Food, Empire and War
Avner's next historical project, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Offer 1989) was situated in the same fin de siecle as Property and Politics, but ranged across a much wider terrain.
Here, Avner examined international food supply as a factor in the course of late Victorian imperialism and the run up to, outbreak, prosecution and settlement of the Great War. During the “first globalisation” of 1870-1914, Britain outsourced much of its food supply to overseas suppliers, as did Germany, albeit to a lesser extent. This new international division of labour exposed the maritime supply routes of food and essential raw materials to naval blockade. This gave rise to international tensions which were instrumental in setting off the First World War and affected the way it was fought and concluded.Avner began by examining the German food economy during the war, assessing the fragility of domestic and imported supplies, and carefully reconstructing the quality of food and calorific intake over time. He then linked this to data on illness, mortality and morale, both on the front and at home, concluding that the sense of deprivation and uncertainty incurred by food stress, including the ill will caused by competition for food resources and coercive rationing by the State, were more significant factors in understanding Germany's defeat than the insult to health during this protracted period of hardship. These discoveries marked the beginning of Avner's quest to find secure economic-historical measures of welfare that go beyond the commodity standard of living.
The book then turned its focus to the Allies where the picture was very different. Across a century or more of specialisation in trade and industry, Britain had run down its domestic food economy and become dependent on cheap food imports—which explained the country's mediocre food culture in modern times.
Britain's manufactured exports did not cover the cost of its food and raw material imports, a gap bridged by services and income from overseas assets, and vouchsafed by financial and naval power. Wheat was the essential staple, and Avner explored the migration of Britons to the prairies and pastures of the Dominions, showing how the bonds of trade, kinship and shared culture held together a vast imperial system of food production and transport. He then demonstrated that the deepening of the British food trading economy between the metropole and peripheries of empire affected the social structure of both. Large land ownership in Britain, with its tenant farmers and impoverished wage labourers, could not compete with the yeoman farmers of the Dominions, who enjoyed land abundance and strong incentives to work for economic independence on their homesteads. A similar analysis of settler capitalist societies had been developed by Avner's Canberra colleague Donald Denoon a few years earlier (Denoon 1983). In sum, British farming declined, starved of investment and labour, whilst colonial and North American farming flourished. Impoverished British workers moved to the wealthier colonies in search of better lives. Changes in land use and agrarian pricing affected wage levels and opportunities for capital investment. These developments help explain the migration cycles of the pre-war period, the development of social democracy in the Dominion societies, their exposure to the ebb and flow of capital movements and commodity prices, and the heightened class conflict and angry politics in the British metropole.Avner then analysed the social and economic development since the midnineteenth century of the three main breadbaskets supplying Britain— Australia, Canada and the United States, offering glimpses also of South American export production, and contrasting these with subsistence systems in Russia and India. Wheat was like petroleum—a bulk-traded international good, not easily replaced, and cheap to transport in highly responsive markets.
Avner highlighted an interesting dualism in the wealthy wheat-exporting societies: a high-wage settlement and well-developed public goods, combined with fear of competition from Asia and considerable racial animus. The inefficient constraints on free labour migration in the Pacific Rim was an economic puzzle whose answer lay not only in the relations of inside and outside labour markets but also in terms of the colonial insistence on a white racial identity and imperial defence. When war broke out, the Dominions leapt to the defence of the mother country and sent their youth to die across the oceans in Europe and the Middle East at rates comparable to the losses of the British and French.The second half of the book focused on military strategy and the economics of blockade. Avner demonstrated, through painstaking research in the British and German archives, how the pre-war leadership of Britain and Germany were each conscious that they had surrendered their food self-sufficiency through economic specialisation, and came to fear the other's capacity to cut vital food supplies. On both sides, therefore, political and military elites strove to neutralise the mutual threat of starvation by means of military and naval superiority. After two years of stalemate in the trenches, Germany made the fateful decision to launch economic war against a staggering Britain by starting the U-boat campaign against mercantile shipping. By bringing America into the war, the submarine campaign guaranteed German defeat, and a tight food blockade helped to bring the Central Powers to their knees.
The global story of international food production and trade added a new dimension to this much-studied history of strategic miscalculation and descent into the Great War, and also gave a new twist to economic theories of empire, moving explanation away from the Hobsonian theory of capital export and under-consumption as the taproot of imperial expansion. Avner suggested that military planning on the German side with its fatalistic commitment to decisive action regardless of the consequences overcame civilian rationality both in the initial attack of 1914, and the “second decision for war” being the 1917 U-boat campaign (Offer 1995).
The story on the British side was more complicated; the civilian and naval planners expected to win a long war by means of blockade and had good reasons to avoid being drawn into a land war. The pre-war Liberal government attempted to deter and constrain the Germans by means of a naval build-up and a bellicose posture. When Germany failed to read the signals and threw the dice in August 1914, Britain was drawn into a continental commitment.Avner also highlighted the social contract on the home front as a factor in understanding the course of the war. The nation state in all combatant countries placed heavy demands on its populations and had to offer a modicum of equality in return. German officialdom was more coercive and less inclined to rely on moral appeals and market incentives to discipline production and ration consumption. Avner argued that resentment about the inequality of burdens leached the authority of the German State and undermined the war effort. In contrast, the British home front remained more or less intact. With the hardships of the Allied food blockade extending into the winter of 1918—1919, accompanied by the flu epidemic, German civil society was gravely weakened; this, together with the punitive Allied victory settlement, left a poisonous political legacy post-war. The idea of unequal burdens and coercion as destructive of polity was to recur in Avner's later social and economic analyses.
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