according to its own mythology a global nurturer of international peace through the civilizing arts of commerce—has achieved most of its productivity feats, and extracted much of its profits, through state-enforced coercion of its workers. He argues that the crucial precursor to the emergence of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism was three centuries of world-wide “war capitalism,” defined by “slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs” (p. xv). Rival, aggressive European states, each uniting the financial power of merchant capital and the military power and legitimacy of the nation state, engaged in almost continual conflict to hold and exploit global production industries. The emergence of modern industrial capitalism, from this perspective, was rooted as much in violent conquest as in constitutional, institutional, and technical innovation. (So much for grand explanations for Europe's “great divergence”—from the East, and from eighteenth-century China in particular—which previous historians have championed, such as Protestantism or England's constitutional and legal institutions.) Although gold, silver, spices, timbers, sugar, tobacco, and many other commodities were involved in all this, Beckert is surely correct that cotton—“white gold”—was the most valuable. Cotton's production as a cultivated raw material and its processing into a diversity of textile products each required the management of large amounts of distinctive forms of labor. The rise of the cotton industry produced an explosion of both slavery and wage labor, as well as an attendant host of accountants and managers and, above all, a trans-oceanic neural network of merchants, agents, and creditors. By 1800 the central brain of this financial information system was located in Liverpool, home of the world's largest cotton importers and with its own resident American Chamber of Commerce. The global scale of the industry expanded over the ensuing century to such an extent that by 1900 some 1.5 percent of the entire world's population was involved in the cotton industry, mostly of course as planters, pickers, and factory hands (pp. xviii–xix). For the economist Douglass North, the origins of industrial capitalism were to be found in the respect for property and the rule of law in the early modern Low Countries and in Britain, seen as key institutions facilitating growth of factor markets. Beckert's thesis is that war capitalism divided the world into a European civilized “inside,” where property rights and the rule of law were increasingly state-enforced, and a much more extensive global “outside,” a necessary obverse where, contrastingly, violent expropriation of labor and land, slavery, and suppression, not civil law, were the rule. In the global “outside,” population growth, much of it through migration, was promoted but highly selectively; mortality was high and health conditions often appalling. Beckert begins his narrative by reflecting on the global antiquity of cotton manufacture. Archaeological evidence points to perhaps 4,000 years of cotton production in South America, predating cloth manufacture in Egypt, China, or India. Although the conquistadores were disappointed that El Dorado did not yield as much gold as they lusted for, it is recorded that they marveled at the quantity, the colors, and the fine quality of cotton textiles they found in Peru. By the start of the sixteenth century, however, it was India that was the globally dominant producer of cotton cloth, with Gujarati merchants the principal traders. An Ottoman official observed in 1647 that “the world's wealth accumulates in India” (p. 18). Vasco da Gama's arrival in 1497 in the port of Calicut (today Kozhikode in Kerala) opened a sea route for European access to Indian producers via the Cape of Good Hope. Over the following centuries this route gradually enabled European trading companies to circumvent the Indian and Arab middlemen of the overland trade to Europe, a vital step in the ultimately entirely successful European effort to wrest control of India's textile wealth. Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, British, and belatedly French trading companies all tried their luck, but it was the armed merchants of the British East India Company who ended up dominant in the Indian textiles trade, along the way suppressing the local traders. These Indian calicoes and other cloths, profitably sold in Europe, also became an integral part of another, more violent trade, bringing the populations of West Africa into the story of world development. African chiefs consumed large quantities of Indian cloth, in return providing the traders with slaves to work the plantations of the New World, whose sugar and tobacco then returned to Europe: in effect, the cotton trade sustained slavery in other industries, too. European commercial ambitions did not stop simply at buying and trading in manufactures from the East; Europe also wanted to make them. In Britain, with the rule of law established and the monarchy tamed, employers and merchants found Parliament to be an increasingly valuable resource in pursuing their advantage. From 1685 onward a sequence of protectionist laws were passed (as also in Venice, Prussia, and other European states), attempting to stimulate domestic manufacture of cotton cloth. These early efforts were massively augmented in the next century with a series of celebrated labor-saving innovations, culminating in 1779 with Crompton's mule and, from 1795, with the application of steam power. Beckert notes that between 1780 and 1800 output of cotton textiles in Britain grew on average by more than 10 percent a year. This rapid growth continued in subsequent decades so that by the 1830s even Indians themselves were using British machino-factured yarn and cloth: “the world's cotton industry had been turned on its head” (p. 67). Meanwhile, the relentless upsurge in British cotton manufacture stimulated landowners in the New World to turn their slaves to the profitable cultivation of raw cotton. Lancashire's steam and machine-driven power produced cheaper cloth than ever before, creating an insatiable demand for raw cotton. By 1850, 67 percent of American cotton grew on land that had not even been part of the United States in 1800, a result principally of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France. This transaction epitomizes Beckert's thesis that global cotton was propelled by British merchants and the British state in league together to promote the wealth of the former and the power of the latter, with the world as the stage and source of the spoils. The Louisiana Purchase was negotiated for £1 million by the British banker and cotton merchant Thomas Baring, with express approval from the British government. This radical expansion of the new American republic, with which Britain had so recently been at war, was blessed by the British Prime Minister, Henry Addington, on the strategic grounds that it would provide “an additional means for vent of our manufacturers in preference to France” (p. 107). Louisiana promised vast new land for the production of raw cotton to feed Manchester's mills. Banishment of the North American indigenes and massive territorial expansion in the use of slavery, the practice that the British state would itself prohibit just four years later, would inevitably follow, a fact clearly understood by both Baring and Addington. American independence meant the British could morally have their abolitionist cake while also eating it in the form of cheap cotton. In 1807 Britain's Parliament resolved to use the country's powerful navy to attempt to enforce a global prohibition on the slave trade, leaving untouched the trade in slave-picked cotton. Beckert notes that “The disjunction of political from economic spaces [was] crucial for the world's most dynamic industry.” In the US, cotton-growing slave-owners could rely on government support for their interests in a way that had become impossible for slaveholders within the British Empire (pp. 112–3). Echoes of such a disjunction can be found today in citizens of the West benefiting from high levels of labor and environmental protection while enjoying cheap consumer goods made in jurisdictions with no such costly protections. In Uzbekistan, for example, currently the fourth largest cotton exporter to the world's markets, it is well known that raw cotton is produced under conditions of state-sanctioned forced labor. In conventional development thinking, all populations experience development through a rising tide of world trade; closer scrutiny of capitalism's ongoing history shows that there are powerful forces subverting the theory. The conversion of the wealth produced from internationally traded commodities into human development benefiting producer populations is a politically contingent matter, dependent on the relative bargaining power of the actors involved. Low labor standards and outright coercion, of course, were not lacking in nineteenth-century Europe, witnessed in the factory employment of children or the exposure of all workers to the fiber-filled factory atmospheres of Manchester, Mulhouse, Barcelona, Chemnitz, or Lodz. In the case of Lancashire, though labor was no longer subject to feudal servitude, options for the property-less poor were increasingly restricted. First, access to the commons disappeared, then their spinning wheels and handlooms were rendered obsolete by patented inventions and factory manufacture. It took a generation or more, along with the government's deterrent workhouses erected under the New Poor Law of 1834, for many proud plebeian men to accept the discipline of machine-paced factory work in return for a weekly wage from an employer. Consequently, the textile workforce was disproportionately composed of single women (unthinkable in China, as historian Kenneth Pomeranz has noted, which was promptly left behind in the great divergence (p. 191)). Children were the other main component of the workforce in the early mills. They were often orphans supplied by the Poor Law authorities to prosperous textile employers. Unlike the predictions of demographic transition theory, while GDP expanded impressively, neither mortality nor fertility fell for many decades, even among the “free” population of England. The single most important event in Beckert's new interpretation of the global history of capitalism viewed through the lens of cotton is the American Civil War. Beckert argues that this fratricidal conflict was perceived by Europe's statesmen of the time as a fundamental threat to the supply of the raw material for the world's most valuable industry. The conflict enforced the appreciation that, with so many million livelihoods now directly dependent on this manufacturing sector, national governments must take strategic responsibility for the future raw cotton supply. This realization kick-started Europe's imperial regimes into an urgent hunt for secure alternative cotton suppliers, which in effect became the origin of European mega-projects of rival, colonial “development” in their various possessions around the world. The projects involved railway building, draining and irrigating potential cropland, and making other investments in rural colonies on a scale not previously contemplated. Beckert's thesis is that panic reaction to the American Civil War changed the course of global capitalist and imperial history as Europe's financiers and governments embarked on ambitious early development projects and sought to expand legal control and commercial exploitation over their colonial territories. Thus, the global story of population and development planning does not commence with post-1945 development economists and transition theorists, nor even with (another favored starting point) Governor Guggisberg's plans for the Gold Coast in the 1920s, but fully half a century earlier and all around the globe. This was development and population management on a grand scale. Funds were rapidly forthcoming from European banks to fund these large projects. By 1864, 40 percent of all fertile land in Lower Egypt had been converted to cotton (p. 256), while in India £7m was allocated for infrastructure in that year alone. Ideological cartwheels were turned in short order by the high priests of laissez-faire, including The Economist and even the prominent industrialist and free-trader Richard Cobden, to explain why such massive state intervention was justifiable. European finance for cotton cultivation flowed freely also to Western Anatolia, Togo, Queensland, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. It was less the Civil War per se than the prospect of emancipation of the slaves that was presumed to toll the death knell for US raw cotton production, giving rise to many strange contortions as commentators tried to square their approval for the Northern cause of “free” wage labor with reasons—typically racist—why cotton-pickers across the world may have to be less free than other workers.1 Beckert notes how this shows that “cotton capitalists had learned that the lucrative global trade networks they had spun could only be protected and maintained by unprecedented state activism” (p. 273). Furthermore, capitalists came to learn that even without actual slavery a new domination over labor could be extended globally through the combined social mechanisms of the market, the law, and the state, if carefully arranged. Other historians have long documented the injustices of indentured labor within the post-slavery British Empire.2 In the US, the unhappy outcome of new strategies for Southern blacks themselves was, of course, sharecropping and the Jim Crow laws. Elsewhere imperial governments, having invested in the infrastructure to harvest new cotton fields, also required compliant workforces. In India, which by 1900 had become a major cotton supplier to Japan and Europe, the expansion of the railway—that archetypal symbol of progress and trade—spelled economic regression for skilled spinners and weavers, reduced to field workers. Worse was to come for many Indians with the forcible surveying and parceling out of property rights, seen by the government as an essential precondition for cotton production. Most smallholders soon fell into debt, rendering them acutely vulnerable in the recurrent famines that particularly afflicted cotton-growing districts in the 1890s: for instance in Berar province (part of modern Maharashtra), responsible for a quarter of all Indian cotton at that time (p. 297), 8.5 percent of the dispossessed population perished during 1900 (p. 337). Given this widespread experience, it is wholly understandable that the cause of cotton self-sufficiency came to play a central and symbolic role in India's subsequent nationalist Independence movement. Gandhi researched and wrote The Indian Cotton Textile Industry: Its Past, Present and Future (1930) to inform the Swadeshi movement, and the domestic spinning wheel features at the center of the Indian flag to this day. Elsewhere the Ottoman Empire planted cotton in Cukurowa, in southern Turkey, displacing its nomads; and Russia's internal colonization of the Central Asian Khanates was initially deemed such a great success that the Germans sought to emulate the Russian feat in Togo in West Africa. This was a particularly poignant and instructive episode, recounted in some detail by Beckert. The German colonists recruited educated sons of slaves from Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Industrial and Normal Institute in Alabama to teach the Togo population “the Negro's favourite culture.” Although considerable production of cotton was achieved, the Germans then encountered economic limits. Without compulsion—and given the abundant, virtually free local food supply—the German colonizers simply could not pay the African workers enough per pound of cotton to make it worth their while to engage in the arduous labor required by cotton picking. Eventually the Russian venture that had inspired the Germans also failed, though for different reasons. Lacking the self-produced food supply of the more fortunate Togolese, the population in Turkestan fell by 18.5 percent over 1914–21 (p. 362). Overall, Beckert paints a bleak prospect for cotton-field laborers and small farmers across the globe by the early twentieth century. They were poor and indebted while the surplus of their industry was supporting the profits of private capital and the state's legal and administrative apparatus. The increasingly unionized cotton factory workers of Lancashire eventually won some gains, but not the dispossessed cotton pickers of the rest of the world. The final episode detailed by Beckert is the “Return of the Global South” in cotton manufacturing as well as cultivation. With cotton industrialists locked into a tightly dependent relationship with the state, once governments became more sensitive to the threats and, indeed, the democratic claims and eventually votes of organized labor, “Northern” industrialists found it increasingly difficult to avoid the rising labor costs won by workers’ campaigns for better living standards. However, manufacturers in the “South” were now able, with the support of their state officials, to expand wherever labor was less organized and workers less empowered than in Europe and North America. Perhaps the most ironic symbol of this was to be found within the US itself, where the Deep South, previously only a raw cotton supplier, completely overtook the industrial North between 1918 and 1965 as the country's principal of cotton. In the the labor of the Jim Crow Southern states, lacking the rights of other US was, in effect, a of the global merchant finance as as rapidly and without to global commercial wherever they the of legal for investments and labor British and other European of finance to the of cotton manufacturing flowed and and and to and Brazil, where the experience of Britain's own early manufacturing history itself (p. The history of an industry even that has been as central to the global as cotton, provide with a history of all of global capitalist development. However, Beckert has a high for a study of this Other to rise to the his interpretation on the of of other of global development. They could also in some detail in Beckert's in his of the for England's in yarn and cloth manufacture made by the of “free” labor into the new of war capitalism and a state not provide the story during the crucial as students of well Beckert's have more to early modern labor the movement, and the Poor not from the value of the This is a and highly and of along the Beckert's interpretation of capitalism has been and we can of it for the to study population and development to fully and this In a Beckert notes that there was only in the long history of the cotton industry capitalists, at least in the global North, were forced to accept a more even with their workforce and more with and increasingly politically organized into trade and national political This was the that Thomas has also recently as an of wealth in the more It is that, with a wholly different of and perspective, Beckert has an interpretation with for the of and world population and development that so closely to the of this other major study of