"Having grappled with a complex, sometimes contradictory, and often obscure corpus of data spanning multiple fields of scholarship, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date summary of the dispersal of ancient crops across South Asia and the eastern Mediterranean."--Robert N. Spengler III, author of Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat "Accessible, rigorous, and interdisciplinary, Muthukumaran's Tropical Turn offers an absorbing plant-based historical journey from tropical Asia to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. This lucid, thought-provoking account of agricultural plant migrations--which variously affected labor regimes, landscapes, and cultural traditions--demonstrates how fascinating and relevant to understanding our globalized world crop histories can be."--Daniel Fuks, Research Associate, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge