Food and Power

Henry Thomson is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. From 2014 to 2017 he was a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. In 2015, his dissertation won the American Political Science Association's Juan Linz Prize for the Best Dissertation in the Comparative Study of Democracy.

• 1. Introduction; 2. Policy, institutions and stability; 3. Policy outcomes; 4. Food, policy and unrest; 5. Agricultural rents and regime durability; 6. Germany, 1878–1890; 7. Malaysia, 1969–1980; 8. Conclusion.

'For anyone who thinks they know how authoritarian regimes manage the political dilemma of promoting economic development while sustaining regime stability; you don't, until you have read this book. Using the best of social science - cross-national data, contemporary cases, and careful historical case studies - we see that economic development is a deeply political process with profound political reverberations. A modern work but in the great tradition of Alexander Gerschenkron's Bread and Democracy, Henry's Thomson places food and agriculture at the center of the study of regime change. He emerges full of illuminating insight for scholars of present-day authoritarianism and democracy.' Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University