ABSTRACT

This article provides a historical account of the emergence of crop ecology, a precursor of modern agroecology, in the twentieth century. It focuses on the transnational career of agronomist Ioannis Papadakis, a founding figure in this scientific discipline, while contextualizing his work as part of broader state-led projects of agricultural modernization in Europe and Latin America. This study has two implications concerning the history of agroecology. First, that agricultural productivism and a cosmopolitan outlook on plant breeding, often considered to be at odds with agroecology’s principles, were in fact necessary elements for the emergence of crop ecology, and therefore of agroecological thought more generally. Second, we argue that the excesses of the Green Revolution, against which agroecology reacted in the last decades of the twentieth century, did not just stem from a disregard for the agricultural knowledge of indigenous peasants. They also resulted from the marginalization of intellectual dispositions that had taken shape in peripheral areas within the global geography of scientific production. A third implication, specific to the history of Greek agriculture, is that the claim that interwar Greece’s rural economy failed to substantially develop needs to be nuanced when the priorities of Greek agronomists are taken into consideration.

摘要

本文提供了作物生态学（现代农业生态学的先驱）在 20 世纪出现的历史记录。它侧重于农学家 Ioannis Papadakis 的跨国职业生涯，他是该科学学科的创始人物，同时将他的工作作为欧洲和拉丁美洲更广泛的国家主导的农业现代化项目的一部分。这项研究对农业生态学的历史有两个影响。首先，农业生产主义和植物育种世界观，通常被认为与农业生态学的原则不一致，实际上是作物生态学出现的必要因素，因此是更普遍的农业生态学思想的必要因素。其次，我们认为绿色革命的过度，在 20 世纪最后几十年，生态农业对此作出反应，这不仅仅源于对土著农民农业知识的漠视。它们也是在全球科学生产地理的外围地区形成的知识倾向边缘化的结果。希腊农业历史的第三个含义是，当考虑到希腊农学家的优先事项时，需要对两次世界大战期间希腊农村经济未能大幅发展的说法进行细微的处理。