Phosphate Rock Frontiers: Nature, Labor, and Imperial States, from 1870 to World War II

This comparative historical study examines the three main frontier regions of phosphate rock from the period after the US Civil War until World War II: the American South, French North Africa, and the South Pacific. Imperial states mobilized nature, labor, and capital in the frontier regions to cheapen the rock enough to galvanize fertilizer manufacturing and the budding chemical industry in the metropoles. The unit of analysis of nineteenth-century chemical fertilizer is the international division of labor—of a generalized wage labor force in the metropolitan centers and coerced labor in the frontier regions and of energy flows from the commodity frontiers to the metropolitan farming regions and the buildup of life chemicals in soils and waterways generations later. In the post-2009 era of food security fears with volatile fertilizer prices, this article addresses the question of how and why commercial agriculture systems began to use and depend on phosphate fertilizers.