This volume showcases the intersection of two fields whose development has been remarkably dynamic in the last few decades – the history of agriculture on the one hand and the history of science and technology on the other. The group of contributors includes historians, several sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars. While the volume focuses on metropolitan France, most of the contributions consider regional specificities or transnational connections. The subtitle of the volume signals that geographical scope seemed less crucial to the editors than chronology. As their introduction suggests, the volume’s premise is that agriculture turned into a key site of (techno)scientific interventions from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Even as individual chapters eschew teleological narratives of agricultural »modernization«, this overall periodization dovetails with the theme of J. L. Anderson’s contribution to the new Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History (2024), titled »The Growing Power of Agricultural Science«.

Most of the ten chapters in Sciences, techniques et agriculture interrogate the power of agronomy and zootechnics, two fields of knowledge that became well-defined scientific disciplines over the course of the nineteenth century. Agathe Giraud, for instance, argues that new theories and methods of breeding and raising sheep emerged from a »dialog between shepherds and scholars« (100) in the decades around 1800. To be sure, the perspectives of scientists are generally much easier to reconstruct from the historical record than those of agricultural practitioners. Pierre Cornu’s chapter sidesteps this difficulty by uncovering French agronomists’ dialogs with colleagues from other countries, state bureaucrats, and international agencies such as the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), rather than with peasants or farmers. This approach enables Cornu to explain the dramatic mid-twentieth-century improvement in the transnational reputation of French zootechnics. By contrast, Clémence Gadenne-Rosfelder tackles the methodological problem head-on. Through recourse to oral history, she analyzes how Breton pig farmers selectively appropriated the technoscientific innovations of the postwar decades: instead of falling in line with the industrialization of agriculture in any simple way, they engaged in frequent tinkering (bricolage) with the architecture and interior set-up of their pigpens. The volume as a whole shows that the power of agricultural science was never that of a steamroller; even in its productivist triumphs, it was not a flattening and homogenizing force.

This general observation applies even more strongly to relevant sciences and technologies other than those of agronomy and zootechnics. The chapter by Lucas Kuntz is a fascinating case study of »non-usages« (113): it reveals just how little the early electrification of rural Burgundy circa 1900 transformed agricultural work, despite the wildly optimistic scenarios touted at the time by builders of hydropower plants and other promoters of electricity. In several other chapters, the question of ecology looms large. In her chapter on the »growing scientific interest in viticulture« (46) in early modern France (and especially after 1750), Stéphanie Lachaud argues that early agronomists’ attention to climate, soil, and various other factors was proto‑ecological. As for the twentieth-century scientific discipline of ecology, Charlène Bouvier discusses how it inspired some of the post-1945 agronomists who sought to bend the principles of their monocrop‑focused field to the specific challenges of understanding and managing grassland. That said, the volume’s final, co-authored chapter offers a stark reminder of how the defenders of France’s hegemonic »technostructure« (201) managed to minimize the influence of ecological and environmentalist discourses on agricultural policy in the 1960s. Tracking both the initially buoyant reception of Rachel Carson’s epochal Silent Spring in France and the subsequent campaign to discredit her work or at least deny its relevance to French agriculture, the authors compellingly revisit the extent and limits of ecology’s social power.

Hence, if we discard the simplistic image of science as a steamroller, what other metaphors or concepts might help us grasp more adequately the force field of science, technology, and agriculture? Aside from being broadly indebted to half a century’s worth of insights from Science and Technology Studies, this volume does not propose a unified answer to that question – and that is arguably a good thing. It means, in any case, that readers will find a panoply of intriguing solutions across different chapters. For instance, Bouvier draws on Ludwik Fleck’s concepts of thought style and thought collective to trace how postwar scientists gradually developed a distinct »agronomy of grassland« (148). Jean‑Baptiste Vérot’s case study of the eighteenth-century naturalist Pierre‑Augustin Boissier de Sauvages makes excellent use of the notion of réduction en art, primarily elaborated by Hélène Vérin. As Vérot argues, Boissier de Sauvages appropriated, tested, and re-ordered southern French silk-farmers’ existing knowledge in order to »reduce« it to a supposedly superior method of sericulture that landowners might then teach their workers. To add one more example, Micaël Belleaubre’s chapter introduces the concepts of interpenetration, intrication, and experimentation. He thus distinguishes among the different ways in which a wide range of social groups – from rural artisans and notables to Parisian businessmen – interacted in the development of new distillation technology for brandy, especially cognac, across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In this undeniably rich volume, the relative under-representation of the nineteenth century appears problematic. Two of the three contributions that deal at least in part with nineteenth-century history (Belleaubre and Kuntz) are also among those that do not focus on what we might consider the core fields of agricultural science. Therefore, a gap opens up between the chapters on Enlightenment-era agromanie and those on the fully-fledged disciplinary landscape of twentieth-century agronomy and zootechnics. This gap seems all the more surprising because two of the volume’s three editors, Fabien Knittel and Corinne Marache, have worked extensively on nineteenth-century rural France for two decades. Their previous publications are among those that readers will want to consult for a deeper understanding of how agriculture and its bodies of knowledge transformed in the century following the French Revolution. Apart from that chronological weak link, however, the volume represents a commendable and sophisticated effort to enrich the historiography of modern agriculture by applying the thematic lens of scientific and technical knowledge.