Soy and Agro-Food Change

Any assessment of agro-food change faces the challenge of the multiplicity of time, space, and agency addressing short-, medium-, and long-term periods, spatial formations from local to global, as well as multiple human and non-human agents. To reduce this complexity in this special issue of the Rural History Yearbook, soy as a commodity provides a lens for assessing agro-food change in the era of globalisation since the 1870s. Soy serves best as a marker of agro-food globalisation, because it evolved from an East Asian food crop to the world's biggest agricultural commodity and allows us to grasp intersections of multiple scales of time, space, and agency. The volume assesses agro-food globalisation from a historical social science and humanities perspective. It aims to overcome the 'methodological nationalism' of country-focused agro-food studies as well as some globalist tendencies in food regime research by emphasising (sub )national pathways of agro-food change. International scholars across disciplines addressed the history of soy in and between Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. They highlighted fundamental continuities and changes, important sites and their connections, as well as more-than-human key actors of the global soy complex, also in light of the current 'polycrisis.'