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ABOUT THE EDITORS
Jonathan Curry-Machado is founding editor and coordinator of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk and Associate Fellow of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of London). His research ranges from the history, identity, and influence of migrant engineers in nineteenth-century Cuba, in the context of transnational networks of trade, capital, and technology through comparative study of Cuba and Java and the global transfer of cane varieties to rural society on the sugar frontier in the Hispanic Caribbean.
Jean Stubbs is co-founder of the Commodities of Empire Project, Associate Fellow of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of London) and professor emerita of London Metropolitan University, where she directed the Caribbean Studies Center. She is a member of the Academy of History of Cuba and past president of the regional Caribbean Studies Association and UK Society for Caribbean Studies. Since her early monograph Tobacco on the Periphery, recently out in a new expanded edition, she has published widely on Cuba, her specialist interests spanning tobacco, labour, gender, race, class, nation, and migration.
William Gervase Clarence-Smith, emeritus professor at SOAS University of London and former chief editor of the Journal of Global History (Cambridge University Press), is one of the core team of the Commodities of Empire Project. He also coordinates, with Ed Emery, the Interdisciplinary Animal Studies Initiative at SOAS University of London. He has written widely on a number of commodities, notably tree crops and animals, with particular reference to Africa and Southeast Asia. He has also published on the history of colonialism, diasporas and migration, sexuality, religion, labour, climate, manufacturing, and transport.
Jelmer Vos is lecturer in Global History at the University of Glasgow and a member of the Commodities of Empire core team. He is the author of Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). He has also published several articles and book chapters on slavery, rubber, and coffee in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Angola, as well as the eighteenth-century ivory and slave trades from Cote d'Ivoire. He is currently writing a monograph on the history of coffee cultivation in Angola (James Currey, forthcoming).
CONTRIBUTORS
Catia Antunes is a Professor of History of Global Economic Networks at the Institute of History, Leiden University. Her publications include Pursuing Empire: Brazilians, the Dutch and the Portuguese in Brazil and the South Atlantic, 1620s-1660s (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2022), and Merchant Cultures: A Global Approach to Spaces, Representations and Worlds of Trade, 1500-1800 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2022).
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies at Princeton University, with research interests in African American Art and Art of the Black Diaspora. Her publications include Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
Karl Heinz Arenz is an Associate Professor at the Federal University of Para, with research interests in Amazonian colonial social history and popular cultures. His publications include ‘Valente para servir’: O padre Jodo Felipe Bettendorff e a Amazonia portuguesa no século XVII (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: Caravana, 2022).
Ulbe Bosma is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History and Professor of International Comparative Social History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is a founding coordinator of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative. His publications include The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023), and The Making of a Periphery: How Island Southeast Asia Became a Mass Exporter of Labor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
John L. Brooke is Emeritus Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, Warner Woodring Chair in American History, and Professor of Anthropology, and former Director of the Ohio State University Center for Historical Research. His publications include Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Stéphane Castonguay is Canada Research Chair in Environmental History and Professor of History at the Université du Québec a Trois-Riviéres. His publications include The Government of Natural Resources: Science, Territory, and State Power in Quebec, 1867-1939 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2021), and Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities, and Space in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).
Rafael Chambouleyron is Professor of History at the Federal University of Para, with research interests in the colonial Amazon rainforest and frontier. His publications include Rivers and Shores: Fluviality and the Occupation of Colonial Amazonia (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Baywolf Press, 2019).
Paul S. Ciccantell is Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University, with research interests in comparative sociology, sociology of development, and environmental sociology. His publications include Migration, Racism and Labor Exploitation in the World-System (New York: Routledge, 2021), and Globalization and the Race for Resources (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Jonathan Curry-Machado is an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of London), and founding editor and coordinator of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project. His publications include Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Cuban Sugar Industry: Transnational Networks and Engineering Migrants in Mid-Nineteenth Century Cuba (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
William Gervase Clarence-Smith is Emeritus Professor at SOAS, University of London, and former chief editor of the Journal of Global History. He has written widely on a number of commodities, with particular reference to Africa and Southeast Asia. His publications include The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914 (London: Routledge, 2000).
Jim Clifford is Associate Professor of Environmental History at the University of Saskatchewan, with particular interest in the application of digital methods including historical GIS, text mining, and augmented reality to the study of industrialization and global commodities. His publications include West Ham and the River Lea: A Social and Environmental History of London's Industrialized Marshland, 1839-1914 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017).
Hanne Cottyn is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions Global Fellow with Ghent University, Belgium, and the University of Tarapaca, Chile, researching ‘More-thanHuman Histories of Rural Landscapes in the Andes. Her publications include Las luchas sociales por la tierra en América Latina: Un andlisis historico, comparativo y global (Lima, Peru: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2016).
Helen Cowie is Professor of History at the University of York, where she researches and teaches the history of animals. Her publications include Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Ana Crespo-Solana is Professor and Scientific Researcher in the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and director of the ForSEAdiscovery project, with research interests in maritime archaeology and historical GIS. Her publications include Heritage and the Sea: Maritime History and Archaeology of the Global Iberian World (15th-18th centuries) (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022), and Mercaderes atlanticos: redes del comercio flamenco y holandés entre Europa y el Caribe (Cordoba: UCO Press, 2009).
Anne Dietrich is a Researcher at the University of Leipzig, with research interests in the history of global commodities: in particular, the provision and consumption of coffee, sugar, and tropical fruits in the GDR, studying trade relations with socialist-oriented countries in the Global South (especially Ethiopia and Cuba). Her publications include Navigating Socialist Encounters: Moorings and (Dis)entanglements between Africa and East Germany during the Cold War (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).
Alexander Engel is Interim Professor at the Department of History at LMU Munich and Privatdozent at the Institute for Economic and Social History, Georg-August University G6ttingen, with research interests in the history of markets, prices, and commerce, globalisation and colonial economies, and the history of capitalism. His publications include Risikodkonomie. Eine Geschichte des Borsenterminhandels (Frankfurt, Germany: Campus, 2021), and Farben der Globalisierung. Die Entstehung moderner Markte fiir Farbstoffe, 1500-1900 (Frankfurt, Germany: Campus, 2009).
Suraiya Faroghi is Professor of History at Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul, with research interests in early modern Ottoman social history: in particular, women and artisan production. Her publications include The Ottoman and Mughal Empires: Social History in the Early Modern World (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), and A Cultural History of the Ottomans: The Imperial Elite and Its Artefacts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016).
Leida Fernandez-Prieto is Distinguished Researcher in the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), with research interests in the history of agricultural science and Caribbean environmental history. Her publications include Espacio de Poder, Ciencia y Agricultura en Cuba (Madrid/ Sevilla: CSIC/Diputacion de Sevilla, 2019), and Cuba Agricola: Mito y Tradicion, 1878-1920 (Madrid: Departamento de Historia de América, 2005).
Joao Figueiroa-Rego is Vice-Director and Senior Researcher at Centre of Humanities, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Nova University Lisbon, with research interests in tobacco in the Iberian world. His publications include El tabaco y la esclavitud en la rearticulacién imperial ibérica (s.XV-XX) (Evora, Portugal: Publicagées de CIDEHUS, 2019).
Luly Fischer is Associate Professor of Rural and Environmental Law at the Federal University of Para, with research interests in property and land use in the Amazon.
Sandip Hazareesingh is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Open University. He was founding co-director of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project. His publications include Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-commodities in Global History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Eric Herschthal is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah, with research interests in slavery and abolition in the Atlantic World, the history of science and technology, and climate history. His publications include The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).
Karin Hofmeester is Director of Research at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam and Professor of Jewish Culture at Antwerp University. She is also project leader of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, and is researching diamonds as a global commodity. Her publications include Handbook Global History of Work (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), and Luxury in Global Perspective: Objects and Practices, 1600-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Sabrina Joseph is Provost and Chief Academic Officer of the American University in Dubai, with research interests in the Middle East and environmental history, encompassing land use and natural resource management. Her publications include Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion: Social, Ecological and Political Implications from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Day (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Jed O. Kaplan is Professor of Geoscience at the University of Calgary, with research interests in human-environment interactions, palaeoenvironmental change, regional climate and land-atmosphere interactions, and land use and anthropogenic land cover change.
Santiago de Luxan Meléndez is Emeritus Professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, with research interests in Iberian tobacco. His publications include Povoamento, tabaco, acucar e arte na Historia das ilhas do Atlantico Médio (Azores: CHAM, 2021), and El tabaco y la esclavitud en la rearticulacion imperial ibérica (s.XVXX) (Evora, Portugal: Cidehus, 2019).
Harro Maat is Associate Professor at Wageningen University, with research interests in social patterns and institutional arrangements emerging from practices of growing food and other agricultural products. His publications include Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-commodities in Global History (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Joshua MacFadyen is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities at the University of Prince Edward Island, with research interests in history and current problems of food and energy systems, and the application of new digital humanities tools. His publications include Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018).
Joyce A. Madancy is Professor of History at Union College, with research interests in state-society relations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. Her publications include The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Leonardo Marques is a Professor in History at the Fluminense Federal University, Niterdi, with research interests in Atlantic slave trade and the history of commodities. His publications include Historia das Mercadorias: Trabalho, Meio Ambiente e Capitalismo Mundial (ss XVI-XIX) (Sao Leopoldo, Brazil: Casa Leiria, 2023), and The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
Paul R. Mullins was Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and former president of the Society for Historical Archaeology. His publications include The Archaeology of Consumer Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011). Paul died shortly before the publication of this Handbook.
Ghulam A. Nadri is Professor of History at Georgia State University, with research interests in indigo and Indian history. His publications include The Political Economy of Indigo in India, 1580-1930: A Global Perspective (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2016).
Franziska Ollendorf is a Researcher at the Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, in the Sustainable Land Use in Developing Countries working group. Her research interests include the political economy of cocoa, deforestation-free supply chains, agroecology, and food system transitions.
David Pretel is Lecturer in Global History and Beatriu Pinos-MSCA-COFUND Fellow at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. His research interests include the global history of Latin American commodities, intellectual property rights, and the entangled histories of technology, capitalism, and the environment in the Caribbean. His publications include Technology and Globalisation: Networks of Experts in World History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1640-1914 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Jonathan E. Robins is Associate Professor of Global History at Michigan Technological University, with research interests in agricultural commodities and the industries they serve. His publications include Oil Palm: A Global History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), and Cotton and Race across the Atlantic: Britain, Africa, and America, 1900-1920 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016).
Corey Ross is Director of the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel, with research interests in imperialism and global environmental history in the 19th and 20th centuries. His publications include Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Francois Ruf is Researcher at the Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development (CIRAD), with research interests in cocoa, sustainability, and food security. His publications include From Slash and Burn to Replanting: Green Revolutions in the Indonesian Uplands (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004), and Booms et crises du cacao—Les vertiges de lor brun (Paris: Karthala, 1995).
Vicent Sanz Rozalén is Professor of Contemporary History at the Jaume I University, Castellé de la Plana, with research interests in tobacco and the social history of work. His publications include Resistencia, delito y dominacion en el mundo esclavo. Microhistorias de la esclavitud atldntica (s.XVI-XIX) (Albolote, Spain: Comares, 2019), and Social History of Spanish Labour (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
David A. Smith is Professor of Sociology at University of California—Irvine, with research interests in comparative sociology, world systems analysis, and development. His publications include Nature, Raw Materials, and Political Economy (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005).
Jean Stubbs is Professor Emerita of London Metropolitan University, and an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (University of London). She was founding co-director of the Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project. Her publications include Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860-1958 (London: Amaurea Press, 2023).
Steven C. Topik is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California— Irvine, with research interests in Latin America and World history through the study of commodities, especially coffee. His publications include From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), and The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Enrique Uribe Leitz is a Researcher at the Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development (CIRAD), and completed his doctorate at Wageningen University, researching sustainability in global cocoa commodity chains. His publications include EU Development Cooperation and Ethical Certification Schemes: Impact, Transparency and Traceability (Brussels: European Union, 2021).
Marieke van Erp leads the Digital Humanities Research Lab at the KNAW Humanities Cluster, working on strengthening computational methods in humanities research. In 2023, she was awarded an ERC Consolidated grant to research improving language and semantic web technologies to create better knowledge graphs for humanities research.
Eric Vanhaute is Professor of Economic and Social History and World History at Ghent University, where he heads the Communities, Comparisons, Connections research group. He is a founding coordinator of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative. His publications include Peasants in World History (New York: Routledge, 2021).
Jelmer Vos is Lecturer in Global History at the University of Glasgow, with research interests in slavery, rubber, and coffee in Angola. His publications include Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860-1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).
Elizabeth Zanoni is Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University, with research interests in the history of food and migration. Her publications include Migrant Marketplaces: Food and Italians in North and South America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
Michael Zeuske is Emeritus Professor of Iberian and Latin American History (University of Cologne), and Senior Research Professor and Principal Investigator at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, with research interests in micro- and global histories of slaveries. His publications include Handbuch Geschichte der Sklaverei. Eine Globalgeschichte von den Anfangen bis heute, 2 vols. (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), and Resistencia, delito y dominacion en el mundo esclavo. Microhistorias de la esclavitud atlantica (s.XVII-XIX) (Albolote, Spain: Comares, 2019).
INTRODUCTION Researching Commodity History
JONATHAN CURRY-MACHADO AND JEAN STUBBS
IN our contemporary world it is nearly impossible to escape from a dependency on commodities. We have become reliant on goods that are bought, transported, and sold—as food, industrial components, even entertainment—at an ever-greater remove from their geographical origins. In recent years, there has been a growing genre of historical, sociological, geographical, and anthropological scholarship in which the story of human societies has been told through the history of such commodities. Such studies underscore the importance of the cultivation, extraction, processing, and trade of many ubiquitous items of consumption forging our modern world. The study of commodities, their interactions, and their impact on local, regional, and global developments has become of central importance in researching and writing global history and thereby gaining a fuller understanding of the complex historical processes to which they have been so integral.
Through commodity chains, circuits, and networks, we can better trace global interconnections and social and economic relations, linking cultivation to consumption by way of manufacture and trade. From being nomadic hunter-gatherers, humans settled and began to farm the land, gradually making agricultural innovations that enabled ever larger quantities of crops to be cultivated, while increasing global trade resulted in their distribution throughout the world. In the process, and with the development of capitalism, human societies became bound together on an increasingly global scale, while the production of commercial crops led to profound ecological changes. Asia and Europe became connected from the Middle Ages, with the east-west trading of goods along the silk road and the spice route. From the sixteenth century, commodities were at the heart of the establishment by European powers of global empires, with the triangular trade of slaves, sugar, and tobacco connecting Africa and the Americas. From the nineteenth century on, an ever-more-integrated global capitalist system was created, highlighted even further when challenged by twentieth-century socialism. The processes of commodity extraction, trade, processing, and consumption have resulted in the emergence of a global economy and society where events in one hemisphere directly influence the other, and the most remote locations are often the setting for the acquisition of raw materials and products demanded by industry and consumers the world over.
Commodity history is today a fast-developing field of study. Within it, not only are commodities followed as they make their way from land and water, through processing and trade to eventual consumption, so also local and global histories are understood and written through a commodities lens. Collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research and the use of new informational technologies are also becoming increasingly important, and whereas many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodity cases, they often do so within the context of projects that bring them together with others working on different commodities and regions, using various theoretical and methodological approaches. It is this interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that is making commodity history central to the development of local and global historical analysis and has seen the recent emergence of international advances towards accessing large quantities of historical data, across many different commodities and geographical regions. This is what has shaped our approach to the Handbook, departing from a mere compendium of single-commodity studies to explore broader empirical and conceptual underlying themes, with contributions authored by scholars who have been involved in these developments in a range of countries and linguistic regions. Here they discuss the state of the art in their field, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research.
CONCEPTUAL AND COLLABORATIVE ANTECEDENTS
In Das Kapital, Karl Marx defined a commodity as ‘an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies haman needs of whatever kind?’ He went on to explore commodities as a combination of their use value (their worth for the satisfaction of those human needs) and exchange value (the price that the market places on them), and this formed the basis of his understanding of the mechanisms of the capitalist system. Today, however, commodities are generally understood more loosely as traded goods, to be found wherever any form of exchange occurs.
Commodities defined in this way have been present in one form or another throughout economic history. Nevertheless, it has taken some time for a specific focus on commodities to emerge as being fundamental for our understanding of how the global system has evolved and functioned. Most current work in commodity history owes a debt to certain foundational texts—as can be attested by the frequency with which these are referred to in the chapters of the Handbook. In 1966, Fernand Braudel, leading scholar of the French Annales School, published his influential two-volume study of the Mediterranean world during the early-modern Spanish empire under Philip II. In the first volume, he sought to establish a model for economic history, exploring the key role of the circulation of precious metals as a basis for trading systems, providing a form of readily established exchange value, before turning to a detailed examination of two key commodities of the early-modern period—pepper (an example ofa luxury) and grain (a globally essential food source).*
A decade later, in the Anglophone world, US scholars came to the fore. In their 1977 article in the journal of the Fernand Braudel Center, historical sociologist Terence Hopkins and social and economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein laid out the basis for a world systems approach to history.’ In this, commodities again occupied a central role, and in their sequel journal article in 1986 they explicitly looked at how commodity chains established the connections through which the global economy had developed prior to 1800.’ The chains approach became systematized in the study of the contemporary global system through global commodity chains analysis. This was itself derived from world systems theory—which was initially more influential in sociological studies, offering as it did a framework for the analysis of global industries at a time when much attention was being given to the increasingly globalized nature of the world economy. Testimony to this in the 1990s are the volume edited by sociologists Gary Gerefh and Miguel Korzeniewicz—Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism—and Gerefli’s A Commodity Chains Framework for Analyzing Global Industries.
Gradually, the approach came to be more influential in historical studies, as exemplified in From Silver to Cocaine, edited by Stephen Topik, Zephyr Frank, and Carlos Marichal, the contributions to which explored the various ways in which Latin American commodity chains contributed to the building of the global economy from 1500 to the present times.° For Chapter 1 in this volume, Topik teams with two sociologists (Paul S. Ciccantell and David A. Smith) to chart how the global commodity chain approach has continued to develop, including the more recent global value chain approach.
Similar developments were taking place within the francophone approche filiére. Whereas the two approaches cover much of the same general field, they have differed in their political and theoretical grounding as well as geography and language. The approche filiére tradition originated in the study of contract farming and vertical integration in French agriculture in the 1960s and was soon applied to the analysis of French colonial and post-colonial state agricultural development policy. The initial focus was on local production systems and consumption of select export commodities such as rubber, cotton, coffee, and cocoa, and while a more anthropological approach in filiére work dates from the 1970s with research on Sahel grain markets in the context of food crisis, it was not until the 1980s that areas such as international trade and processing were included. Strikingly, it is argued—contrary to the commodity chains approach, which works under a more unified theoretical framework—approche filiére straddles different schools of thought, with a loosely knit set of studies using the filiére (or chain) of activities and exchanges as a practical tool of analysis for applied research rather than a theory. In Chapter 2, scholars involved from a development studies perspective—Francois Ruf, Franziska Ollendorf, and Enrique Uribe Leitz—discuss the differences as well as similarities with anglophone commodity-chain studies.
Although commodity chains (or filiéres) certainly drew attention to the complex social, political, economic, environmental, and cultural interactions in which these are set, as research has developed there has been an increasing trend towards focusing more explicitly on such interactions. By the early twenty-first century, with an increasing number of historians working in this direction, the time was ripe for the development of collaborative projects seeking to further commodity-focused historical research. In 2007, the Commodities of Empire (CoE) project was founded with British Academy recognition and funding and has prioritized facilitating international research among scholars of the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South. The express aim has been to further our global understanding from multiple local perspectives of the networks through which commodities circulated both within and in the spaces between empires. A particular focus of attention was on the local processes originating in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America, which significantly influenced the outcome of the encounter between the world economy and regional societies. The CoE workshops and Working Papers series have continued since then to help provide a focus for an international network of scholars to further the development of commodity history as a specific field of global study. A special edition of the Journal of Global History in 2009 and the publication of an edited collection Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions in 2013 contributed to this.”
With the increasing number of research projects dealing with the social, economic, and cultural history of agricultural, mineral, and manufactured commodities, in 2009 the ‘Cultural Foundations of Integration’ Centre of Excellence at the University of Konstanz and International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam held a joint workshop on the history of commodities and commodity chains. The workshop provided an opportunity for advancing the development of international collaborative research connections, which continued to develop over the coming years. The CoE project and the Technology and Agrarian Development Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands joined forces in 2009 on an ‘anticommodities’ research programme, which focused on modes of indigenous production as sustainable practice and resistance against agrarian commercial capitalism during the colonial era. A turn to the space in which commodity exploitation occurs, and the people that this involved, was behind the conceptualization of the ‘anticommodity, ‘defined as an enduring form of production and action in opposition either to actual commodities and their existing functions, or to wider social practices of commodification, rather than simply a momentary form of protest or reaction.’ Although originally intended as a somewhat controversial heuristic, the concept has nevertheless found its way into more recent scholarship. This has particularly been in relation to issues around food security and food-crop commodification, owing much to the intellectual heritage of anthropologist James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak and the work of geographer Judith Carney and environmentalist Richard Rosomoff on Black Rice and In the Shadow of Slavery documenting Africa’s botanical legacy in the Americas, evidencing a concern for subaltern technologies and actors.?
The origins and continuing impact that the anti-commodity concept has had in historical research is explored in Chapter 3, by historians Sandip Hazareesingh and Harro Maat, directors of the original anti-commodities programme.
The collaborative development of commodity history took another stride forward with the founding in 2014 of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI)—bringing together a network of researchers and research centres from around the world. In doing so, they were influenced by the work of historical sociologist Jason Moore, whose article published in 2000 in the journal of the Fernand Braudel Center introduced the concept of commodity frontiers to understand the centrality of sugar in the expansion of the early-modern world economy." Although building on Hopkins’s and Wallerstein’s earlier world-systems work, Moore turned attention away from the focus on the commodities themselves, and their chains, to the spaces in which their exploitation occurred and the long-term impact of this in terms of sustainability and the environment. A similarly influential work was that of economist Edward Barbier’s Scarcity and Frontiers, looking at how the availability of resources and their eventual exhaustion has led to productive zones adapting and moving elsewhere, and in so doing defining the course of human civilization.”
Following through on this thinking, CFI set out an agenda that was interdisciplinary in nature, embracing anthropological, economic, sociological, political, scientific, ecological, and developmental as well as historical perspectives. The aim was to systematically catalogue, study, and analyse a wide range of commodity frontiers over the past six hundred years, examining the role of the countryside and its people in the history of global capitalism.” In 2020, the Commodity Frontiers Journal was launched. In Chapter 4, Bosma and Vanhaute explain the concept of commodity frontiers and the development of the CFI, and several others, including Sabrina Joseph in Chapter 18 on the United Arab Emirates, provide examples of the historical application of the concept and some of the new methodologies that the CFI has been helping develop.
Over the same period, a number of other collaborative research initiatives broadened the reach of commodity history and some of those involved have also contributed to the Handbook. During 2011 and 2012, the Global History and Culture Centre at the University of Warwick hosted an international network and a series of workshops and conferences exploring global commodities and the material culture of early-modern connections. The aim was to bring together the methodologies of global history and material culture to analyse the part played in the development of global connections by material objects, in particular traded commodities, and to encourage transregional, global, and interdisciplinary research, alongside intercultural dialogue. The author of Chapter 5 in this volume, Suraiya Faroqhi, was one of the partners in that initiative. A leading scholar in Ottoman history, she here looks at the role of Ottoman silks in early-modern trading routes.
While such projects were moving the bounds of commodity history back to earlier time periods, others began looking to incorporate more systematically than had hitherto been the case the new technological and methodological possibilities of harnessing ‘big data. Although a primary focus of IISH is global labour history, in recent years much of the research emanating from there has been combined with a commodity focus—along with a strong commitment to the development of several large-scale, international, collaborative programmes. One of these is the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, in which work and commodities are inextricably intertwined, and labour itself can be seen as a commodity, as Karin Hofmeester, director of the Collaboratory, explores in Chapter 15.
From 2014, an international collaboration between York University and the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and the University of Edinburgh and University of St Andrews in Scotland resulted in “Trading Consequences. This has seen the development ofa platform providing access to a wealth of data mining of historical documents related to international commodity trading, and its impact on the economy and environment. The environmental and digital historian Jim Clifford, who was one of the leaders of that project, co-authored Chapter 28 with Joshua MacFadyen, whose expertise is in geospatial communications, and environmental historian Stéphane Castonguay, to demonstrate the potential applications of historical GIS (geographic information systems) to commodity history.
Given the wide range of commodity-related historical research that is now being undertaken, the Handbook comes at a timely moment in the development of commodity history. On the one hand, the tendency towards ‘following the thing’ —in which commodities themselves are traced from cultivation and extraction through processing and trade to ultimate consumption—remains as prevalent as ever but is resulting in increasingly sophisticated understandings of the global histories that commodities have enabled. On the other, there is the historical research that looks beyond the commodities themselves, to the people and spaces from and through which these commodities are extracted, moved, and ultimately consumed. Often, locally focused studies are providing in-depth insights that can be brought together comparatively for a more nuanced understanding of historical global processes.
FOLLOWING THE THING
In 2004, cultural geographer Ian Cook described the process of tracing the global commodity chain of the papaya fruit from farm to consumer as ‘following the thing.'? Cook was writing from a radical social geographic perspective, seeking to ‘de-fetishize’ contemporary commodities, by reconnecting producers to distant consumers in the context of the globalized food (and other commodity) chains of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. But the description is an apt one for much commodity history research—which at its simplest level continues to be primarily about tracing the global paths and interconnections taken by the tangible material goods that lie at the heart of our trading systems.
An early influential work in this vein, cited in several chapters of the Handbook, was anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power, which tells the story of how sugar became transformed from being a luxury into a necessity of modern life—changing the course of world capitalism and industry in the process.’ Other studies followed, seeking to trace the rise of the modern world and global capitalism through specific commodities. In Tobacco in History, Jordan Goodman traced how a ‘poor man’s crop’ had conquered the world; while Iain Gately, in Tobacco, argued that tobacco was the driving force behind the establishment of American colonies, Dutch merchant networks, and the African slave trade.”
The collection of essays on The Global Coffee Economy edited by William Gervase Clarence-Smith, one of the co-editors of this volume, together with Topik analysed coffee markets and societies over the past five centuries. Contributors examined ‘the creation and function of commodity, labour, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging of economic development and political democracy’’® It was an impressive task for one plant, the cultivation of which has spread throughout the tropical regions, and whose consumption has become commonplace throughout the temperate developed world.
Cotton also took centre stage in a series of more recent publications. In Cotton, Giorgio Riello traced how this textile drove a historical globalization that can be dated from as early as 1000 CE stretching to the present day. He explored this earlier globalized economy, and how it became transformed from the eighteenth century, with cotton leading European industrialization;’” and Sven Beckert, in Empire of Cotton, more explicitly tied the development of global capitalism to this single commodity.* In similar fashion, Erika Rappaport, in A Thirst for Empire, showed how the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism; while Ulbe Bosma, in The World of Sugar, explored ‘how the sweet stuff transformed our politics, health, and environment over 2,000 years.””
Not everyone felt the need to lay such expansive claim to the importance of a single commodity in order to study its history in depth. In Cocoa and Chocolate, ClarenceSmith traced the cocoa commodity chain from planting to its ultimate consumption— following the thing over the long nineteenth century.” In Banana Cultures, John Soluri focused on the Central American banana cultivation and its North American consumption from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and its contribution to the wider history of twentieth-century globalization, with its impact on rural livelihoods, local economies, and biodiversity.” Similarly, Paul Gootenberg followed the story of Andean Cocaine, from its beginnings as a nineteenth-century medical commodity through its twentieth-century repression and late-twentieth-century resurgence.” Several of the chapters in the present volume exemplify such approaches, through their commodity case studies: the commodity chain of coffee (Chapter 1), the filiére of cocoa (Chapter 2), palm oil (Chapter 13), and opium (Chapter 23).
It is not only commodity extraction that can be located in clearly defined geographic spaces. Commodity trade occurs through merchant networks, the nodes of which are ports—which have themselves become the subject of commodity-related research. This has included wide-ranging collaborative and comparative projects, such as that which brought together port historians from across the Atlantic world and resulted in publications such as the collection by Miguel Suarez Bosa on Atlantic Ports and the First Globalisation and Bosma and business historian Anthony Webster’s Commodities, Ports and Asian Maritime Trade since 1750.7? In Chapter 6, building on their work on Dutch and Portuguese imperial history, Catia Antunes and Jelmer Vos explore the synergy between commodities and port cities from the perspective of commodity chains, identifying mutual dependencies. They illustrate this by looking in particular at Luanda’s emergence as a port city through its intersectional co-dependency on several commodities in ways that are central to the development of other ports.
Rather than isolating single linear commodity chains, many studies are increasingly pointing towards the interaction between these, and the way in which they form temporal and spatial ‘networks’ or ‘webs’ with other commodities and industries. More expansive approaches can be seen in, for example, Barbara Hahn’s Making Tobacco Bright and MacFadyen's Flax Americana.”©
Other analyses follow commodities to look explicitly ‘within, beneath, and beyond’ the bounds of nations and empires—towards transnational and transimperial interconnections, as the present authors, Curry-Machado and Stubbs, have explored in their own research on sugar and tobacco, respectively.’” This has resulted in the idea of different broad regional spaces defined by the commodity-driven interconnections crossing these: an Atlantic space, a Pacific space, and an Indian Ocean space. In Chapter 7 of this Handbook, Santiago de Luxan Meléndez, Joao de Figueiroa-Rego, Vicent Sanz Rozalén, and Stubbs draw on their collaborative work of the past decade documenting the centrality of tobacco and the tobacco monopolies in shaping the Iberian empires from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, embedded as they were in transimperial and transcolonial connections in territories across the Americas, Africa, and Asia.”8
Such approaches are enabling a deeper historical understanding of the functioning and development of the global economic system, uncovering new areas of research and challenging existing assumptions. In Chapter 8, Alexander Engel explores how futures trading—now a defining feature of the contemporary capitalist system—emerged much earlier than was originally thought. A heightened sense of competition and time as a valuable resource prompted the acceleration of trade in the eighteenth century, and standardization of forward contracting in the mid-nineteenth century made commodity trading more abstract and speculative.” His chapter comes as a timely followup to Chapter 7, which features the Spanish situado—in essence, a system of situating advance finance within and across Spain's colonies, with silver from the Viceroyalty of New Spain playing a key role. This can be seen as a precursor to the advance credit practices evidenced in tobacco agriculture to this day, and perhaps to futures trading, whose imprint coincided with the late-nineteenth-century switch from the silver to the gold standard.
A significant and welcome departure in the Handbook from this focus on commodities and the rise of global capitalism is Chapter 9, in which Anne Dietrich builds on her knowledge of the history of the German Democratic Republic to chart that of commodities across the twentieth-century socialist world in juxtaposition to the fast-globalizing dominant capitalist world. Her focus is on how Eastern bloc countries attempted to guarantee stable commodity flows through trade among member states of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), which came to embrace socialist-leaning countries of the Global South, and she homes in on several facets of this: grain supply in the Soviet Union and China, cash crops in the Global South, CMEA energy networks, consumer goods in Eastern Europe, and sugar in Cuba.
Production is very often at the fore in commodity history, and several chapters here explore changes in production over time and space. In Chapter 10, Leonardo Marques looks at mining frontiers of the Iberian Americas—New Spain, New Granada, Peru, and Brazil—with a focus on changing labour regimes, technology, and environmental impact over time and space. Others have studied the different mechanisms that were stimulated by and became essential for commodity production and trade—such as the development of technologies, as explored by David Pretel and Lino Cambrupi in their Technology and Globalisation.*° In Chapter 11, Pretel explores the technological history of export commodities in the processes of extraction and processing in the Global South, demonstrating this with case studies in the industrial treatment of raw materials in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, notably sugar, silver, henequen, and tree products. He highlights the persistence of traditional techniques and the technological connections across regions and collaboration of local and imported expertise. He also calls for a technological history of commodity production.
In similar fashion, the plantation-based system of production is interrogated in Chapter 12 by Ghulam A. Nadri. Influenced by the work of those studying production systems related to specific commodities—such as Bosma, who has explored the complex notion of plantation as applied to Asian sugar*!—he interrogates change in how the concept of the plantation has been applied as an analytical framework in commodity history. He argues that Indian indigo production in colonial India, while being based primarily on peasant cultivation, should nevertheless be considered a form of plantation in which peasants produced the crop for European planters—an argument that echoes in many other crops and regions around the world.
In Chapter 13, Jonathan E. Robins widens the production web to look at the relationship between primary commodities and industrial consumers. He draws on his work on palm oil, once an early-modern luxury and today an important ingredient in manufacturing—showing how this drove demand, new forms of production, and expansion into new areas, while linking multiple industries and sites of production. He argues that its industrial success owed more to factors influencing its production cost than its material properties, and it was the emergence of a plantation system that consolidated palm oil's role in global history.
PEOPLE AND SPACES
Another foundational text for commodity history—as can be attested by the frequency with which it is referred to in chapters of this Handbook—is Arjun Appadurai’s Social Life of Things.** Here commodities are seen not so much in the economic connections that have been established through them as in the social and cultural settings in which they have gained meaning, and to which they have given meaning. Commodities did not, of course, move themselves around the world. They depended on people not only to cultivate, extract, and process them but also to act as the conduits through which they were moved on their journeys to their ultimate points of consumption. Commodities had a profound social impact, partly through processes of migration tied to commodity frontiers successively exploiting new territories. The trading routes were themselves established and maintained by networks of diasporic merchants. Building on earlier work such as that of Philip Curtin into such trade diasporas, historians like Roger Knight have been uncovering the human stories of those who were responsible for the development of these global interconnections.*?
There were extensive global migrations of people, some of them free, but many coerced. In Chapter 14, Michael Zeuske, co-editor of Bonded Labour, takes a longuedurée approach to explore the connection between the various forms of slavery and commodification—seeing this as a process that rendered slaves as human or ‘talking commodities.*4 The broader category of labour as a commodity is subsequently addressed by Hofmeester in Chapter 15. Drawing on her previous work, she takes as her point of departure foundational texts by Adam Smith, Marx, and Karl Polanyi.*° Hofmeester then expands the debate beyond wage labour to all kinds of labour, from unpaid domestic work to slave labour. She provides a case study illuminating the changing work regimes in rough diamond production in India, Brazil, and South Africa from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
In Chapter 16, our attention is turned from diamonds to landrush, in which Hanne Cottyn historicizes processes of land-rights commodification, and the struggles of rural communities over their rights to their lands. She begins with a theoretical discussion of the emergence of modern land-rights regimes, related transformations, and conflicts over multiple parallel existing land rights, demonstrating an uneven global trajectory of intensified commodification since the nineteenth century. Cottyn draws on her own empirical research in Andean communities in Bolivia to highlight rural trajectories that, through resistance and negotiation, have managed to remain outside the scope of land privatization.
The history of science and environmental history have also played a significant role in commodity history. For example, Stuart McCook, in his history of the ‘coffee leaf rust’ disease, shows how the global transfer of commodity-crop plants thanks to scientific knowledge circuits, also resulted in the global spread of pathogens.*° Similarly, in Chapter 17, Leida Fernandez-Prieto explores how such local and global knowledge circuits were interconnected, through her case study of the control and eradication of sugar cane mosaic virus in Cuba and Puerto Rico. In this, she highlights the interconnections between experts, and between local and global strategies, for the generation of new scientific knowledge.
In sum, while much of commodity history continues to ‘follow the thing; in so doing it is leading historians to look towards the interconnections that this is revealing: the people involved and the spaces through which they move. This has included the mapping and surveying of lands on the part of colonial authorities, scientists, and states, motivated by political and economic interests. In Chapter 18, Joseph documents this for the Trucial States in the early part of the twentieth century through British initiatives, showing how these played a pivotal role in the emergence of the oil frontier. The importance of who controls the land and the ways in which this is integrally tied to commodity extraction can also be seen in Chapter 19, in which Rafael Chambouleyron, Luly Fischer, and Karl Heinz Arenz examine land appropriation for the production of commodities and the social consequences of this appropriation, focusing mainly on Amazonian cacao from the mid-seventeenth through to the late nineteenth century. They demonstrate how the same commodity entailed different forms of land use, with diverse environmental and territorial consequences.
ENVIRONMENT AND CONSUMPTION
The concentration on the role played by local actors in the production of global commodities in frontier zones has contributed to a ‘glocalizing’ trend in commodity history research to explain political, socio-economic, and environmental impacts. This can be seen, for example, in what has been described as the ‘telescopic’ approach of Katerina Teaiwa, whose Consuming Ocean Island on the remote Pacific island of Banaba explores the material and economic impact on local lives and culture that resulted from the extraction of phosphates coming from guano in order to service global industry.*” Likewise, in Kongo in the Age of Empire, Vos sees the extraction and trade from Kongo of the global commodity of rubber through the history of local and migrant traders, missionaries, and the indigenous inhabitants—a global trade emerging from local dynamics.*®
Importantly, as Moore stated, ‘the most significant commodity frontiers were based on the exploitation of the environment.’ Although hardly a new observation, given a number of earlier historical studies focusing on this (such as Warren Dean’s environmental history of Brazilian rubber), what is clear is that the historical ecological impact of commodities is coming under increasing scrutiny.*° In Reinaldo Funes’s From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba, ecological change, especially deforestation, is closely linked to the rise of the sugar industry.*’ More recently, Corey Ross has offered a more general environmental history, looking at the ecological cost of the growth in tropical commodity production since the nineteenth century.”
In Chapter 20, Ross articulates this growing environmental approach to commodity history as ‘the ecological life of things. He covers three principal themes—the economics of resource depletion, spatial teleconnections of markets, and ecological ramifications of specialization—that have led to an unprecedented exploitation of land, water, plants, animals, and soils.
This ecological turn has resulted in a deeper understanding of the ways in which commodities are changing landscapes and impacting the human relationship with nature. It is also informing recent debates around the Anthropocene, leading to questions of how far back this can be traced, and what part in it was played by commodities produced and extracted for global commerce and consumption. A detailed look at this in the context of commodities, carbon, and climate can be found in Chapter 21, co-authored by John L. Brooke, Eric Herschthal, and Jed O. Kaplan. The chapter reviews the long history of climate change and commodity production through the lens of human-derived, or anthropogenic, carbon emissions, which may have begun in advancing agricultural societies six to seven thousand years ago, with a focus on the early-modern Caribbean. They close by reviewing the rise of emissions through the ‘Great Acceleration’ after 1945 and the recent trajectory of energy decarbonization.
It is through commodities that we come to understand ourselves and our interactions with others and the world. Commodities as ‘things’ have to be produced by people, in spaces that have become defined—at times catastrophically so—by the ways in which production has been carried out; they have formed the basis of our global movements and exchanges; and ultimately fulfil their purpose in consumption. In so doing they have become how we define our lives, as Frank Trentmann has shown. The commodities we consume, how, and with what consequences, are unquestionably of paramount importance for understanding society and culture. Animals in this context have supplied dietary needs, been used in producing goods from clothing to fertilizer, and harnessed to transport and process major commodities. In their changing role in global trade, animals themselves have been commodified, posing ecological and ethical issues, as animal historian Helen Cowie shows in Chapter 22. She illustrates this with a case study of the Pacific fur seal, which was hunted to the point of extinction in the nineteenth century.
The history of drugs and food is an exciting new field in commodity history, and the central place of the production, trade, and politics of control of psychoactive drugs in imperial and global trade and production is broached in Chapter 23 by Joyce A. Madancy. She explores this with a particular focus on opium, analysing responses to its commerce in India, Britain, and China in the final decade of the triangular trade, highlighting how differences in Indian and Chinese production methods reveal strengths and weaknesses in the political, social, and economic structure of each society. Food history has likewise increasingly adopted a commodity-history approach to global research on foodways and food systems from ‘farm to fork. In Chapter 24, food historian Elizabeth Zanoni demonstrates how food commodities are embedded in broader political, economic, and cultural milieus linked to other geopolitical dynamics such as migration, empire—and nation-building, industrialization, and inequitable political and labour regimes, featuring one Italian family’s entrepreneurial history in South America.
METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES
Some of the arguably most challenging developments within commodity history are bound up with interdisciplinarity and new methodologies, ranging from archaeology, art history, and material culture to the recent technological breakthroughs in accessing big data. Of course, archaeology has always been a close ally of history, and it has had a key role to play in commodity history, examining the ways in which people have variously consumed commodities and how their meanings are constructed and contested. Chapter 25 by Paul R. Mullins, who died shortly before the publication of this Handbook, pushes the boundaries of historical archaeology as applied to African American commodity consumption in racially segregated nineteenth- and twentieth-century society. Archaeologies of commodification, he concludes, lend themselves to an interpretation of prosaic things that are intersection points between producers and consumers embedded in global structural, social, and ideological processes. Meanwhile, in Chapter 26, art historian Anna Arabindan-Kesson discusses commodities through the methodology of materiality, engaging with the physical substance of a commodity and its visual representation. Her special focus is on the representation of cotton and its geographies of connection to commerce, colonialism, and slavery.
Computational technology is advancing commodity history in ways and on a scale hitherto impossible to envisage. Language technology and semantic web expert Marieke van Erp teamed up with Bosma in Chapter 27 to discuss natural language processing and semantic web technologies to represent knowledge in a machinereadable manner, illustrating this in their application to apple pie recipes to explore culinary practices and sugar consumption. Clifford, MacFadyen, and Castonguay follow in Chapter 28 with an explanation of how GIS are allowing historians to bring together information from historical maps, textual sources, and quantitative data to interrogate historiographical assumption and develop new questions. Their case study is the Canadian forest-products trade, in an attempt to better understand the early development of Quebec export-oriented sawmills and the timber and firewood trade of the later nineteenth century.
Finally, in Chapter 29, commodities, interdisciplinarity and historical GIS are brought together by Ana Crespo-Solana, drawing on the work of an international project she spearheads on early-modern maritime routes, enabling the integration of historical and archaeological information with timber provenance data to analyse shipwreck sites and timber use. The project explores how the sea and the forests have been inextricably linked since the invention of the ship and the forest, and its main resource, wood, underwent a process of politicization and commercialization, due to timber’s importance as a basic raw material for merchant navies and warships.
ORGANIZATION OF THE HANDBOOK
The intention of this Handbook is to present a broad range of contemporary work undertaken in commodity history from around the world, from a variety of perspectives, offering an insight into different linguistic historiographies. Rather than being organized around specific commodities, the approach has been to look to the most important themes and tendencies characterizing commodity history as a field of study—from cultivation, extraction, and processing through trade to consumption, along with the social, cultural, and ecological impacts that commodities have had. We have attempted to include as wide a variety of commodities as possible—and not just the most common ones. There is a global spread of regions here, and a balance between those that take a more local approach in their research and those that bring a more general perspective. With the cases ranging from the early modern to the contemporary, the volume provides a comprehensive review of the current state of the field of commodity history.
‘There are many themes for which there is no specific chapter, but we feel that these are nevertheless well covered through the other contributions. No chapter focuses exclusively on the rise of global capitalism, and yet this is an unavoidable theme throughout, which can be seen from many perspectives. The specific processes of decolonization and neocolonialism have not been included, and yet several actual examples can be found running through other chapters—similarly with merchant networks, labour resistance, and food security.
The volume has been organized in seven parts. In Part One, four of the key approaches to commodity history are examined: commodity chains, approches filiéres, anticommodities, and commodity frontiers. The chapters in Part Two look at the global histories that have come from commodities, from early-modern trading routes and port cities, through the making of empires and the development of new economic forces as capitalism developed, to the twentieth century and the emergence of a socialist alternative that attempted to challenge the dominant global capitalist system. Part Three turns to key methods of production: mining frontiers and extractivism, plantations and crops, the technological history of commodities, and the use of primary agricultural commodities in the development of modern industry. In Part Four, people and land come into focus, covering migration and slavery, labour, land rights, and circuits of knowledge.
Part Five explores the environmental impact of commodity history: the surveying and mapping processes that opened territories up for exploitation, the varying ways in which land has been utilized in the process, the ecological transformations that this has resulted in, and the contribution that commodities have historically made to climate change. Part Six examines several aspects of commodities and consumption: the exploitation of animals as commodities, drug histories, culinary commodities, and what historical archaeologies are revealing about our social and cultural relationship to these artefacts. Part Seven presents some of the new methodologies that are increasingly being applied to commodity history: the examination of visual representations, the use of computational methods for mining ‘big data’ the uses of historical GIS, and the interdisciplinarity that is becoming an increasing feature of contemporary commodityhistory research.
While every chapter has a character of its own, they all broadly follow a common pattern. Each is roughly evenly divided into three sections: a survey of the current historiography relevant to the theme under examination and its place in commodity history; a commodity case study, drawn from the research expertise of each contributor; and an assessment of what the case contributes to the wider historical and historiographical understanding. In some chapters, the case study has focused on a single commodity, demonstrating the application of the approaches that the historiographic discussion has revealed; in others, a number of commodities are brought together.
Although it is impossible for a single volume to provide an exhaustive view of such a far-ranging subject as commodity history, the volume ends with a Conclusion in which co-editors Clarence-Smith and Vos discuss the lacunae and prospects for future commodity research, drawing attention to the need for a more multi-centred approach. The intention is that the Handbook will not only offer the reader an insight into the state of the art in the field but also nurture future research into the multiple ways in which the study of commodity history can shape our better understanding of the world.
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