Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

At the ICS, Hermínio Martins read my work closely and offered innumerable suggestions on readings and research paths. The reference to the French Greenshirts that opens the introduction to this book stems from his comments on my chapters on the Italian and Portuguese wheat battles. I was thrilled to be able to discuss questions of biopolitics with a scholar who not only produced one of the most influential early interpretations of the Portuguese fascist regime, but was one of the international pioneers of the field of Science and Technology Studies. In August of 2015, I received the terrible news that Hermínio Martins had passed away.

The ICS is a thriving community of STS scholars with whom I carried on a constant conversation. My close friends Cristiana Bastos and Ricardo Roque bear considerable responsibility for my heavy emphasis on colonialism in this book. They practice a very original mix of STS and postcolonial studies, and they, together with Ângela Barreto Xavier, inspired me to explore the African trail. My chapter on the trans-imperial travels of karakul sheep was written in close dialogue with their work and benefited immensely from the postcolonial studies seminar at the ICS put together by Ricardo and Ângela. The seminar provided invaluable regular interaction with a very stimulating group of scholars: Filipa Lowndes Vicente, Cristina Nogueira da Silva, Cláudia Castelo, Marcos Cardão, and Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo. Conversations with João Pina-Cabral and Paulo Granjo were also important to my exploration of Portuguese colonialism.

In my ICS years I was part of the institute’s research group on sustainability headed by Luísa Schmidt, who brought together sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and historians to form a thriving cross-disciplinary community dedicated to the social dimensions of the environment. Luísa has a unique talent for managing large research teams, finding funding sources, and identifying meaningful topics while creating a collegial and joyful working atmosphere. It was a privilege to work with her, and this book owes much of its engagement with environmental history to her. Ana Delicado, Mónica Truninger, and José Gomes Ferreira all contributed significantly to making me more aware of the environmental dimensions of my work.

As I write these acknowledgments, I realize how much this book was molded by ICS scholarship. The book’s combination of history of fascism, STS, postcolonial studies, and environmental history is due in large part to the ICS’s excellence in those fields of inquiry.

The ICS was my institutional home for seven years, and the book has profited immensely from the unique privileged conditions it offers its members. The institute is particularly good at combining academic excellence with total freedom of research. I couldn’t be more grateful for its enduring support as materialized in the actions of its three directors, Manuel Villaverde Cabral, Jorge Vala, and José Luís Cardoso. António Martinho, Maria Eugénia Rodrigues, Andrea Rojão Silva, Elvira Costa, Madalena Reis, and Paula Costa always offered me the best possible conditions for my research work.

The book benefited from generous research grants from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology that supported my travels to archives and libraries in Italy and Germany and the organizing of a large international workshop on science and fascism in 2007. That workshop, held under the auspices of the Journal of History of Science and Technology, provided an occasion for establishing an early dialogue with scholars interested in these topics, namely Susanne Heim, Mark Walker, Thomas Wieland, Nuno Luís Madureira, Yiannis Antoniou, Roberto Maiocchi, Antoni Malet, Fátima Nunes, Fernanda Rollo, and Augusto Fitas.

Early versions of various chapters were discussed at several other academic events. Jonathan Harwood and Staffan Müller-Wille organized an important workshop, held in 2008 at the Max Planck Institute of History of Science in Berlin, that explored new directions in the history of plant breeding. I am particularly thankful for the comments made by Barbara Hahn, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Nils Roll-Hansen, Harro Maat, Barbara Kimmelmann, R. Steven Turner, and Thomas Wieland. In 2010, Sara Pritchard, Dolly Jørgensen, and Finn Arne Jørgensen put together, at Trondheim in Norway, a groundbreaking workshop bringing together STS and environmental history. I would like to acknowledge their comments and insights as well as those offered by Sverker Sörlin and Clapperton Mavhunga. In 2011, I benefited from comments made by Frank Uekötter, Stuart McCook, John Soluri, Paul Sutter, Michitake Aso, Marina Padrão Temudo, and John R. McNeill during a conference called Comparing Apples, Oranges, and Cotton: Environmental Histories of the Plantation, held at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich.