Reservoirs of Fertility: Colonialism and Britain's Turn to ‘Food Security’, 1945–65

ABSTRACT This article examines Britain's post‐war turn from the world's leading food importer to being largely self‐sufficient in food, as a key process within the transition from first to second global food regime. It focuses on the special soil fertility resources mobilised to implement this transition in British agriculture; looking first at the economic, political and military strategic factors which drove the heavy use and stockpiling of chemical fertilisers; and then at Britain's colonial phosphate rock networks. This article affirms the value of a concrete and historicised theoretical approach to Food Regimes Analysis, to appreciate secondary dynamics and regional differences. By employing an archive‐centred historical method with close attention to the role of the state and political economy, this article reveals the endurance of formal colonialism and colonial forms of exploitation—alongside the development of a US‐led international state system—in determining the hierarchy of states under the Second Food Regime.