Potatoes

This chapter explores the most prolific tuber, the potato, from its early history to the present. The discussion moves from the potato in its original pre-Columbian Andean setting, through the Spanish colonial and republican periods in Peru, and then to Europe before returning to modern-day Peru. It looks at the potato’s domestication and its attributes, and its place in state-making and state expansion, in warfare and peasant resistance, in demographic growth and industrialization, in scientific agronomy and Third World development, and, finally, in the national and cultural politics of Indigenous agricultural practice and agrobiodiversity conservation. Arguing that the potato was never a couch potato, but rather a most ambitious and enthusiastic little tubérculo, the chapter addresses the question of how history, social science, and ethnography position and explain the potato’s political, sociocultural, and economic agency over the longue durée.