Globalizing the Soybean

Front matter

Routledge Studies in Modern History

GLOBALIZING THE SOYBEAN

FAT, FEED, AND SOMETIMES FOOD, C. 1900-1950

Contents

List of Illustrations vii A Note on Measuring Units, Currencies, and Romanization viii Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Introduction 1

Global Commodities 2 Fertilizer, Fat, Fodder (and Food) 9

Manchuria and Its Beans 18 Crop Talks in Europe and the United States 27

Introduction

Soybeans have been consumed by humans since the Neolithic period. Biologists trace present-day varieties back to a wild soybean plant that was domesticated in East Asia about 6,000-9,000 years ago.! Yet, it took most of this exceptionally long period before the crop found its way to other continents, either by accident or by design. Up until the early twentieth century, soybean cultivation, trade, and consumption largely remained within its Asian origins. Back in ancient times, human migration occurred more slowly and to a lesser extent, but once people encountered different parts of the world in the modern period, they took crops, animals, and diseases along with them. Rice has been a staple all over the world for centuries. The Columbian exchange brought sugar, horses, and syphilis from the Old World to the New and shipped potatoes and tobacco, among many other living organisms, in the opposite direction.* In modern times also East Asia gained the attention of European sea voyagers in their search for new trading routes and business opportunities. In the sixteenth century, Portuguese and later Spanish and Dutch merchants brought spices, tea, and silk to European customers, but none considered the soybean a valuable commodity for trade. To be sure, they—as well as missionaries, diplomats, and migrants—also introduced the soybean and foods derived from it, but the scope of this transfer remained rather marginal. Outside Asia, soy did not become a commodity of any significant economic value until the early decades of the twentieth century. This book sets out to analyze why, then, in the first half of the twentieth century, the soybean suddenly became attractive to the Western world, and what its uses were. In addition to emerging at a comparatively late stage, the Western interest in soybeans was also very sudden. Once the crop left its Asian homeland it unexpectedly became a valuable commodity, and contemporary observers were astonished at the nascent trade. A 1911 report from the Chinese Maritime Customs in Shanghai emphasized:

It is only in the last three years that soya beans have become important in intercontinental commerce, and their rapid emergence from obscurity has, indeed, been one of the most remarkable commercial events of recent times.’

The bean’s new economic power was compared to that of the once-thriving trade in tea from China and it was predicted that its importance would soon equal that of the contemporary trade in silk. In the same year, the U.S. ambassador in Beijing reported to the U.S. State Department that until recently the world had known next to nothing about possible trade deals with a certain region called Manchuria, from where the beans destined for global trade were coming. Now, the ambassador wrote, economic developments in Northeast China were being closely watched in New York, London, Hamburg, Seattle, and elsewhere. According to him, this was thanks solely to soybeans, the surging demand for which had been “phenomenal in trade annals.”

The unexpected appreciation of soy had nothing to do with a sudden esteem for Asian foods. Instead, from roughly the 1910s onward, the soybean was reduced into its two main constituent parts: oil and protein. Soy turned into an ordinary—yet invisible—ingredient in daily life, a process that was completed by the 1950s. By then the “miracle bean,” as it was once called in Europe and the United States, had become a veritable industrial crop, and its components could be found in products as diverse as margarine, soap, paint, mayonnaise, wallpaper, glue, and dynamite, to mention just a few. In addition, the soybean had become a key element in factory farming and with that part of human nutrition, albeit rather indirectly. Now, nearly all meats, from beef steaks to pork loins, chicken wings to salmon are produced from concentrate feed made of soybeans. By way of contrast, it is only since the 1990s that the space regular supermarkets devote to supposedly typical soy products, such as tofu and soy milk, have grown as well.°

Global Commodities

What was it that led the beans to suddenly become a global commodity? How did the soybean achieve global economic power in the space of only 50 years? What were the incentives for using it? Who had an interest in soybeans, and why? In finding answers to these questions, I focus on the bean’s origins and its principal destinations in the Western world—that is, chiefly Germany and the United States. The term “Western world” or simply “the West” is neither new nor undisputed in modern historiography; nevertheless, for reasons of pragmatism I decided to use it as an umbrella term to describe developments in Europe and North America. The adventure of the soybean outside Asia began on these two continents simultaneously, and, while the initial interest was different, the result remained the same. Shipments of soybeans from Asia reached various European harbors in the first decade of the twentieth century, and while the First World War interrupted this trade, it flourished all the more thereafter. Around the same time, Americans also discovered the soybean; however, they would hardly import, and rather cultivate, the crop. The attraction of soybeans to people on both sides of the Atlantic was tied to a desire for meat and cheap alternatives to butter, in addition to cosmetics and products based on chemical syntheses such as plastics. In result, the soybean mainly became a cheap resource for fat and fodder in the West.

The soybean’s global journey began in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) and can be centered on three particular hubs: Northeast China, also known as Manchuria, as the starting point; Germany, where most of the beans in the interwar period were shipped; and the United States, which became the worldwide leading cultivator of soy during the 1940s. Thus, the story told in this book deals with developments on three different continents, thereby encompassing quite distinct economies and national particularities. Regarding Manchuria, the main aspects of trade will be emphasized, while for Germany processing industries are at the heart of the matter, and in the United States, agricultural developments. In light of these differences, the question arises of whether it makes sense to bring these diverse historical developments together. The challenge grows even greater considering the many products made of soy. Chemical research in the interwar period led to many different uses for the crop and thus rather wide-ranging consumer groups. Agricultural scientists, politicians, economists, and entrepreneurs in Europe and Northern America were enthusiastic about the versatile uses of this Asian stranger.’ While the crop remained rather homogeneous, the products containing traces of it were spectacularly heterogeneous. In result, this book encompasses historical aspects reaching far beyond the crop itself and opens for questions related to agricultural, technological, environmental, economic, and business history in addition to those on soybeans as a commodity. When it comes to historical analyses, dealing with soy implies thus not only crossing a number of geographic boundaries but also breaching the borderlines between a variety of historical subdisciplines.

I agree with other historians in arguing that it is precisely through following a global commodity that a coherent narrative about diverse but interconnected places and phenomena becomes visible.’ The soybean story is as much about Han Chinese peasants working the soil with the help of an Ox as it is about technological innovation in the city of Hamburg. It is about American farmers chugging along their fields in a Fordson and about ammunition for guns in the Second World War. This book contributes to discussions about global economic connections by focusing on how a specific commodity was produced, exchanged, and processed along a supply chain. In tracing the commodification of the soybean, I show how a producing part of the world was linked commercially to financiers, industrialists, and consumers in another area. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, the industry and agriculture of a developed economy such as that of Germany depended on the ongoing exploitation of a very distant environment, namely Manchuria. The trade evolving in this context, however, was neither controlled by German nor Chinese traders but by Japanese and Danish ones. Following the cultivation, trade, processing, and use of the soybean illuminates the workings of the contemporary world economy. In addition, it allows us to connect people who were not in direct contact at the time, in order to shed light on interactions in global systems otherwise considered as freestanding and unrelated.

There is research on the history of the soybean in various spatial and national contexts, but their transnational linkages have so far largely been undetected. Matthew Roth has written on the rise of the soybean in the United States, thereby pointing out the many uses of the crop and the work of the U.S. engineers and agriculturalists who tirelessly promoted the various industrial uses of the plant. Jürgen Drews has analyzed Nazi Germany’s attempts at growing soybeans in southeastern Europe in order to serve war-related needs for fats and proteins on the one hand, and to seek an outlet for the products of the chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate I.G. Farben on the other. Robert G. Fahs has also focused on Nazi Germany, but paid attention to the regime’s trade deals with Japan and Manchukuo, the puppet state Japan had founded in 1932 after the invasion of Manchuria. The deals came about for similar reasons, the acquisition of soybeans and the trade in heavy industrial goods. Together with Hiromi Mizuno, I have worked on the Manchurian soybean trade in the 1910s and 1920s and the role of Japanese imperialism in facilitating it. Other scholars such as Ernst Langthaler and David Wolff have made the first attempts in linking parts of the places and people related to the spread of soy in global agriculture, trade, and nutrition. Christine Du Bois made the most comprehensive effort to date to trace the history of the soybean in different parts of the world and its value for different purposes. Globalizing the Soybean is an attempt at bringing these branches of the story together and interpreting their findings as part of one development, namely the making of soy as a global and ubiquitous commodity.’

Recent works on global commodities have described the history of capitalist activity at various times in inspiring ways, taking into account not only economic aspects but also social, cultural, and political factors. They shed light on elaborate systems of local and global connections that lay behind the supply and demand of resources, their processing, trade, and consumption. Giorgio Riello’s work on cotton has been particularly inspiring because he told a story of how cotton changed the way in which economies around the world worked by linking what happened in one location to what happened in another.!° The evolution of cotton as a global fabric was the fruit of complex interactions, and I argue that the emergence of the soybean as global fodder and fat resource was exactly the same—the result of human interactions in different parts of the world.

In addition to being about connections in history, this book is also about historical change. People involved in the business of soybeans had diverse values and interests, but they all played a part in the soybean becoming both an agricultural crop and an industrial commodity on a global scale. Thus, just as John Soluri has done with the example of the banana or Anna Tsing with the matsutake mushroom, I use the soybean as an opening to broader social, economic, and historical processes. Both scholars reveal not only global and transnational connections but also the power relations embedded within them. Soluri points to how the demand for bananas in the United States reshaped local spaces in Honduras, while Tsing works out conditions of capitalism when following the supply chain of a mushroom that grows, among other places, in northern California and is considered a luxury item in Japan.!! What I try to show is the network of actors which led to a Western dependence on soy as a cheap resource and in turn the evolution of modern consumer societies. Nowadays, soybeans are globally valued as a resource for fat and fodder precisely because societies started this process about one hundred years ago. Who were these people, which businesses were involved, and which role did political institutions play for this process? Placing the soybean at the center of this story helps us understand this process of worldwide historical change.

In global economic history, most of the period under consideration here has been characterized as rather disconnected compared to the globalized world before the First World War. The years before the war, from roughly the mid-nineteenth century onward, had brought spectacular change to the worldwide economic system. Led by Great Britain and other European powers, it was characterized by a laissez-faire market economy and free trade, resulting, among other things, in a broad process of economic integration. That system received a shock both during the war and the challenges arising from it in the 1920s. Now, European states turned to protectionist measures and regulated their markets. Through state interventionism, countries adopted economic nationalism and sought self-sufficiency, with the result that world trade stagnated. The international economic system was then even more shaken during the Great Depression, which led to a significant decline in worldwide output and trade. The volume of European trade, for example, fell from 58 billion U.S. dollars to 21 billion U.S. dollars between 1929 and 1935. Thus, it has become textbook knowledge that the years until the 1950s were a period of distinct economic de-globalization.'?

Interestingly, the history of the soybean points in the opposite direction. The crop went global in the economically challenging years of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Hermann Bollmann, a Hamburg-based oil miller, became a leading entrepreneur in processing soybeans after the First World War and was known far beyond German borders. He secured his company, the Hansa-Mühle, progressive innovations in processing soybeans, thereby opening outlets for even more soybean-based products, namely lecithin. This fatty substance was sought after for smoothening food textures, emulsifying and homogenizing liquids, and repelling sticky materials, but was until then rather costly as it was principally obtained from egg yolk. Extracting it from soybeans resulted in lower prices and a general increase in its sheer availability. Since then, lecithin has been used to smoothen margarine and chocolate, make leather soft to the touch, and hold candy bars together, among many other uses. In addition, Bollmann and other oil millers constantly promoted soybean meal as concentrate feed. Thanks to the trifold value of the soybean as a resource for obtaining oil, lecithin, and fodder the trade in soybeans with Germany reached its peak in the early 1930s. Oils mills, such as Hansa-Mühle, were among the companies that thrived in times that were otherwise challenging

Around the same time, the soybean also entered the United States, although as a crop plant, not a commodity. Farmers in the Midwest initially grew them for reasons of soil management, making hay, and seed production. Then, in the aftermath of the Great Depression and in the course of the Second World War, the plant’s presence in U.S. farming grew bigger and Americans eventually began to make greater use of the crop. Experts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and state colleges as well as few entrepreneurs convinced farmers to harvest their beans and have them processed into fat and fodder. The chemurgy movement, in which mainly private companies worked on preparing industrial products from domestic raw materials, chimed in and fostered a growing interest in them. Henry Ford was one of the movement’s most prominent advocates, his enthusiasm for soy going so far that in the early 1940s he presented a car whose body was made of soybean-based plastics.

There are several reasons for the advancement of the soybean in the challenging years between the First and Second World Wars, and they vary for Germany and the United States. In the early twentieth century, Germany depended heavily on the import of fatty raw materials to secure food supplies, but in the 1920s the country’s economic and financial situation was particularly tough. The beans’ low price was decisive for why oil millers in Germany preferred soybeans over the import of other resources to serve the demand for cheap fats. In addition, German oil millers were keen to process soybeans because they offered them a notion of independence from other European powers. Soybeans were not the only cheap resource for fat available on the world market; prices for cottonseed and linseed were comparatively low, and their oils’ chemical characteristics were similar to that of the soybean. Germany, however, had no direct access to these or any other overseas oilseeds and fruits, as it had lost its colonies after the First World War. Simultaneously, world trade in resources for vegetable oils and fats remained within the imperial structures established before the war. While British companies preferred cottonseed and linseed from Egypt, French oil millers settled on peanuts from French colonies in West Africa. German oil millers could obtain these resources as well, also for a low price, but preferred the soybean in the assumption that its trade was less controlled, or at least not by a competing great power. The soybean trade was in fact heavily controlled by Japanese and Danish trading companies, but the notion of independence led to the soybean becoming a crucial commodity in agriculture and industry in the Weimar Republic. Processing companies channeled soybean oil into the production of margarine, soap, and various industries, and the protein-rich byproduct to farmers. It was during this period that soybean meal for the first time became a key element in livestock breeding to increase meat production.

Americans did not to the same degree depend on the import of fatty raw materials, at least not in the aftermath of the First World War, when the beans took root on farms in the United States. Nevertheless, also in this case, a crisis-ridden economy was the determining factor for why the soybean found entry into the country’s agriculture at that time. After the First World War, farmers in the Midwest and South struggled to grow the crops— wheat, corn, and cotton—they had specialized in for decades. In order to service demand, they had not followed crop rotations during wartime and were now suffering from the effects of mismanagement and monoculture. Besides ruined soils, the consequences were overproduction and plagues of insects such as the boll weevil in the South or the corn borer in the Midwest. In this situation, farmers discovered the soybean’s ability to enrich their farmlands with nitrogen and thus help to rejuvenate depleted and acidic soils. They were attracted by the idea of simply letting the crop grow and having the plant’s root nodules fertilize the soil. Healthier soils meant getting back on track with well-established cash crops. At first, many farmers did not intend to harvest the beans at all but would let their livestock graze the land, thereby providing the animals with protein-rich fodder.

Their hopes were aptly expressed at the founding of the American Soybean Association (ASA) in Indiana in 1920. The program included field trips to examine cultivation trials and the use of harvesters in yielding soybeans and processing them into hay or silage. Lectures were held and experiences exchanged. Farmers’ wives offered soy-based dishes that they had brought along or prepared on site, even though none seriously considered growing soybeans as food. To break up the program, a quartet of local soy farmers sang an ode to the bean. Its title, “Growing Soybeans to Get Along,” is telling regarding the expectations, and the desperation, of farmers at the time.'?

Although developments in the United States coincided with those in Germany, sources hardly point to transnational networks between experts or businesses from the two countries. It rather seems that most farmers were unaware of the possibility of making a profit from the beans. These disconnections notwithstanding, the result was the same: Germans and Americans discovered the soybean in economically challenging times.

When the history of the soybean in the Western world is understood as one global historical process, the marked influence of governmental actors and political decisions on its spread comes to light. In addition to becoming a commodity in times of general decline and de-globalization, the soybean was also actively pushed by actors beyond businessmen and farmers. Its spread was enabled by institutional structures and political decisions. In the 1910s and 1920s, the soybean became a commodity of economic value in Europe because the Japanese trading company Mitsui & Co. facilitated its transfer from Northeast China. However, the company’s activities were not only backed but also requested by the Japanese government. At that time, Japan was attempting to further its imperialist ambitions on the Asian mainland. This effort was followed by a modernization policy that supported industrialization and international trade. As a result, Mitsui & Co. became one of the strongest Japanese actors in Manchuria besides the South Manchurian Railway (SMR) and the Bank of Chosen. The interplay between these three was enabled, requested, and supported by Japanese imperialism and the policies resulting from it. In Germany, political decisions were equally important. Thanks to trade policies in the Weimar Republic, Germany became the largest soybean-importing country in the late 1920s, and it was through trade agreements with Japan and Manchukuo that Nazi Germany maintained its supply of soybeans until 1941. In the United States, the soybean eventually became a crop not because farmers discovered its manifold benefits but because the government enacted policies that fostered its cultivation during the Great Depression and into the Second World War. In all these cases, the state and other regulatory actors were deeply involved in creating the conditions for the commodification and marketization of the soybean."

The question of human agency in nature, or rather human power over material objects, has recently been challenged in historical writing. In The Matter of History, Timothy LeCain writes on the historical significance of nonhuman objects and develops a neo-materialist theory, giving agency to the objects themselves. He argues inter alia that the material environment has “creative powers” and is of “independent nature.” His approach helped me to imagine that soybeans have power over humans insofar as they now provide us with plentiful amounts of cheap meat and fat. As such, they influence not only the shape of human bodies and the quality of human health but also contribute to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions— from cattle belching methane, for example. On the other hand, was it the soybean that brought itself into this position, or human action? I agree that humans should be viewed as part of nature, but struggle to understand how to weave a coherent story without identifying actors and their intentions. Thus, I rather tend to see things as Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, who also frame our modern world as a material one but argue that humans organize and control things.!° In this book, the global spread of the soybean is seen as the result of human agency. People with various interests and values turned it into the almost invisible yet ubiquitous material that it is today.

Of course, soy production and consumption have shifted since the end of the Second World War. The most obvious example is the expansion of soybean cultivation into Latin America since the 1970s and the accompanying devastation of the rainforest in order to gain more arable land. This and other more recent transitions are excluded from this book for two reasons. First, by the time Brazil and Argentina became major soybean-growing regions, the crop was already fully established in the Western world. I am most interested in how the beans became so widely used in Western industry and agriculture in the first place, and see Latin American soy production more as an expansion of developments, the foundations of which were laid earlier. Second, most Latin American soy (as well as much of today’s U.S.

soy) has been exported to Asia, where it is used to fatten animals. China currently accounts for three-quarters of Brazil’s soy exports. Also, in the United States soybeans are among the top American exports to China. The trade has declined in recent years but was nevertheless worth 14 billion U.S. dollars in 2020 and in 2021, constituting about 40 percent of all agricultural exports from the United States to China.” This transfer undoubtedly leads to a number of important questions about global capitalism, trade wars, and not least human exploitation of nature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Nevertheless, the soybean trade to Asia, mainly China, is diametrical to my question about soy’s journey in the other direction.

Fertilizer, Fat, Fodder (and Food)

With soybeans essentially containing oil and protein, they hold two of the three macronutrients important for human nutrition. The body needs larger amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats than of other nutrients because these are required for energy supplies and to maintain the body’s structure and systems. In theory, soybeans are thus ideal for human consumption; in practice, things are more complex. Soybeans are hard to digest, making it difficult to access their nutrients. They contain a variety of proteins, with one—called a trypsin inhibitor—indeed suppressing the breakdown of the others in the human digestive system. What seems a clever survival strategy for the plant, at least theoretically, results in pain in the upper abdomen in humans, unless the beans are thoroughly cooked. Likewise, certain components cannot be degraded by the human digestive enzymes and pass into the colon, where they are metabolized by anaerobic bacteria, leading to the generation of gas and flatulence. Considering these challenges, humans have had to be inventive since ancient times in order to incorporate soybeans into daily meals, developing methods of processing through which they have become easier to digest. Tofu, soy sauce, and soy milk are merely the best-known examples of a variety of foods which no longer cause digestive problems and are, instead, considered healthy.'® In addition to the bean’s benefits as a food, other uses have been known in Asia since ancient times too. Its oil was highly versatile, as it could both be consumed and used in oil lamps or as a lubricant. The residue from oil extraction, known as soybean cake or meal, was suitable as animal feed and fertilizer. It provided the soil with nitrogen and was shipped to sugar plantations in southern China and paddy fields in Japan, among others.'?

By the late nineteenth century at the latest, Northeast China came to depend heavily on the soybean trade with Japan. Contemporary Western observers often intoned that the crop was Manchuria’s “wealth,” “gold,” and “fortune,” but failed to take into account that it was also the region’s fate. In fact, the increased soybean cultivation was not only triggered by the rising demand for fertilizer, as will be analyzed in Chapter 1. That Manchuria could offer soybeans to Japanese rice farmers in the first place was enabled and later accompanied by the geopolitical and imperial disputes between China, Japan, and Russia which played out in this region. While Japan and Russia claimed ownership of this remote region, the Chinese empire opened the provinces for settlement and development in order to push back the colonial interests of other powers. The new Han Chinese migrants worked the fields to make a living from soybeans, thereby ushering in Manchuria’s agricultural transformation.”

In a global perspective, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are described as the age of New Imperialism. Characteristic to the period were colonial expansions by European powers, the United States, and Japan. In Chapter 2, I show that the soybean was also entangled in this global phenomenon. A prerequisite for the soybean trade with Europe was the Russo-Japanese War, as a result of which Japan expanded its role on the Asian mainland and became the master of the trade routes and trade goods of southern Manchuria. From 1908, thanks to the resourceful action of the Japanese trading company Mitsui & Co., soy appeared in the English port of Hull and since then has been a cheap source of oil for margarine, soap, paints, and many more products. The interplay between imperialism and globalization became a key starting point for the commodification of the soybean in Europe.

Equally important, of course, was strong demand. This was triggered by new technological advances and developments in the processing of fat. When the soybean eventually gained attention as a commodity in Europe, industries paid most attention to it as a resource for cheap and versatile fat. While fats and their liquid equivalent, oils, are despised as a thickener today, they were essential for a variety of foods and nonfood items back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Fat was mainly used in foodstuffs such as margarine, but it had industrial uses as well. Machines such as trains or, later, cars, motorcycles, and airplanes not only needed to be lubricated but also painted and varnished; houses and fences also needed to be given a protective coating; people washed themselves and their clothes with soaps; the beauty industry was making advances with numerous products; waterproof fabrics were just as suitable as oilcloth on the table as they were as clothing for the military; candles were to be found everywhere; and finally, dynamite could be made from the glycerin of fats and oils. For all these and many other products, anything that lubricated and was cheap was in demand. Petroleum, which today is mostly used for these more industrial purposes, was far from ubiquitous then, making resources from animal and vegetable origins essential.*! And soybean oil is still highly valued up to this day. The soybean counts as one of the most important sources of vegetable oil worldwide, whichis why the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations classifies it as an oil crop.