The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture by Courtney Fullilove (review)

The disorienting nature of the text is intended to support the central argument of the book, which tellingly appears only on the penultimate page of the main text: "Agricultural expansion in the United States, rather than an effervescence of innovation, was a muddled and circuitous practice of accumulation, rebranding, and reorganization of diverse intellectual and material resources in new institutions of commerce and governance" (p. 220). The book is bursting with pithy provocations, e.g.: "For seeds are not merely agricultural inputs, but symbols of prosperity and bounty masking the political-economic requirements of cultivation" (p. 124). Yet as a gnomic text, in which sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are often deeply mysterious regarding their meaning and purpose, the book often seems like the bureaucracy of patent medicine taxation explored in chapter 7: "a locus of disorder and provisional arrangement" (p. 192).