The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed with individually varying seedling fruit trees. American nurserymen stabilized both this chaotic landscape and their trade by promoting named fruit “varieties” gleaned from domestic orchards and from a global network of botanical gardens. Developing strategies to regulate the production of names and descriptions, they altered both texts and organisms, replacing a profusion of “wild” trees with a negotiated list of “named varieties.” Examining this process reveals intersections between commercial and scientific credibility and illuminates the alternative business forms built around living goods.

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, governments across Latin America founded departments of fomento, or development, to promote economic growth and modernization. This article looks at the evolution of this department in Mexico and the ways in which it integrated infrastructure, migration, land policy, science, and education into a rural economic and social project. For Department of Fomento leaders, agriculture became the connective tissue linking peace to prosperity. Though many failed, initiatives aimed at increasing the diversity of Mexico's rural production illustrate a concerted effort to avoid top-heavy monoculture and use scientific planning to stabilize and unify the nation.

This article looks at the evolution of the British chocolate industry from the 1860s to the 1960s, a period during which it was dominated by Quaker businesses: Cadbury, Rowntree, and their predecessor, Fry. It provides evidence of early forms of fair trade by these Quaker businesses, showing that, before the fair trade movement took off in the 1970s, they contributed to social change and to improvement in living standards and long-term sustainable economic growth in developing countries. This article argues that when the mechanisms for enforcing food standards were weak and certification bodies did not exist, the Religious Society of Friends acted as an indirect independent endorser, reinforcing the imagery and reputation of the Quaker-owned brands and associating them both with purity and quality and with honest and fair trading.

This article examines how, starting in the 1870s, food manufacturers in the United States began to use standardized color, achieved by synthetic dyes, as part of their marketing strategies. The emergence of the synthetic dye industry paralleled the growth of mass production and mass marketing in the American food industry. It provided food manufacturers with an economical means to standardize their products and helped establish brand identities through consistent appearance. By 1938, food dyes had achieved such widespread use, and had raised such public concern, that the federal government amended the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act to implement more stringent measures to regulate the industry.

This article provides a historical overview of the development of U.S. government-mandated commodity promotion. This form of promotion, known colloquially as the “checkoff,” is responsible for such memorable slogans as “Beef: It's What's for Dinner,” as well as research intended to boost consumption of agricultural products. The article argues that checkoffs represent an associational form of governance in which private organizations achieve public aims. Though they have been frequently challenged in courts and have garnered scrutiny from public health activists, checkoffs have been a durable form of agricultural regulation because they hide the heavy hand of government with the rhetoric of markets and self-help.

Nearly sixty years have passed since the publication of A Concept of Agribusiness by John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg. The book, which circulated widely among agricultural policymakers, business leaders, and academic economists, cemented the neologism “agribusiness” in the English lexicon. By opening up a new discourse for understanding the political economy of agriculture, Davis and Goldberg introduced a potentially revolutionary strategy for exploring the workings of a food and fiber economy anchored by large corporations. After briefly exploring how the book was received (and often misunderstood) in its own time, this essay will consider whether recent historical work has effectively revived the crucial insights Davis and Goldberg offered more than half a century ago.