Seminar: "Commodity Frontiers, World Histories"

We are pleased to announce that Ulbe Bosma, Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) and Professor of International Comparative Social History at the Free University of Amsterdam, will give a presentation of his most recent book, the World of Sugar, at ICTA-UAB.

The book presentation will be accompanied by Joan Martínez Alier, Professor of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology at ICTA-UAB and the recipient of 2024 Holberg Prize and 2020 Balzan Prize, and Zehra Yaşın, Post-doctoral Researcher at ICTA-UAB.

 

Seminar: Commodity Frontiers, World Histories

 

Date: Wednesday, January 29th 2024
Time: 11 am – 1pm
Venue: Sala Montseny (Z/022 – Z/023) ICTA-UAB + online

 

Speakers:  

• Ulbe Bosma, International Institute of Social History and Free University of Amsterdam. - “The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years”.
   
• Joan Martinez-Alier, ICTA-UAB, “ZIJIN - A Growing Metal Mining Transnational Chinese Company”.
   
• Zehra Yaşın, ICTA-UAB - “Mesopotamian Oil Frontier: Capital, Nation-State and Social Ecology”.

 

The alarming pace of climate change and the global social and environmental crisis makes the global/world history or a world-historical perspective more important and urgent than ever. The history of social deepening and spatial expansion of commodity frontiers is a central aspect of the making of the modern world and capitalist development with the accompanying socio-environmental challenges.

The commodity frontier is a a relational concept that grasps the material/energy flows between society and nature and among diverse societies connecting diverse parts of the capitalist world-economy specializing on commodity extraction or production. The lens of the commodity frontier brings to the historical analysis the perspective of the periphery, the Global South, and the countryside with its peoples and environments to understand the most urgent historical questions of the contemporary moment. This lens enables us to explore the sites and processes of capitalist incorporation, such as the frontiers of agricultural production and mineral extraction, by examining the labour and property relations, socio-ecological transformations and geopolitical relations that produce them. As such, the histories of commodity frontiers inform us multiple interconnected histories of socio-environmental change, labour regimes, business organization and state formation grounded in the centuries long formation and reconfiguration of the capitalist world-economy. Such a world-scale histories of commodity frontiers are the histories of the making of the socio-environmental conflicts presented by the Environmental Justice Atlas.  

This panel will bring together different commodities, i.e. sugar, metals, and oil, to reflect on the histories of commodity frontiers and the transformation of the world-economy with a relational historical lens.

 

Ulbe Bosma, is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History and Professor of International Comparative History at the VU University in Amsterdam. His main fields of interest are the histories of labour, international labour migration, and commodity frontiers. He is one of the founders of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative. His books include The Making of a Periphery (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia, Industrial Production 1770-2010 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). His most recent book is The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years published with Harvard University Press (2023) and currently translated in multiple languages including Spanish.