Bitter harvest – how Ukraine’s wheat has always been coveted

Publishers love books with ambitious subtitles such as ‘How Bubblegum Made the Modern World’, and this one’s, about American wheat remaking the world, was no doubt devised to appeal to readers in the United States. It is not really appropriate: for ‘American’, read ‘Ukrainian’. The focal point of Oceans of Grain lies very far from the vast wheat fields of North America. This is mainly a book about Ukraine and the Black Sea, and the importance of Ukrainian grain in world history. Its appearance during the current war is extraordinarily timely.

Scott Reynolds Nelson insists that grain supplies have lain at the heart of millennia of conflict. He describes the first world war as ‘a war fought over nothing less than foreign bread’, tying together the failure of Russian plans to grow massive amounts of grain in Siberia and central Asia, the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905, the first Russian revolution that year and tensions with Turkey over grain shipments in 1914, plus the lingering Russian ambition to recover Constantinople from the Turks.

Here the weaknesses in what in my undergraduate days we used to call ‘simplistic monocausal explanations’ become clear. The tsars did see the capture of Istanbul as a means to guarantee the passage of Ukrainian grain into the Mediterranean; at the same time, Nelson needs to recognise that the city had enormous religious significance to the Russian rulers of the ‘Third Rome’. And there was much more than this to the outbreak of the first world war. Nelson might place a little more emphasis on an assassination in Sarajevo, as well as the naval ambitions of Germany fostered by the Kaiser and his belligerent admiral, Tirpitz.