On 12 February 2025
Coordinated by Margot Lyautey, Léna Humbert and Christophe Bonneuil, Histoire des modernisations agricoles au XXe siècle was published in 2021. All the contributions, whether from the fields of environmental history or the history of science and technology, examine twentieth-century agricultural modernization “no longer as a necessary process of modernity, but as a set of socio-technical choices [...] made by groups of situated actors”, as the authors put it.
Among these contributions, Delphine Berdah, historian of science, questions the use of antibiotics as growth promoters during the 20th century in a chapter entitled “Pour une autre histoire de la ‘modernisation’ des pratiques d'élevage. Antibiotics in rations to stabilize French and British pharmaceutical socio-technical systems”.
Summary of the chapter:
This chapter looks back at the conditions under which antibiotics were introduced as growth promoters in France and the UK in the 1950s, and questions the assumption that without these drugs, the productivist turn taken by pig and poultry farming at that time would not have been possible. Drawing on new French and British archival sources from the Ministries of Agriculture and Health, as well as from veterinary, agricultural and pharmaceutical industry journals, this article departs from the traditional focus of historiography on the various impacts that these drugs could have (or were suspected of having) on public health, and on the public policies implemented to control them. It shows how, on the other hand, these issues were taken into account by the various experts - doctors, veterinarians, biologists, agronomists, nutritionists, toxicologists - called upon to take a stand on these drugs, and how, against all expectations, these questions weighed little in the face of the need to see the expansion of powerful pharmaceutical industries, capable of supporting the development of post-war social medicine.
References:
Berdah, Delphine. 2021. « Pour une autre histoire de la “modernisation” des pratiques d’élevage : Des antibiotiques dans les rations pour stabiliser les systèmes sociotechniques pharmaceutiques français et britannique ». p. 101‑14 in Histoire des modernisations agricoles au XXe siècle, Histoire, coordonné par M. Lyautey, L. Humbert, et C. Bonneuil. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Margot Lyautey, Léna Humbert, et Christophe Bonneuil. 2021. Histoire des modernisations agricoles au XXe siècle. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.
The entire chapter can be found here.
