Global Mennonite Faith, Farms, and Modernities: Reflections on Mennonite Farmers

Royden Loewen’s personal bibliography demonstrates his expansive view of Mennonite and agricultural history. From the start with his big book, Blumenort: A Mennonite Community in Transition, 1874-1983 (1983), about a small town in southern Manitoba, to his general moving between transnational history of Mennonites in Manitoba and Nebraska, to Mennonites moving back and forth between Canada and points south in the western hemisphere, to now, finally circling the globe. It is a natural progression of his interests and skills as a historian and writer, and whether it is a small town or the world, he has made place central to the Mennonite story. As much as we are taught not to judge a book by its cover, I confess, they draw me in. So it is with the cover of this book. A photograph of two Mennonite men, their tractors’ steel wheels deep in the Bolivian soil. For a book about farming, soil, land, and place, the majority of the photograph is filled with sky, reminding us of how small and tethered even global spaces are. Mennonites have long been farmers, and until now, that has not been treated in a global context. Loewen has produced an ambitious book on Mennonite farming in seven different locations around the world: the Netherlands, United States, Canada, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Russia, and Bolivia. It is a book that is spaciously written despite being filled with a constellation of seven microhistories. Anticipating critical reaction, Loewen acknowledges he does not have expert knowledge of each of these locations, but he assembled an impressive team of young scholars with appropriate historical and linguistic backgrounds to do interviews, held a round of seminars to consider how to work with the broad contours of Mennonite, environmental, and agricultural histories, and Loewen himself visited most of the places prior to the project, gaining some familiarity with each location. He came to this project primarily as a scholar, but also as a farmer. Armed with theoretical backing, a methodological foundation, and the credentials as a Mennonite scholar and farmer, it was time to tell seven stories, from the ground up, over the twentieth century. Loewen argues that localized Mennonite engagement with the environment always takes place in a global context, however, the connections between the local and global are different everywhere. Moreover, whether in the Global North or South and having experienced modernity in vastly different ways, Loewen maintains that Mennonite farmers “tended to it as a place, holistically…they never just farmed in a place; they farmed the place” (13). The enormous challenge then is how to coherently research and tell this seven-part global history. He sketches this process out in a helpful introduction where the project is theoretically grounded by such global environmental scholars as J. R. McNeill, who argued for the unevenness of such histories in different places at the same time. Loewen produces case studies of his seven locations for which literary and oral history sources are comparatively explored. A particular strength of the book is in his finding a way to have the voices of people on the ground heard on issues of religious faith, daily life, and the challenges both local and global in the twentieth century. Over the course of eight chapters, Loewen demonstrates not only that there was significant change at different rates in different places, but also that none of the stories are simple. An interconnected global history of time and space is traced from the Netherlands during the Reformation to migrations in Europe on account of persecutions and government enticement, then across the Atlantic to North America, and then further migrations to …