1 Review Innovation, Agrobiodiversity, and the Global Nature of National Agriculture Graham Dutfield School of Law, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom E-mail address: g.m.dutfield@leeds.ac.uk Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture Courtney Fullilove, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (2017) 280 pp., Price $40.00 cloth, ISBN: 9780226454863 Promoting Sustainable Innovations in Plant Varieties Mrinalini Kochupillai, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2016) xxi + 335 pp., Price 114,99 € hardcover, ISBN: 978-3-662-52795-5 Traveling across the vast continental steppes of northern Kazakhstan, as the present reviewer recently did, the immensity of this ecoregion strikes one with force. The steppes stretch from the Danube Delta through Ukraine and southern Russia to the Altai Mountains bordering Mongolia at its eastern margins. The southern borders include the Black and Caspian Seas, the Caucasus Mountains, and the drylands of central Kazakhstan. To the north is European Russia and Siberia. Whether we talk of ecoregions of such magnitude, of single farms, or even buildings, as Courtney Fullilove’s book amply demonstrates, borders, margins, frontiers and walls matter too. Mrinalini Kochupillai’s book focuses mainly on India, and has nothing to say about the steppes, or the American prairies for that matter. But the perspectives of the two authors, despite their very different scholarly styles and approaches, are in many respects convergent. Starting with Fullilove’s book, it seems counterintuitive that a book about American agriculture should start in Armenia and take us to distant countries especially Russia, various ex-Soviet republics, and a few in the Middle East. But a book focused on seeds and the knowledge and expertise of many generations of farmers, especially one of this quality, serves to remind us that there is little about agriculture or food production whose origin or present character can be confined within national boundaries. Seeds, plants and associated knowledge are very hard things to “fix” in time and space (see also Osseo-Asare, 2014). They rarely have clear and unmistakeable origins. But whether they do or not, “somewhere else” rather than “here” is more likely to form at least part of any genuine answer as to where they