I am at present revising my dissertation into a book manuscript that charts the development of agricultural sciences in modern South Asia. The book project examines this story across three interlinked axes, namely, the emergence of a post-Mendelian theory and practice of agriculture, the reordering of the global agrarian economy after World War I, and the formulation of agrarian and food policies emerging from the anti-colonial movement. Agricultural modernization in the Global South is typically associated with post-colonial food scarcity, miracle seeds, American technical expertise, and the politics of the Cold War. The picture, however, was markedly different at the beginning of the twentieth century when the logic of European imperialism undergirded the global agrarian economy. Large sections of Asia and Africa were under European rule who controlled colonial economies through a regime of cultivating stipulations, manufacturing barriers, and trade protectionism. My research argues that the transformation of the agrarian economy in British India in the first half of the twentieth century was brought about through a reworking of the relationship between science, the colonial state and the local environment.