Book Project

Green Revolution: The Political Effects of Technological Change in Agriculture

Between the 1960s and 1990s, developing countries experienced a technological revolution in agriculture known as the "green revolution". In this book, I explore how technological change revolutionized not only agriculture but also politics in the developing world. I also explore broader lessons concerning the role technological change as a form of 'creative destruction' in political development.

Focusing on the case of India, I argue that that the introduction of high-yielding variety (HYV) crops had far-reaching consequences for the organization of agriculture, playing an important role in the destruction of the traditional system of agricultural production based upon customary landlord-peasant relationships and the creation in its place of increasingly 'capitalist' systems of agricultural production. 

I argue that these agricultural transformations had far-reaching political consequences, illustrating the co-evolutionary relationship between technology and political order. By contributing to the breakdown of customary landlord-peasant relationships, the spread of HYV crops also weakened India's dominant Congress party which had traditionally relied upon these patron-client networks for vote mobilization. By contributing to the rise of a new class of commercial farmers increasingly dependent upon state-controlled policies governing subsidies and prices, the green revolution also contributed to growing rural collective action and the rise of new agrarian political parties which democratized the Indian political system.

Leveraging natural experiments, historical datasets linking election outcomes to measures of local agricultural technology adoption, a new database of rural collective action events extracted from thousands of newspaper articles (see collective action events database in top right panel), and comparative historical case studies based on original archival research, the book demonstrates how the spread of high-yielding variety (HYV) crops across Indian districts between the 1960s and 1980s played a key role in the transformation of modern Indian politics. 

The book concludes with comparative case studies and a cross-national analysis of the political effects of the green revolution (see bottom right panel). Overall, it aims to highlight not just industrialization but also agricultural revolutions -- the "commercialization of agriculture" famously highlighted by Barrington Moore -- as a pivotal step in the economic and political development of different societies and the role of technological change as a form of political 'creative destruction'. To learn more, please check out an article published in the APSR here and a brief summary at Ideas for India here as well as a talk here on part of the book project at the Center for the Advanced Study of India.