Across the world, diversified peasant production was displaced by plantation monocultures. The new global market in food may have banished famine in the industrial metropole. But, as Backe pointed out, the monocultures of capitalist agriculture had spread food insecurity to vast tracts of the globe. In recorded history there had never been famines so severe or so frequent as in the nineteenth century.24 The agricultural crises of the 1920s and 1930s were simply the latest phase in liberalism’s disastrous campaign of conquest. In Backe’s vision, Darré’s racial agrarianism melded with a more
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