2025 Theses Doctoral

Earth Hunger: Agriculture, Settler Colonialism, and the Rise of the Global Grain Trade, 1846-1914

Gorton, Alice Louise

This dissertation argues that Britain's shift to free trade in 1846 moved British settler colonialism in Canada and Australia away from older trade and land monopolies and toward an imperial-agrarian system that sought to transform Indigenous lands into breadbaskets for the newly industrializing metropole. Liberal theories articulated in the 1840s created the ideological basis for new colonial legislation in the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the routine enclosure of land for settlers. Contrary to the utopian visions of interdependence and trade harmony painted by free traders in the 1840s, free trade policies led to an increase in British territorial conquest in the settler colonies. As foreign grain imports put pressure on the domestic agricultural sector in the 1870s, many began to view settler colonization as a release valve that could alleviate domestic population and food pressures. The 1870s were pivotal. As the imperial-agrarian system expanded to feed a growing industrial population in Britain, Indigenous communities in areas slated for grain production entered the agricultural economy and developed new political claims around land, even as colonial expansion undermined access to resources. Indeed, efforts to secure private property rights for farmers in new regions undermined the existing food supply, which led to subsistence crises, displacement, and land loss among Indigenous communities across Canada and Australia.

While new legal agreements emerged to reserve land for Indigenous peoples in the empire, the cyclical dynamic of agricultural development and improvement also foreshadowed the erosion of those agreements. The establishment of the grain economy set in motion a process of continual exploitation and expropriation, as colonists sought new arable lands—new extractive or commodity frontiers—to preserve or expand their margins. As settlers ran into both economic and ecological limits, such as exhausted soil and rising land prices, they sought to appropriate more Native land, establishing farmsteads in territories they had once considered marginal or that had been legally reserved for Indigenous communities. The grain economy in both places experienced significant growth in the 1890s and 1910s. These decades also saw intensified efforts to subdivide and allot reserve lands for sale to agricultural settlers. Examining the closure of Poonindie in South Australia and the surrender of the Siksika reserve in Alberta, my argument shows how land allotment was closely tied to the grain trade.

This dissertation uses the thread of the grain trade to bind together national histories within a British imperial system linked by trade. The story of the grain trade between 1846 and 1914, with its extensive land use, sprawling capital-intensive infrastructure, and integral position in the global and increasingly globalized food economy, gives us a more holistic picture of a period for which scholars have tended to write distinct histories of the British empire and its settler dominions in Canada and Australia. The project demonstrates that grain became the crop most closely associated with settler colonies, as the production of cash crops by family farmers simultaneously addressed both the population and agricultural crises in Britain. Grain was the flipside of the industrial economy, the crop that underwrote Britain's economic growth and upheld its imperial system.