From The Milken Institute Review:
You cannot not know history,” said the American architect Philip Johnson. (Though he did successfully conceal his years as a young fascist demagogue in the 1930s, but never mind.)
The challenge of understanding Ukraine’s evolution is the sheer number and variety of nations and peoples who have played parts in its history — not only Ukrainian speakers but Crimean Tatars, Cossacks, Turks, Poles, Jews, Greeks (as owners of grain ships) and, of course, Russians. The condescending name for Ukraine, Little Russia, almost disappeared a century ago as the cultures differentiated, yet Vladimir Putin has shown how persistent and pernicious the idea has been of Ukrainians as junior siblings of the so-called Great Russians.
One of the best scholarly corrections of the record has Ukraine nowhere in its title, yet it is as enlightening about the history of that nation as it is about the development of the United States grain empire that is its main theme. It reveals that, in important ways, the U.S. and Ukraine have been swept along in intersecting currents of history.
Looking Way BackIn Oceans of Grain, Scott Reynolds Nelson shows how the territory of present-day Ukraine has been strategically essential since the days of ancient Greece, when shipping magnates called aristoi controlled the routes that brought grain from the northern ports of the Black Sea to the city-states of Greece that had outgrown their own agricultural hinterlands. The aristoi ships, which could carry a remarkable ten thousand sacks of grain, plied their trade into the 4th century and were largest seagoing vessels ever built until introduction of Spanish galleons in the 16th century.The Black Sea grain trade remained a lifeline for European nutrition for a very long time. And Byzantium (the city also called Constantinople in honor of the emperor who established it as a new capital) effectively controlled that trade in the centuries it dominated the Eastern Roman Empire by controlling shipping through the Dardanelles Strait, the only outlet from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. This power was, of course, inherited by the Ottoman Turks when they conquered the city in 1453.
Elsewhere in Europe, rulers remained acutely aware of the importance of a reliable grain supply to retention of power. Indeed, food riots contributed to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. Hunger protests preceded the fall not only of Louis XVI of France but the Ottoman Sultan Selim III, although, to be sure, the causes were complex.
Britain, aware of its vulnerability, sought grain from its Irish colony to feed England’s growing cities beginning in the 17th century. Protestant landowners extracted grain from the Catholic peasants, who were left to subsist on potatoes (more calories, less nutrition per acre) from their small remaining plots.
Meanwhile in the Black Sea region, generations of Russian tsars nourished the fantasy of building an empire stretching from the Baltic to the Dardanelles, with Constantinople to be renamed Tsargrad (a name ominously adopted by a militantly pro-Putin Russian media group). Ivan the Great’s marriage to a niece of the last ruler of the Byzantine empire in 1472 founded a claim to succession of the Eastern Empire. It is also the origin of the Byzantine double-headed eagle so visible in Putin-era iconography. A century later, Russia’s rulers were chipping away at the Polish empire, which controlled the rich soils of what is now southeastern Ukraine. Though it’s not clear who to root for here: Poland had enserfed the Ukrainian-speaking peasants who farmed this land....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
The Bread We Eat Is Junk Food: Blame the Wheat
It gets complicated fast....
"Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat"
If a couple oversized bets don't pan out, yours truly has been informed we will be pivoting to cooking tips.
