Scientific agriculture and the chimera of racialization in modernity: a global genealogy and a subtropical perception

The advance of scientific and industrial agriculture over forests and traditional territories has recently expanded the scope of a well-known drama experienced by poor rural populations for decades and has also drawn attention to the problem of climate change. In academia, the violence of this large-scale agro-hydro-business has been stud-ied based on the relations between private groups and the connivance of governments. Based on this debate, I propose a historical genealogy focusing on the foundations of violence in agricultural practices against humans and non-humans, as a way to argue that, besides latifundia and slavery, other global historical events interfered in the production of a racialized, hierarchical, and violent agricultural paradigm. As a possible example, I observe that part of the national elites dominating this production system descended from European immigrants who arrived in Brazil precisely to serve as free labor and to whiten the country's population - a veritable "technical-racial" elite, molded based on the assumption of the allegedly better acclimatization of Europeans in the subtropics. Interpreted by the state as examples of modernity, small groups of Neo-European farmers were privileged by a series of historical events, which guaranteed them land tenure and established them, together with descendants of the large landowners of colonial times in the Southeast, as some of the main players of a global connection of food production after the civil-military dictatorship. The article was based on sources from scientific articles, essays on Brazilian Social Thought, and immigration reports. The methodology used was connected global history, in dialogue with a non-chronological historical genealogy.