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Twenty years ago, Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael published a highly original, influential and—subsequently—controversial article:‘Agriculture and the state system: the rise and fall of national agricultures, 1870 to the present’(Friedmann and McMichael 1989). Over the following years, both Friedmann and McMichael, along with other collaborators, further developed their insights, challenging agri-food scholars with a new way of framing agri-food power relations as well as providing an approach for agricultural research and policy analysis that moved food from the periphery to the centre of wider theories about society and interpretations of the history of capitalism.

Through the early 1990s, their argument and its significance—described more fully below—gave rise to numerous attempts to both validate and extend their theory and position before a strong critique of the food regimes approach in the mid-90s …