Tuberous Entanglements and the Potato Empire

This essay on the social, ecological, and political history of potatoes is the fifth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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Born in the 1920s in East Polesie, along the Prypiat’ River in southern Belarus, my grandmother lived through revolution, World War II and Nazi occupation, postwar austerity, the Chernobyl catastrophe, and the uncertainties of Belarusian independence. She was born into a poor peasant family whose stories of violence under Russian imperial rule shaped her worldview and later my own upbringing. Across these ruptures, she consistently grew potatoes, as her ancestors had done. She stored them in pits, sorted them for replanting, and spoke of them not as mere food, but as a condition of survival.

As a child, I remember being mesmerized by our cellar, where potatoes covered the ground. For her, they were dependable—a companion species anchoring life amid uncertainty. Each spring, as my parents prepared our dacha (seasonal country cottage) for the summer season, her first questions was: How many potatoes will you grow?

Beginning from her practices, I understand the Belarusian potato as part of a multispecies household—planted, tended, and relied upon across generations. This perspective raises broader questions: How did a plant domesticated in the Andes become central to survival in East Europe? And what kinds of historical entanglements—and possible solidarities—does this trajectory reveal?

A Borderland Staple

In Belarus, the potato is often called the “second bread,” a phrase that reflects its deep integration into everyday life. The country ranks among the highest in per capita potato consumption, with around 160 kilograms consumed per person annually. Potatoes appear on tables—with more than 300 recorded dishes, in folklore, and in jokes that label Belarusians “potato people.” While often derogatory, shaped by imperial stereotypes of peasant backwardness, this nickname signals the crop’s role in Belaruisans’ survival through wars, famines, and poverty. These overlapping meanings—intimacy, necessity, and stigma—reveal the potato’s complex place in Belarusian history. 

This staple is the outcome of a long imperial trajectory. The potato moved through layered networks: from Andean domestication to Spanish colonial extractions, to Western European botanical gardens and scientific institutions, to Prussian and Russian imperial agricultural reforms, and finally, into peasant fields in East Europe—adopted sometimes willingly, sometimes forcefully. At each stage, the plant was transformed biologically, culturally, and politically.

This trajectory reflects Belarus as a borderland ecology of empire. Situated between Western Europe and Russia, Belarusian lands have been absorbed into imperial formations, including the Russian Empire since the eighteenth century and later the Soviet Union. Earlier, Belarusian peasants occupied a marginal position within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where increasing constraints culminated in the intensification of serfdom and the incorporation of the region into an extractive agrarian periphery.

Within these formations, the potato mediated between imperial governance and everyday survival. More than a crop, it became a reliable presence under unstable conditions.

I approach the potato in Belarus as an imperial mediator, a multispecies companion, and a participant in histories of domination and endurance, revealing both the workings of imperial power and the forms of resilience developed within and against it. It reshaped diets, agricultural practices, and labor regimes, enabling both imperial control and peasant resilience. Thinking with the potato reveals how empire operates through everyday life—and how endurance emerges within and against it.

In developing this approach, I draw on In the Shadow of the Palms, in which Sophy Chao shows that plants implicated in colonial expansion, like the palm tree in Indonesia, can also become beings with whom people form pragmatic, ambivalent relations. Similarly, tracing the potato’s trajectory invites us to imagine forms of solidarity grounded in shared botanical entanglements shaped by empires.

Potato Origins and Imperial Circulations

Plants have often been treated as passive resources in Western thought, a view that has shaped scientific and historical knowledge.  Recent scholarship, instead, highlights how plants actively participate in imperial expansion, governance, and economic systems—often mediating relations between states and everyday life.

Before the sixteenth century, potatoes were cultivated exclusively in the Andes, where Indigenous communities domesticated thousands of distinct varieties adapted to specific ecological niches. These varieties differed in color, texture, taste, and resistance to frost, drought, and disease, reflecting the extreme diversity of high-altitude environments. Indigenous farmers also developed sophisticated preservation techniques, such as freeze-drying (chuño), allowing potatoes to be stored for long periods.

European colonization violently appropriated this knowledge, transforming the potato embedded in Indigenous lifeways into a global commodity. Spanish colonizers extracted the potato from its Andean context and introduced it to Europe, where it circulated through botanical gardens and elite experimental plots before becoming a subsistence crop. In this process, the plant’s diversity was significantly reduced.

European agriculture favored uniform, high-yield varieties, adapted to temperate, lowland climates and suited to storage and large-scale agriculture rather than for the broad ecological adaptability and taste variety prized in the Andes. These European potatoes were typically less diverse in color, shape, and taste.

By the time the potato reached Europe’s East, it carried layered imperial histories: colonial extractions, scientific classification, and Enlightenment agronomy. Russian imperial authorities added another layer by using it to govern occupied borderlands such as Belarus.

Imperial Agriculture

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Russian Empire promoted potato to address famines, stabilize rural populations, and standardize agriculture. These efforts were often coercive, enforced through quotas and penalties. The potato thus functioned as a governing tool—a technique of imperial “improvement,” aimed at disciplining bodies, land, and time.

Peasants, however, did not adopt it passively. Potatoes circulated through horizontal exchanges—shared among neighbors, traded in local markets, passed along kinship networks—that exceeded state directives. Cultivation practices emerged through observation and experimentation, allowing peasants to integrate the crop relationally, in terms of taste, yield, labor demands, and social meaning.

At the same time, perceptions of the potato diverged across social groups and over time. Initially a botanical curiosity and, in some contexts, a delicacy, the potato gradually became associated with rural culture and peasant life. While elites came to dismiss it as a low-status food, peasants valued its adaptability and yields.

At the same time, peasants resisted the imposition of potatoes. Their resistance, widely recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was often characterized as superstition. But it was so much more than that. Rumors that potatoes caused illness, moral decline, or social disorder functioned as critiques of imperial intrusion into everyday life. When peasants refused to plant potatoes or destroyed the imposed fields, they resisted the authority behind their introduction. In regions incorporated into the Russian Empire, including Belarusian lands, opposition often emerged directly in response to coercive policies.

The politics of edibility became inseparable from the politics of empire. Potatoes were embraced when they met local needs and circulated through familiar social networks but resisted when imposed as instruments of control.

Potato Worlds

Potato also reshaped environments and livelihoods. In the Russian Empire and Europe’s East, forest edges, marshlands, and poorly drained soils—once used for grazing or foraging—were converted into fields. At the same time, traditional crops such as rye, barley, and turnips declined, as the potato’s high yields encouraged dependence on this single, introduced species. This shift increased vulnerability to ecological and political pressures.

The potato also reconfigured household economies and labor relations. Because it could be grown in small plots, its cultivation expanded in household fields and kitchen gardens, intensifying gendered divisions of labor. Women, largely responsible for subsistence agriculture, undertook much of this work: selecting seed potatoes, managing planting cycles, storing harvests, and ensuring year-round food supply. Despite its importance, this labor remained largely invisible in official accounts, which focused on yields, policies, and male landowners.

Peasants also developed intimate multispecies relations with the potato, selecting varieties for taste or resilience and maintaining yields despite soil exhaustion. These practices reflected care, attention, and a recognition of the potato as a living participant in daily life.

Partners for Resilience

The potato became a beloved staple in Belarus through crises. During food shortages, wars, and political turmoil, it proved indispensable. In the nineteenth century, potatoes often provided the only calories for Belarusian peasants. In these moments, the potato was less a symbol of imperial authority and more a companion for survival.

This role deepened in the twentieth century. During the Second World War, potatoes grown in forest clearings sustained families and partisan fighters. In Soviet collective farms, where grain requisitioning often left households undersupplied, private potato plots became acts of quiet resistance. Naming potato a “second bread” likely became common in this context.

Women again played a central role in these survival strategies, managing food security under these difficult conditions. Their labor sustained households and preserved adaptive practices across generations.

In this sense, the potato became kin—not metaphorically, but materially. It shaped routines, guided strategies for endurance, and became part of multispecies households that sustained life under oppressive conditions. The potato illustrates how plants can be active allies in collective resilience, not simply resources imposed or managed by empire.

Botanical Imaginations of Solidarity

From these histories emerges a botanical imagination of solidarity—a material connection grounded in uneven entanglements with a plant shaped by empire.

The potato’s movement materializes relations between regions: domesticated in the Andes, it became embedded in Belarusian foodways, in dishes such as draniki (potato pancakes), babka (potato pudding or casserole), or kolduny (grated potato “patties” filled with savory meat, fried or baked until golden).

These connections reflect not sameness but historically connected strategies of endurance. They are also asymmetrical. Belarusian reliance on the potato was made possible by colonial dispossession in the Andes. Its global spread was driven by extraction, not reciprocity. A botanical imagination of solidarity must therefore attend to both connection and inequality.

Potatoes are living archives of extraction, adaptation, and care. Their presence in fields, kitchens, and storage spaces anchors these histories in everyday life.

This framework also offers a practical orientation for research. It encourages tracing the imperial trajectories of staple crops across regions, foregrounding Indigenous knowledge, and examining how unequal pasts shape present food systems. It can inform collaborations among scholars, artists, and agricultural practitioners working to preserve crop diversity and resist industrial monoculture. Solidarity becomes a situated practice—of researching, cultivating, and relating—that acknowledges uneven histories while opening possibilities for more just futures.

The Second Bread and the Futures It Holds

Today, Belarus is an important potato‑producing country, and its agricultural identity is deeply tied to this crop. This is visible in everyday practices, household gardens, seasonal rhythms of planting and harvesting, and widely consumed dishes that anchor the potato in daily life.

At the same time, the potato also circulates as a national symbol that has been mobilized within contemporary authoritarian political discourse, with support from Russia. Its familiarity and cultural centrality make it available to different forms of appropriation. State narratives emphasize agrarian tradition and self-sufficiency to legitimate the authoritarian regime and its close ties to Russian imperial influence. In this context, the potato can be read not only as a material staple shaped by imperial histories, but also as a symbol whose meanings are actively contested in the present.

Potato fields stretching across the countryside are a living reminder of imperial agricultural policies, peasant ingenuity, and ecological adaptation. They also invite us to imagine futures grounded in relational, ethical, and multispecies ways of living.

Returning to my grandmother’s practices clarifies these histories. The potato was not a silent presence as it had seemed to me as a child, but an ordinary and constant one—so embedded it could be overlooked.  It structured daily routines, anchored strategies of endurance, and sustained households through war, scarcity, and political upheaval. Through practices of planting, storing, and cooking, the potato became part of a multispecies household that supported survival across generations.

Seen in this light, what appears as a simple tuber is a dense node of global entanglements. Attending to these histories reveals how everyday food practices are shaped by empire and ecology. Thinking with the potato invites a botanical imagination of solidarity grounded in shared—though unequal—histories of endurance. Such solidarity recognizes how uneven histories of extraction, adaptation, and care continue to shape the present.

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Featured image: Women and children peeling potatoes on the doorstep of their house. Vasilevichy, Homel region, south-eastern Belarus, 1911. Photo by Belarusian ethnographer Isaac Serbau. Found and published by Darya Zorka. Reprinted with permission.

Tatsiana Shchurko is Assistant Professor of Instruction and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of South Florida, where her teaching and research focus on transnational feminism, anti-colonial feminist theory, and Black feminist internationalism. A queer feminist scholar and activist from Belarus, her work explores the intersections of imperialism, Eurasian knowledge production, and feminist solidarities across borders. Digital project. Contact.