Commodity frontiers and global histories: the tasks ahead

Abstract

Given the alarming pace of climate change, global environmental destruction, and associated social dislocations and inequalities, a global history that also speaks to the present is more important now than ever. We started our article with a pointed argument that ‘[t]he history of the making of the modern world is a history of the expansion of commodity frontiers, a historical conundrum so spatially, socially, and structurally all-encompassing that it still awaits its persuasive analysis’. This deep historical perspective, we argued, is crucial to understanding how we arrived at our current socioecological predicament. What is more, we proposed that transdisciplinary research among historians and social, ecological, and computational scientists is essential to engage such questions. To that end, we have developed our research agenda around an analytical framework that lets us trace the long history and present of capitalism. We look at the countryside through the lens of the history of commodity frontiers, using commodity regimes as an analytical framework to make sense of the vast amount of data we hope to uncover. The commodity frontier – the empirical core of our investigations – is not simply a place. It is a relational concept that grasps the flows of materials and energy between nature and society, between different societies and within them. These flows connect regions of extraction with the sites of production that organize capitalist modernity on a world scale. The commodity frontier stands for an inductive historical approach that starts from the far edges of global expansion. It includes agents other than the global hegemonic powers, spaces other than the metropole and relations that encompass more than the economic. Indeed, as we emphasized in our paper, ‘[m]uch of the writing on the history of capitalism privileges the perspective from the city and industry to the detriment of processes in the household, agriculture, and the countryside where the vast majority of humanity has lived until very recently and where many of the revolutions of capitalism have taken place’. Urban merchants, state bureaucrats, soldiers and lawmakers, of course, helped produce these commodity frontiers as much as commodity frontiers co-created them – yet the distinguishing feature of our work is that it thinks of these processes from the fringes. We welcome Maxine Berg’s observation that ‘histories of natural resources and of the countryside and its peoples have not been sufficiently addressed by global historians’. This lacuna stands in contrast to a growing number of scholars from other disciplines who have come to see ‘commodity frontiers’ as a promising approach to historical processes. As Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke conclude, such an approach is both exciting and necessary to avoid mono-causal explanations of historical change. The research agenda we propose, as Ruth Mostern observes, attempts to bridge the gulf between the conceptual focus of social science