Cultivating Fields of Progress

Abstract Cultivating Fields of Progress explores how the improvement of working and living conditions in agriculture became an international issue in the broader context of the interwar and immediate post Second World War years. It focuses on the international debates, knowledge production, and policy-making that took place within the International Labour Organization and related organizations, as well as among expert networks, agrarian interest groups, trade unionists, and farmer representatives. It traces the shifting thematic considerations, and temporal and geographical scope of these debates, from the plight of landless farmworkers in Europe in the early 1920s to the conditions of plantation workers in the 1950s. By using the archives of international organizations, the book tells a broader story about how and to what ends questions of rural poverty and problematic labour conditions both in Europe and overseas made their way to the world stage against a backdrop of a discourse of social progress and economic development. If today we tend to associate calls for advancing social justice and decent work with rural economies in the ‘Global South’, the book shows that not so long ago, Europe and its rural populations were a major site of social reform and development.