Commodities, Environment, and Labour
Projects in this cluster focus on the consequences of commodity extraction, production, exchange, and consumption for labour, land, and environment. Their main analytical lenses are those of commodity frontiers and commodity regimes. This perspective has rapidly gained currency since Jason W. Moore introduced the concept in 2000.[i] An agenda-setting article in the Journal of Global History, co-authored by Ulbe Bosma, defines commodity frontiers as processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy.[ii] This article also introduces commodity regimes as a device for periodization and a proposal for a comparative historical method that links broad political-economic change to local agency and contestation.
Projects in this cluster study the history of capitalism from the perspective of capitalism’s capacity to profoundly restructure the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation, and resistance in rural peripheries. Projects apply transdisciplinary concepts such as commodification, extractivism, land grabbing, and environmental justice. The focus on the countryside allows these projects to highlight capitalism’s vulnerabilities, including ecological depletion and social resistance, which have led to fundamental crises culminating in rebellions and revolutions, such as the revolution in Saint Domingue in 1791 and massive strikes in plantation belts across the globe in the 1930s. The link with our projects in the Individual and Collective Action cluster is self-evident. The projects and their researchers are mostly participating in the international transdisciplinary Commodity Frontiers Initiative (https://commodityfrontiers.com/). This network publishes output in its own bi-annual journal and via other well-established media channels, such as the digital magazine Aeon.[iii]
Peyman Jafari’s Veni project researches “Oil Frontiers in the British and Dutch Empires: Land, Labour and Environment in the Making of an Imperial Oil Regime, 1890–1940”. The hypothesis tested in this project is that in order to overcome the obstacles and resistances that they faced, oil corporations introduced legal, managerial, and technological solutions that connected the oil-producing regions with the rest of the world. The problems of socio-ecological degradation and colonialism have become institutionalized through the unequal interaction between empires, oil corporations, and local communities involved in oil production.
On the other hand, Erik Odegard’s project “Investing in Dutch Brazil: Credit, Debt and the Sugar-Cycle in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World” is looking at the involvement of private entrepreneurs from the Dutch Republic in financing and running a WIC-maintained colony in northeastern Brazil, the first Dutch Atlantic slave society and plantation colony. (NWO Veni project 2023–2026).
Ulbe Bosma recently published The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years, the first global history on sugar, which extensively discusses how the cultivation of sugar was a key factor in shaping global capitalism and transformed land and labour, and was responsible for massive enslavement and coerced labour migrations.[iv] Karin Hofmeester works on “Luxury and Labour: A Global Trajectory of Diamond Consumption and Production, 16th–19th century”. The central question of this research project is how the globalization of the diamond trade and finishing industry – spurred by increasing consumer demand – has affected labour relations in this sector worldwide. The project looks at all segments of the production process “from the mine to the finger”.[v]
Rossana Barragán (senior researcher until mid-2022, now fellow) works on extractivism in Bolivia. She recently published Potosí in the Global Silver Age (16th—19th Centuries). The main focus of this book is the new human and environmental landscape that emerged for the production of one of the world’s major commodities.[vi] Rossana Barragán and Carmen Soliz (eds), The Struggle for Natural Resources: Findings from Bolivian History is forthcoming.[vii]
In his NWO VIDI project “Land Grabbing Empire: State Strategy and Large Scale Land Transfers in Dutch Expansion (16th–18th century)” (2022–2027), principal investigator Pepijn Brandon looks at land grabbing, defined as the forced transfer of land from peasant producers to commercial investors, which deeply affects the organization of global agriculture. This project investigates how the highly market-oriented early modern Dutch state and colonial companies employed land grabbing to advance commercial agriculture. By focusing on the Dutch state, a driving force in early modern commercial globalization, this project sheds light on the importance of land grabbing for the history of capitalism, and offers insights into the mechanisms connecting the violent dispossession of peasant populations and the development of commercial agriculture.
New projects in this cluster will link labour and labour relations, on the one hand, with environmental justice on the other, and connect both with collective action, bringing together three of our four research clusters (Global Labour Relations; Commodities, Environment, and Labour; and Individual and Collective Action). Ulbe Bosma’s project on the success of the Dutch anti-nuclear movement, which received a KNAW Onderzoeksfonds in autumn 2023 is one such example. These projects align with the HuC’s Environmental Humanities Lab. Hopefully with help of an ERC grant, Bosma will be able to combine the Commodity Frontiers approach with the data of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations in the project “The Global South in the Age of Early Industrial Capitalism: Commodity Frontiers and Social Transformations (1816–1870)”. It will examine the immense transformative effects of commodity frontiers in the Global South that contributed to the rise of early industrial capitalism and would have lasting global social and ecological repercussions. It will do so by measuring the required labour input (specified for categories such as gender and ethnicity) and the extent to which it was forced through a globally applicable taxonomy; by identifying the diversity of changes in labour and land relations at the commodity frontiers and putting our gaze on the trading networks based in the global periphery.
[i] Jason W. Moore, Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization", Review 23, no. 3 (2000).
[ii]Sven Beckert, Ulbe Bosma, Mindy Schneider, and Eric Vanhaute, “Commodity Frontiers and the Transformation of the Global Countryside: A Research Agenda”, Journal of Global History 16: 3 (2021), pp. 435–450, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022820000455.
[iii] Sven Beckert and Ulbe Bosma, "Ever More Land and Labour: Centuries of Capitalism Saw the Global Countryside Ruthlessly Converted into Cheap Commodities. But at What Cost?", AEON (2022), https://aeon.co/essays/the-capitalist-transformations-of-the-countryside.
[iv] Ulbe Bosma, The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 years (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023).
[v] Karin Hofmeester, “Diamonds from Mine to Finger: Doing Global Labour History by Way of a Luxury Commodity”, in M. van der Linden (ed.), The Global History of Work: Critical Readings. Vol. II: Work Sites (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), pp. 135–153.
[vi] Rossana Barragán and Paula C. Zagalsky (eds), Potosí in the Global Silver Age (16th—19th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
[vii] Rossana Barragan and Carmen Soliz (eds), The Struggle for Natural Resources: Findings from Bolivian History (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2024) (with a contribution by Ulbe Bosma).
