In 2008, while at UCLA, I was given a chance to organize, together with Norton Wise, a workshop on genetics and the political economy of fascism. The intense discussions among the participants were particularly important for the formulation of many of the methodological and historiographic questions addressed in this book. I am very grateful to Jonathan Harwood, Francesco Cassata, Gesine Gerhard, Lino Camprubí, Lourenzo Fernández Pietro, Bernd Gausemeier, and Christophe Bonneuil.
It was at UCLA that I decided to transform a project originally dedicated exclusively to the Portuguese context into one that would include the Italian and German fascist regimes. The abundant resources of UCLA’s Charles E. Young Research Library and easy access to the whole University of California library system—the largest academic library system in the world—helped to enlarge my historical ambitions and imagination. I owe to California’s public system of higher education the privilege of consulting in my office, for extended periods of time, the complete series of journals published by the Portuguese National Agricultural Experiment Station, the German Imperial Biological Institute, the Italian colonial agricultural services, and the Mozambican Center for Scientific Research of Cotton.
In the years 2005–2012, while at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon as a research scholar, I came across a major school of research in the history of fascism. My insistence in this book on the importance for historians of science of engaging with political, social, economic, and cultural historians of fascism is a direct result of my exposure to ICS scholarship. The more generic points made about fascism in the text emerge from dialogues with the ICS historians Manuel Lucena, António Costa Pinto, Pedro Lains, Jaime Reis, Luís Salgado de Matos, José Luis Cardoso, Dulce Freire, and José Sobral. I am particularly indebted to Manuel Villaverde Cabral for many long conversations on the importance of considering a continuum of fascist experiences across Europe. I am sure he will recognize his influence in my obsession with fascist “ideology of the land.”
At the ICS, Hermínio Martins read my work closely and offered innumerable suggestions on readings and research paths. The reference to the French Greenshirts that opens the introduction to this book stems from his comments on my chapters on the Italian and Portuguese wheat battles. I was thrilled to be able to discuss questions of biopolitics with a scholar who not only produced one of the most influential early interpretations of the Portuguese fascist regime, but was one of the international pioneers of the field of Science and Technology Studies. In August of 2015, I received the terrible news that Hermínio Martins had passed away.
The ICS is a thriving community of STS scholars with whom I carried on a constant conversation. My close friends Cristiana Bastos and Ricardo Roque bear considerable responsibility for my heavy emphasis on colonialism in this book. They practice a very original mix of STS and postcolonial studies, and they, together with Ângela Barreto Xavier, inspired me to explore the African trail. My chapter on the trans-imperial travels of karakul sheep was written in close dialogue with their work and benefited immensely from the postcolonial studies seminar at the ICS put together by Ricardo and Ângela. The seminar provided invaluable regular interaction with a very stimulating group of scholars: Filipa Lowndes Vicente, Cristina Nogueira da Silva, Cláudia Castelo, Marcos Cardão, and Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo. Conversations with João Pina-Cabral and Paulo Granjo were also important to my exploration of Portuguese colonialism.
In my ICS years I was part of the institute’s research group on sustainability headed by Luísa Schmidt, who brought together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and historians to form a thriving cross-disciplinary community dedicated to the social dimensions of the environment. Luísa has a unique talent for managing large research teams, finding funding sources, and identifying meaningful topics while creating a collegial and joyful working atmosphere. It was a privilege to work with her, and this book owes much of its engagement with environmental history to her. Ana Delicado, Mónica Truninger, and José Gomes Ferreira all contributed significantly to making me more aware of the environmental dimensions of my work.
As I write these acknowledgments, I realize how much this book was molded by ICS scholarship. The book’s combination of history of fascism, STS, postcolonial studies, and environmental history is due in large part to the ICS’s excellence in those fields of inquiry.
The ICS was my institutional home for seven years, and the book has profited immensely from the unique privileged conditions it offers its members. The institute is particularly good at combining academic excellence with total freedom of research. I couldn’t be more grateful for its enduring support as materialized in the actions of its three directors, Manuel Villaverde Cabral, Jorge Vala, and José Luís Cardoso. António Martinho, Maria Eugénia Rodrigues, Andrea Rojão Silva, Elvira Costa, Madalena Reis, and Paula Costa always offered me the best possible conditions for my research work.
The book benefited from generous research grants from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology that supported my travels to archives and libraries in Italy and Germany and the organizing of a large international workshop on science and fascism in 2007. That workshop, held under the auspices of the Journal of History of Science and Technology, provided an occasion for establishing an early dialogue with scholars interested in these topics, namely Susanne Heim, Mark Walker, Thomas Wieland, Nuno Luís Madureira, Yiannis Antoniou, Roberto Maiocchi, Antoni Malet, Fátima Nunes, Fernanda Rollo, and Augusto Fitas.
Early versions of various chapters were discussed at several other academic events. Jonathan Harwood and Staffan Müller-Wille organized an important workshop, held in 2008 at the Max Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin, that explored new directions in the history of plant breeding. I am particularly thankful for the comments made by Barbara Hahn, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Nils Roll-Hansen, Harro Maat, Barbara Kimmelmann, R. Steven Turner, and Thomas Wieland. In 2010, Sara Pritchard, Dolly Jørgensen, and Finn Arne Jørgensen put together, at Trondheim in Norway, a groundbreaking workshop bringing together STS and environmental history. I would like to acknowledge their comments and insights as well as those offered by Sverker Sörlin and Clapperton Mavhunga. In 2011, I benefited from comments made by Frank Uekötter, Stuart McCook, John Soluri, Paul Sutter, Michitake Aso, Marina Padrão Temudo, and John R. McNeill during a conference called Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton: Environmental Histories of the Plantation, held at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.
The annual meetings of the Society of History of Technology (SHOT) and the History of Science Society (HSS) have been important venues for presenting and discussing my work, and I am grateful to many members of those two societies, including John Krige, Thomas Zeller, David Edgerton, Edmund Russell, Barbara Hahn, Paul Josephson, Deborah Fitzgerald, Asif Siddiqi, Prakash Kumar, Gabrielle Hecht, Jenny Leigh Smith, Bruce Hevly, Rosalind Williams, Mark Walker, Eda Kranakis, Nil Disco, Mats Fridlund, Arne Kaijser, Thomas J. Misa, and Steven Usselman.
It was at a SHOT meeting that Wiebe Bijker first urged me to submit my manuscript to the MIT Press. I am delighted to be able to publish my work in the Inside Technology series and to have it appear side by side with many of the books that defined the way I think about technology and society. I thank Wiebe for such a great opportunity. I also thank W. Bernard Carlson, the co-editor of the series. In addition, I want to acknowledge the great work of Katie Helke in getting the manuscript into publishable form, and the many criticisms, suggestions, and commentaries of the anonymous reviewers.