CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Pojar, Vojtěch |
|---|---|
| Title | Quality over Quantity: Expert Knowledge and the Politics of Food in Prague, 1914-1918 |
| Summary | In this thesis I analyze the interaction between expert knowledge and the biopolitics of urban political elites in the Bohemian Lands during the First World War. More specifically, focusing on the crucial issue of provisioning of cities in the context of an increasing food shortage, I examine the impact of the heated debates in agricultural science, physiology, and eugenics on the way how the urban political elites and other local actors conceptualized their practices concerning the supplying with food of the largest urban agglomeration in the Bohemian Lands, Prague. At the same time, I illuminate how the rising challenges of food politics reshaped the scientific debates. Thus, linking urban history and history of science, and drawing on a wide range of scientific periodicals, popular science pamphlets, general magazines and archival documents produced by Prague’s political elites, this thesis aims to revisit both the interpretations of municipal authorities’ policies during the war and of the development of scientific disciplines that informed them. Arguing against the received view which stresses the exclusive influence of the central state authorities in shaping of the food politics in Bohemian cities, the main contention of this thesis is that the provisioning of urban areas was a result of a complex negotiation between a wide variety of agents, operating not only at the imperial, but also at the local level. Furthermore, I argue that the policies of these diverse agents were informed by competing, and often conflicting expert knowledge. At the same time, relating the development of agricultural science, physiology, and eugenics to the urban context, I suggest a different reading of the history of these scientific fields that stresses discontinuities, rather than continuities of their development during the war. All in all, I argue that in the truncated public sphere in Bohemia during the war the experts emerged as major actors intervening into and shaping the public debates. |
| Supervisor | Hall, Karl |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/pojar_vojtech.pdf |
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