Wheat: The Integral Nation, Genetics, and Salazar’s Corporatist Fascist State

This chapter follows the historical trajectory of Strampelli’s Ardito wheat into Portugal to participate in the Wheat Campaign of Salazar’s fascist regime. When examining the Portuguese case, the narrative explores how new standardized forms of wheat contributed to the development of all embracing corporatist state agencies, a critical subject in the new fascist social order: corporatism promised a society built on organic units and “economic solidarities” in contrast to the alleged artificiality of liberal ideology based on individuals as well as to the Bolshevik obsession with social classes. The technoscientific organisms produced at the National Agricultural Experiment Station (EAN) led by the geneticist António Sousa da Câmara, the executive head of the Wheat Campaign, promised to sustain the futurism of the past announced by the propaganda of the Portuguese corporatist New State.

Sheep: Fascist Settlers and the Colonization of Africa and Europe

The sixth and final chapter is the most original in terms of methodology, for it takes a single technoscientific organism – Karakul sheep – and follows its role in the settlement of the frontier for the three fascist empires. The ability of Karakul to thrive under harsh environmental conditions and its high value in the fur market made it a perfect companion species for white settler’s imperial expansion. The Animal Breeding Institute at the University of Halle is taken as center of circulation, establishing standards and producing the rams to be used not only in white settlers farms in German possessions in Eastern Europe, but also in Italian settlement schemes in Libya and Ethiopia, and in Portuguese colonization of South-western Angola. The different local karakul sheep experiment stations located in frontier spaces are treated as experiments in colonial sociability, revealing the connections between sheep breeding and the genocides perpetrated by the three regimes.

Pigs: The Bodenständig Scientific Community in Nazi Germany

Chapter four explores the development by academic animal breeders of performance tests enabling the transformation of pigs into organisms embodying fascism. Standards developed at the University of Halle by Gustav Frölich and at Gottingen by Jonas Schmidt assured that pigs were fat and rooted in the soil (bodenständig) contributing to the institutionalization of the Nazi regime: Germans were now feeding their animals produce of the national soil, making the country more resilient in case of war, and following the standards imposed by a new bureaucratic structure. Contrary to many historical references of animals and humans in Nazi times, pigs were not just metaphors calling for comparisons between the way they were bred and the Nazi breeding of humans. It was the particular way they were bred, making them bodenständig,which formed the new ties weaving the German Volk. The animals scientists designed were intended to perform the transition of German society into a national community, embodying Nazi alternative modernity.

Potatoes: Pests, Plant Breeding, and the Growth of the Nazi State

The chapter deals with the role of potatoes bred at the Imperial Biological Institute (Biologische Reichsanstalt - BRA) in the Nazi Battle of Production. It highlights the importance of research at the BRA for the seed cleansing of the Nazi years, with thousands of varieties eliminated from German fields, enforced by the Imperial Food Estate (Reichsnährstand - RNS), the institutional form of the ideology of Blood and Soil and the mammoth Nazi organization responsible for organizing the peasant world. The research dynamics at the BRA aimed at coping with the multiple pests afflicting German potato fields (wart, Colorado beetle, late blight, viruses) is put in relation with the growing infrastructure of the RNS, in an exemplary case of co-production of science and the state: each new experimental system at the BRA corresponded to an expansion of the power and reach of the RNS

Conclusion

In the fascist era, rituals followed a tight calendar. Nazis celebrated the 1933 seizure of power in January, the anniversary of the founding of the Party in February, National Mourning Day in March, the Führer’s birthday in April, National Labor Day in May, and so on....

Coffee, Rubber, and Cotton: Cash Crops, Forced Labor, and Fascist Imperialism in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Eastern Europe

The fifth chapter takes coffee, rubber and cotton, three typical elements of colonial plantation stories, and delves into Italian occupation of Ethiopia, German imperial rule in Eastern Europe, and Portuguese colonialism in Northern Mozambique. These plantation schemes, which had plant breeders’ artefacts as their material basis, made massive use of forced labor to serve the imperial economy. Without ignoring the different levels of violence unleashed by the three fascisms, the text suggests that one gains significant insight into the history of fascism from treating together their empires. I take seriously Heinrich Himmler’s intention of making Auschwitz the Agriculture Experiment Station for the colonization of the East and compare the work undertaken there on a rubber ersatz with that of the Portuguese Cotton Research Center in Mozambique and its role in the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of forced workers, as well as with Italian coffee experiment stations in Ethiopia.

Wheat: Food Battles, Elite Breeds, and Mussolini’s Fascist Regime

This chapter describes the design of new wheat breeds by the Italian geneticist Nazareno Strampelli and their role in the Battle of Wheat, the first mass mobilization of Mussolini’s fascist regime. The combination in Strampelli’s most successful breed – Ardito – of immunity to rust and resistance to lodging leading to increased use of chemical fertilizers, an early version of the Green Revolution, made seem plausible fascist dreams of the national soil feeding the national community. More than that, Strampelli’s Ardito performed the fascist permanent mobilization of the nation, blurring peace and war, transforming every Italian involved in the campaign for wheat autarky into a defender of the Fatherland, a human Ardito, the name of the Italian storm troopers of First World War and the basis of Mussolini’s paramilitary black shirts.

Introduction

The introduction places the book in the historical tradition of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault of taking fascism as biopolitics. It stresses the fact that the biological dimension of fascist regimes was not limited to human bodies but it included as well animals and plants bred by geneticists for food production. The focus on food as central component of fascist organic nationalism overcomes apparent contradictions between fascist obsession with the national soil and the modernist nature of fascism. Delving into the making and growing of technoscientific organisms, reveals their importance in the building of fascist alternative modernity. The introduction presents the narrative as a fascist ontology, a bestiary combining historians of science and technology and STS scholars’ organism centered narratives with political and cultural historians general concern for the nature of fascism.