**: The Wheat War: How Grains Reshaped World Hegemony Chinese edition preface.
To understand the history of the rise and fall of empires, we must follow the grain routes along the rivers, between the ports, and across the sea city. In The Wheat Wars, historian Scott ReynoldSnelson reveals that efforts to control these lines can alter the balance of power among the world's great powers.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian Empire sent food to most of Europe through the port of Odessa on the territory of Ukraine. But after the American Civil War, tons of American wheat began to pour into the Atlantic, and these cheap foreign grains fueled the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire. This was also one of the key factors in the outbreak of the First World War and the Revolution.
Narrated from 10,000 B.C., the author recounts the process of reshaping world hegemony through grain, and through historical archives, reconstructs how the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Ukrainian, and Russian empires prospered because of the transportation and supply of grain, and how they were challenged by cheap wheat and globalization in the United States.
The Wheat Wars were an international rivalry between the Russian Empire and the United States to provide food for Europe and the rest of the world from 1789 to 1917. It adopts a modern version of the economic theory of the theorist Pareus. Pareus's theories have deeply influenced modern scholars of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and the theory of the capitalist "world system". This theory studies empires as institutions dependent on the path of food. That is, access to cheap grain is seen as the basis of any powerful state or empire. This path-based history is foreign to Western economists, historians, and foreign policy scholars, but not to anyone who knows about ancient history, especially ancient Chinese history. The French physiocrats of the early 18th century were among the first economists to emphasize a country's responsibility to promote agriculture, improve the soil, and minimize taxes on peasants. But physiocrats are scholars who study the ancient world. They drew heavily on the writings of Mencius, China's "second sage," who lived during the Warring States period in China in the 3rd-4th centuries BC. Mencius's writings were translated into French in the 18th century, and scholars have demonstrated that the principles of the physiocrats were largely drawn from Mencius's writings.
The Wheat Wars is a retelling of the birth of modern European, American, and Russian empires, emphasizing how these empires or nations were fundamentally dependent on food, even though these countries often don't fully understand how dependent they are on food. It also ** the Empire's ways of passing grain through rivers and rail passages, and how they were taxed in the form of customs duties, rail freight, and foreign wars.
The Wheat War is not primarily about China, but it does show how the Russian Empire's attempts to dominate Northeast China led to the collapse of the Russian Empire. Parus was the first to point out that Russia had contracted a railway to northeastern China with French investment funds, a huge debt that was doomed to failure. In 1900, he began working on the project in a book published in Germany called "The Hungry **". In 1904, he published a pamphlet, Capitalism and War, which linked these outstanding debts to the imperialist expansion of the country, attracting an international audience. The inability of the Russian Empire to cope with the Boxer Rebellion, combined with the defeat of the Russian Empire by Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, overwhelmed Russia's finances, led to more than 200 rebellions in the Russian Imperial Army and Navy, and led to the Revolution of 1905. In December, a pivotal moment of the 1905 revolution, Parus issued a "Fiscal Manifesto" in Petersburg, in which he pointed out in terms of the principles of physiocratism that the Russian Empire was trying to use the railroad to expand its empire's grain **, which would doom the banks to bankruptcy. He told workers and middle-class businessmen to withdraw their money and ask for **. Mencius of China would certainly have agreed with this approach. The Russian Empire was so frightened of the pamphlet that the Russian Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sergei Witte, destroyed all the newspapers in St. Petersburg that received the pamphlet to prevent reprinting.
Americans and many European scholars tend to think of the United States as a financial, scientific, or industrial power, but Pareus argues that the country was primarily an agrarian power that greatly promoted agricultural exports from the 18th to the 20th centuries. As a Russian- and German-speaking scholar living in Germany and Turkey, his understanding of the American agri-food path is necessarily limited. The Wheat Wars help explain some of the key but subtle changes that helped the United States defeat the Russian Empire in the sixties of the 19th century and become the breadbasket of Europe. These include, among other things, the improvement of the railroad corridor connecting the Great Plains to the Atlantic during the American Civil War, the creation of markets that allow for the early buying and selling of goods over long distances, the provision of new credit markets for farmers, the opening of the Suez Canal, which allowed thousands of Indian Ocean ships to cross the Atlantic, and the return of most of Europe's empty ships from 1870 to 1917, which made possible mass immigration. Cheap food at home has and will continue to make subsistence a relatively small part of the American workers' budget, which in turn creates a mass market for consumer goods. This is also the case in China, where the reforms of the reformers and subsequent reformers have also promoted the great development of China's agriculture.
If we look at today's growing grain exports, looking ahead to the next hundred years, we can see the growing importance of Ukraine and Brazil, as long as they can minimize the cost of transporting grain and capitalize on grain corridors (with only a small amount of taxes). In my book (completed in 2021), I point out that Russia's future as a world power depends on its dominance over Ukraine. Unfortunately, two days after the book was published, we saw the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, confirming this prediction. I am not a researcher of Chinese history or economics, but it seems to me that the Belt and Road Initiative is an initiative that Parus, the physiocrats, and Mencius would praise. Finally, another important connection between The Wheat Wars and Chinese history is the discovery of two grain path tax institutions by Parus, which humbled both the Ottoman Empire and the Qing Dynasty. The two institutions are the Ottoman Treasury Bond Administration (OPDA) and the General Department of Customs and Taxation (CMC) of China. Both institutions were formally developed at the end of the 19th century as infrastructure and military projects for the Ottoman Sultan and Qing emperors, respectively, to pay off debts. In 1911, Parus wrote an article in Turkish describing the enslavement of the OPDA by the Ottoman Empire in what we now call forensic accounting. The cost of transporting goods and the privileges granted to Europeans seriously weakened and strengthened Europe. I outlined, in a very preliminary way, how Chinese customs do the same thing when China crosses the Yellow Sea. For example, British steamers did not pay taxes, while Chinese ships were subject to high customs duties when transferred from one port to another within the Qing Dynasty. This was partly due to the unclear public accounts of these institutions, which allowed Europeans to absorb resources within both empires.
I am glad that the Chinese translation of this book has enabled it to open an international conversation about economics, history, public policy, debt, and empire.