Abernethy

Cooper

Jonathan Curry‐Machado

Klare

O'Brien

Sandip Hazareesingh

Wolf

English

Crossref

Editorial – Commodities, empires, and global history

Curry Machado, J.M.

Hazareesingh, S.

NARCIS 

Editorial - Commodities, empires, and global history

Wageningen Yield 

Editorial – Commodities, empires,
and global history
Commodities are back in the news. The early twenty-first century seems to have witnessed
an upsurge in the old conflict over valuable resources, leading to a global scramble for
commodities, and bringing in its wake renewed international tension, war, dispossession,
and environmental degradation. The Cold War clash of ideologies, it has been argued, has
been replaced by global competition between Western consumer nations, Russia, and China,
occurring over oil, gas, and other vital economic goods that are required for the smooth
functioning of modern industrial societies.1 In this view, we are witnessing ‘a new age of
war’, most clearly exemplified by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.2
Meanwhile, the large-scale clearance of tropical forests for palm oil plantations, to satisfy
a growing requirement for cheap vegetable oil used in the food, cosmetics, and biofuel
industries, has been held responsible for rising emissions of carbon dioxide, the principle
greenhouse gas and driver of climate change.3 War on Want, a non-governmental organiza-
tion focusing on development, has recently highlighted the violent campaign to force pea-
sants off their land in Columbia to make way for palm oil plantations, a process fuelled,
it claims, by ‘Britain’s passion for chocolate, cakes and crisps’.4
Few can now doubt the renewed importance of commodities in the global political
landscape of the early twenty-first century. Moreover, the current contests over primary
resources, their acknowledged indispensability for present-day industrial societies, and their
global features and reverberations have profound historical echoes. Most of all, perhaps,
they recall the ‘great leap forward’ in the production, movement, and consumption of
commodities inaugurated by industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. The growing
resource, manufacturing, and consumption needs of industrializing societies, the emergence
of the steamship and the railways, the ‘dematerialization of telecommunication’ – all
escalated demand for raw materials and foodstuffs, and quickened and intensified commod-
ity transactions, bringing profound changes to regions and societies in both south and
1 Michael T. Klare, Resource wars: the new landscape of global conflict, New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 2001.
2 Retort Collective, Afflicted powers: capital and spectacle in a new age of war, London: Verso, 2005.
3 ‘Demand for palm oil is ‘‘damaging the planet’’’, The Independent, 9 November 2007.
4 ‘UK palm oil consumption fuels Columbia violence, says report’, The Guardian, 12 May 2008.
1
Journal of Global History (2009) 4, pp. 1–5 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2009
doi:10.1017/S1740022809002927
north.5 Production of raw materials and foodstuffs occurred overwhelmingly in regions of
the south that were either already colonial possessions of rival industrializing European
nation-states or were in the process of becoming so in the course of the nineteenth century.
The industrial overproduction crisis in the last quarter of the century provided an impetus
for the ‘scramble’ for new colonial territories on the part of rival European powers.6
Although the ‘scramble’ focused on markets for manufactures, rather than on temporarily
cheap raw materials, it profoundly affected the conditions of production of tropical
commodities.
This is perhaps, therefore, an appropriate moment for revisiting the social histories of
commodity production, transactions, and consumption, under the changing conditions
brought about by three crucial processes during the course of the past two centuries: first,
the accelerated pace of mechanization of production and transportation; second, the growth
in ‘imperial’ rivalries between industrializing nations on both the political and economic
fronts; and third, the multiplication of different uses and social meanings of products,
as they were relocated from the fields, forests, and mines of the south to the industrialized
societies of the north. ‘Commodities of Empire’ is the theme of a new research collaboration
between the UK’s Open University and London Metropolitan University. The project has a
particular interest in exploring these processes from the vantage point of societies in the
south that were subjected to colonial rule: in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin
America. The articles featured in this special issue initially emerged as papers presented at
the project’s first international workshop, held in London in July 2007.
Historically, commodities had multiple social lives, partaking both in imperial endea-
vours and in local resistance to them. The varied movements embarked upon in the
course of these life cycles – local, regional, across oceans and continents, within and
beyond empires – make commodities a particularly apt mode of exploring global history.
This is particularly the case because their transformations were also connected with
social changes over vast geographical areas, in infrastructures, technologies, economies,
ecologies, labour regimes, and patterns of migration and consumption. They offer an
approach relevant to both ‘styles’ of modern global history identified by Patrick O’Brien:
connections and comparisons.7 The focus on connections also suggests a potentially
fruitful avenue for testing ‘globalization’ claims. The study of commodity movements,
networks, and chains emphasizes the nature of their spatial connections, without any a
priori assumption of ‘global’ reach. It enables the exploration of ‘the historical depth
of interconnections and a focus on just what the structures and limits of the connecting
mechanisms are’.8 The contributors to this special issue of the journal offer illuminating
examples of both ‘connection’ and ‘comparison’ methods, as they explore a range of
5 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the people without history, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982,
p. 310; Roland Wenzlhuemer, ‘The dematerialization of telecommunication: communication centres and
peripheries in Europe and the world, 1850–1920’, Journal of Global History, 2, 2, 2007, pp. 345–72.
6 David B. Abernethy, The dynamics of global dominance: European overseas empires 1415–1980,
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 220.
7 Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical traditions and modern imperatives for the restoration of global
history’, Journal of Global History, 1, 1 2006, pp. 4–7.
8 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in question, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005, p. 91.
2 j
j
E D I T O R I A L
commodity-related events and processes in various parts of the world that impacted
differentially on each part. They do so, moreover, in a manner that is sensitive to the
particularities of different historical contexts.9 Above all, they insist on the significance
of the coeval nature of these processes, as they affected both south and north.
Ports were evidently essential to the transcontinental movement of commodities. The
simultaneous emergence of Bombay and Glasgow as modern global ports in the late
nineteenth century was, Sandip Hazareesingh argues, no accident but was driven by
commercial networks with overlapping interests in both places, based on the cotton
trade and the new possibilities of steam-shipping and related industrial innovations.
Bombay’s sub-imperial function was crucial, and the Scottish merchants who dominated
these networks had a keen eye for enhanced worldwide business opportunities in an age
of imperial expansion, while also enjoying privileged access to both imperial and colo-
nial governments. The connected histories of these ports at this particular historical junc-
ture also suggest a more complex model of causation of British ‘imperial’ processes than
the single, metropolitan-focused paradigm advanced in Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins’
well-known thesis.
While industrialization clearly provided imperial Britain with enhanced power, the
declining and only slowly industrializing imperial power of Spain, in contrast, seemed
during the same period to offer its Cuban colony new possibilities of indigenously led devel-
opment based on sugar. Cuban entrepreneurs initiated the introduction of the latest steam
machinery to the island’s sugar industry, supported in the process by the labour of migrant
engineers from industrializing nations and the capital of foreign, merchant-led companies.
Importantly, Jonathan Curry-Machado shows that these transnational networks were pro-
moting a ‘sub-imperial globalization’, independent of the designs of rival imperial nations.
However, although Cuba emerged as the world’s leading sugar producer, the escalating
costs of the new steam technology led to growing dependence on non-Spanish merchant
banks, which gradually came to control the island’s sugar production and trade. Liberation
from Spain led to domination by the United States.
Nevertheless, the vitality of local processes, in the form, for instance, of peasant choices
over the growing of particular crops or of anti-colonial rebellions, could influence economic
outcomes and change imperial policies. In a comparison of the Bengali and Piedmontese silk
industries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Roberto Davini argues that
Bengali peasants were largely able to dictate the terms under which they were willing to
increase silk production, as demanded by the East India Company. This was the result of
the relative scarcity of labour in silk-producing areas, an ability to grow alternative and
more remunerative crops, and the retention of a great measure of autonomy by South Asian
mercantile communities. While Bengali producers were able to improve their conditions
through obtaining higher prices, Piedmontese silk producers had far less bargaining power
in a local context of agrarian labour abundance and merchant control over all stages
of the silk production process, a system that was effectively policed by the Piedmontese
government.
9 For a timely critique of the ‘generic colonialism’ practised in much of the field of postcolonial studies, see
Cooper, Colonialism in question, pp. 12–26.
E D I T O R I A L j
j
3
David Hyde’s analysis of coffee production in late colonial Kenya shows how interacting
local and global processes could bring about profound changes in colonial government
policies. Faced with the Mau Mau rebellion, the Kenyan colonial government regarded
the welfare of the local coffee industry as crucial to generating the tax revenues to meet
its escalating costs. The industry was in a global crisis, owing to increased supplies of coffee
on world markets, brought about by the increasing production of the major Latin American
growers. As coffee prices fell, the colonial government was left with little option but to
promote Kenya’s African peasant producers, who could grow high quality Arabica coffee
much more economically than white settlers. The local coffee industry was thus restruc-
tured, with profound effects on the economic and social relationships that underpinned
Kenya’s independence.
In other circumstances, however, imperial authorities were able to resist the pressure to
intervene in favour of local groups and interests, particularly where perceived ‘national’
interests clashed with ‘imperial’ ones, often in situations of commodity competition, both
between different colonial territories of the same power and also between these and other
global producers. Thus, as Ayodeji Olukoju shows, the British government, in the 1920s
and 1930s, persistently refused to intervene on behalf of Nigerian, and more widely West
African, producers of palm oil and palm kernel oil. Britain first declined to impose retaliat-
ory tariffs on American manufactured exports to West Africa, in response to American
duties on West African oils, not wishing to unleash a trade war with the new economic
superpower. The British further refused to impose differential duties on producers of palm
oil in Indonesia or on Norwegian companies extracting whale oil, partly because British
companies had substantial interests in these sectors.
From the late nineteenth century, the increasing prosperity of western Europe and the
United States, brought about by industrial production and expanding imperial and world
markets, led, for the first time, to the phenomenon of mass consumption, involving
middle-class and even working-class consumers in ‘home’ countries. Various forms of
advertising were used to foster domestic demand for a wide range of ‘exotic’ products,
portrayed as having origins both distant and imperial. Kaori O’Connor focuses on
how empire foodstuffs were promoted in Britain in the aftermath of the First World
War, through recipes, menus, and cookbooks. She shows that the king’s acceptance of a
Christmas pudding entirely made up of ingredients from different parts of the empire was
part of an attempted reinvention of empire as a peaceful commercial civilization, with the
king as presiding father figure. Advertisements and posters targeted women, particularly
housewives, who were urged to follow the king’s example. They were now assigned a cru-
cial role in the popularization of empire foodstuffs, which coincided with the emergence of
middle-class women who aspired to novel ways of cooking and eating that reflected their
new status.
The articles featured in this special issue collectively illustrate the principal themes
with which the ‘Commodities of Empire’ project is concerned. They identify concrete histor-
ical changes, reveal inequalities in political and economic power, demonstrate patterns of
local resilience, provide insights into local–global interactions, and emphasize the import-
ance of communications and culture. Much historically sensitive work remains to be done
on the nature, extent, and limits of a ‘globalized’ world, which commodities played such
a fundamental part in bringing about. There is here the potential to make a significant
4 j
j
E D I T O R I A L
contribution to the evolution of global history, by realigning the lens away from teleological
ideas about ‘globalization’ and the power projections of various imperialisms, and towards
a focus on emerging thinking about the plurality of spatial linkages, networks, and connec-
tions, which were more than local but less than global. This also involves the recognition of
the agency – in all its complexity, unevenness, and contradictions – of those living in the
colonized spaces of the world.
Sandip Hazareesingh
Jonathan Curry-Machado
E D I T O R I A L j
j
5


Name not available

Hazareesingh, Sandip

Curry-Machado, Jonathan

Open Research Online (Open)

Open Research OnlineThe Open University’s repository of research publicationsand other research outputsCommodities, Empires, and Global History (GuestEditorial, Special Issue of the Journal of GlobalHistory)Journal ItemHow to cite:Hazareesingh, Sandip and Curry-Machado, Jonathan (2009). Commodities, Empires, and Global History (GuestEditorial, Special Issue of the Journal of Global History). Journal of Global History, 4(1) pp. 1–5.For guidance on citations see FAQs.c© 2009 London School of Economics and Political ScienceVersion: Version of RecordLink(s) to article on publisher’s website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1740022809002927Copyright and Moral Rights for the articles on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyrightowners. For more information on Open Research Online’s data policy on reuse of materials please consult the policiespage.oro.open.ac.ukEditorial – Commodities, empires,and global historyCommodities are back in the news. The early twenty-first century seems to have witnessedan upsurge in the old conflict over valuable resources, leading to a global scramble forcommodities, and bringing in its wake renewed international tension, war, dispossession,and environmental degradation. The Cold War clash of ideologies, it has been argued, hasbeen replaced by global competition between Western consumer nations, Russia, and China,occurring over oil, gas, and other vital economic goods that are required for the smoothfunctioning of modern industrial societies.1 In this view, we are witnessing ‘a new age ofwar’, most clearly exemplified by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq.2Meanwhile, the large-scale clearance of tropical forests for palm oil plantations, to satisfya growing requirement for cheap vegetable oil used in the food, cosmetics, and biofuelindustries, has been held responsible for rising emissions of carbon dioxide, the principlegreenhouse gas and driver of climate change.3 War on Want, a non-governmental organiza-tion focusing on development, has recently highlighted the violent campaign to force pea-sants off their land in Columbia to make way for palm oil plantations, a process fuelled,it claims, by ‘Britain’s passion for chocolate, cakes and crisps’.4Few can now doubt the renewed importance of commodities in the global politicallandscape of the early twenty-first century. Moreover, the current contests over primaryresources, their acknowledged indispensability for present-day industrial societies, and theirglobal features and reverberations have profound historical echoes. Most of all, perhaps,they recall the ‘great leap forward’ in the production, movement, and consumption ofcommodities inaugurated by industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. The growingresource, manufacturing, and consumption needs of industrializing societies, the emergenceof the steamship and the railways, the ‘dematerialization of telecommunication’ – allescalated demand for raw materials and foodstuffs, and quickened and intensified commod-ity transactions, bringing profound changes to regions and societies in both south and1 Michael T. Klare, Resource wars: the new landscape of global conflict, New York: Henry Holt andCompany, 2001.2 Retort Collective, Afflicted powers: capital and spectacle in a new age of war, London: Verso, 2005.3 ‘Demand for palm oil is ‘‘damaging the planet’’’, The Independent, 9 November 2007.4 ‘UK palm oil consumption fuels Columbia violence, says report’, The Guardian, 12 May 2008.1Journal of Global History (2009) 4, pp. 1–5 ª London School of Economics and Political Science 2009doi:10.1017/S1740022809002927north.5 Production of raw materials and foodstuffs occurred overwhelmingly in regions ofthe south that were either already colonial possessions of rival industrializing Europeannation-states or were in the process of becoming so in the course of the nineteenth century.The industrial overproduction crisis in the last quarter of the century provided an impetusfor the ‘scramble’ for new colonial territories on the part of rival European powers.6Although the ‘scramble’ focused on markets for manufactures, rather than on temporarilycheap raw materials, it profoundly affected the conditions of production of tropicalcommodities.This is perhaps, therefore, an appropriate moment for revisiting the social histories ofcommodity production, transactions, and consumption, under the changing conditionsbrought about by three crucial processes during the course of the past two centuries: first,the accelerated pace of mechanization of production and transportation; second, the growthin ‘imperial’ rivalries between industrializing nations on both the political and economicfronts; and third, the multiplication of different uses and social meanings of products,as they were relocated from the fields, forests, and mines of the south to the industrializedsocieties of the north. ‘Commodities of Empire’ is the theme of a new research collaborationbetween the UK’s Open University and London Metropolitan University. The project has aparticular interest in exploring these processes from the vantage point of societies in thesouth that were subjected to colonial rule: in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and LatinAmerica. The articles featured in this special issue initially emerged as papers presented atthe project’s first international workshop, held in London in July 2007.Historically, commodities had multiple social lives, partaking both in imperial endea-vours and in local resistance to them. The varied movements embarked upon in thecourse of these life cycles – local, regional, across oceans and continents, within andbeyond empires – make commodities a particularly apt mode of exploring global history.This is particularly the case because their transformations were also connected withsocial changes over vast geographical areas, in infrastructures, technologies, economies,ecologies, labour regimes, and patterns of migration and consumption. They offer anapproach relevant to both ‘styles’ of modern global history identified by Patrick O’Brien:connections and comparisons.7 The focus on connections also suggests a potentiallyfruitful avenue for testing ‘globalization’ claims. The study of commodity movements,networks, and chains emphasizes the nature of their spatial connections, without any apriori assumption of ‘global’ reach. It enables the exploration of ‘the historical depthof interconnections and a focus on just what the structures and limits of the connectingmechanisms are’.8 The contributors to this special issue of the journal offer illuminatingexamples of both ‘connection’ and ‘comparison’ methods, as they explore a range of5 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the people without history, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982,p. 310; Roland Wenzlhuemer, ‘The dematerialization of telecommunication: communication centres andperipheries in Europe and the world, 1850–1920’, Journal of Global History, 2, 2, 2007, pp. 345–72.6 David B. Abernethy, The dynamics of global dominance: European overseas empires 1415–1980,New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 220.7 Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical traditions and modern imperatives for the restoration of globalhistory’, Journal of Global History, 1, 1 2006, pp. 4–7.8 Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in question, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005, p. 91.2 jjE D I T O R I A Lcommodity-related events and processes in various parts of the world that impacteddifferentially on each part. They do so, moreover, in a manner that is sensitive to theparticularities of different historical contexts.9 Above all, they insist on the significanceof the coeval nature of these processes, as they affected both south and north.Ports were evidently essential to the transcontinental movement of commodities. Thesimultaneous emergence of Bombay and Glasgow as modern global ports in the latenineteenth century was, Sandip Hazareesingh argues, no accident but was driven bycommercial networks with overlapping interests in both places, based on the cottontrade and the new possibilities of steam-shipping and related industrial innovations.Bombay’s sub-imperial function was crucial, and the Scottish merchants who dominatedthese networks had a keen eye for enhanced worldwide business opportunities in an ageof imperial expansion, while also enjoying privileged access to both imperial and colo-nial governments. The connected histories of these ports at this particular historical junc-ture also suggest a more complex model of causation of British ‘imperial’ processes thanthe single, metropolitan-focused paradigm advanced in Peter Cain and Tony Hopkins’well-known thesis.While industrialization clearly provided imperial Britain with enhanced power, thedeclining and only slowly industrializing imperial power of Spain, in contrast, seemedduring the same period to offer its Cuban colony new possibilities of indigenously led devel-opment based on sugar. Cuban entrepreneurs initiated the introduction of the latest steammachinery to the island’s sugar industry, supported in the process by the labour of migrantengineers from industrializing nations and the capital of foreign, merchant-led companies.Importantly, Jonathan Curry-Machado shows that these transnational networks were pro-moting a ‘sub-imperial globalization’, independent of the designs of rival imperial nations.However, although Cuba emerged as the world’s leading sugar producer, the escalatingcosts of the new steam technology led to growing dependence on non-Spanish merchantbanks, which gradually came to control the island’s sugar production and trade. Liberationfrom Spain led to domination by the United States.Nevertheless, the vitality of local processes, in the form, for instance, of peasant choicesover the growing of particular crops or of anti-colonial rebellions, could influence economicoutcomes and change imperial policies. In a comparison of the Bengali and Piedmontese silkindustries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Roberto Davini argues thatBengali peasants were largely able to dictate the terms under which they were willing toincrease silk production, as demanded by the East India Company. This was the result ofthe relative scarcity of labour in silk-producing areas, an ability to grow alternative andmore remunerative crops, and the retention of a great measure of autonomy by South Asianmercantile communities. While Bengali producers were able to improve their conditionsthrough obtaining higher prices, Piedmontese silk producers had far less bargaining powerin a local context of agrarian labour abundance and merchant control over all stagesof the silk production process, a system that was effectively policed by the Piedmontesegovernment.9 For a timely critique of the ‘generic colonialism’ practised in much of the field of postcolonial studies, seeCooper, Colonialism in question, pp. 12–26.E D I T O R I A L jj3David Hyde’s analysis of coffee production in late colonial Kenya shows how interactinglocal and global processes could bring about profound changes in colonial governmentpolicies. Faced with the Mau Mau rebellion, the Kenyan colonial government regardedthe welfare of the local coffee industry as crucial to generating the tax revenues to meetits escalating costs. The industry was in a global crisis, owing to increased supplies of coffeeon world markets, brought about by the increasing production of the major Latin Americangrowers. As coffee prices fell, the colonial government was left with little option but topromote Kenya’s African peasant producers, who could grow high quality Arabica coffeemuch more economically than white settlers. The local coffee industry was thus restruc-tured, with profound effects on the economic and social relationships that underpinnedKenya’s independence.In other circumstances, however, imperial authorities were able to resist the pressure tointervene in favour of local groups and interests, particularly where perceived ‘national’interests clashed with ‘imperial’ ones, often in situations of commodity competition, bothbetween different colonial territories of the same power and also between these and otherglobal producers. Thus, as Ayodeji Olukoju shows, the British government, in the 1920sand 1930s, persistently refused to intervene on behalf of Nigerian, and more widely WestAfrican, producers of palm oil and palm kernel oil. Britain first declined to impose retaliat-ory tariffs on American manufactured exports to West Africa, in response to Americanduties on West African oils, not wishing to unleash a trade war with the new economicsuperpower. The British further refused to impose differential duties on producers of palmoil in Indonesia or on Norwegian companies extracting whale oil, partly because Britishcompanies had substantial interests in these sectors.From the late nineteenth century, the increasing prosperity of western Europe and theUnited States, brought about by industrial production and expanding imperial and worldmarkets, led, for the first time, to the phenomenon of mass consumption, involvingmiddle-class and even working-class consumers in ‘home’ countries. Various forms ofadvertising were used to foster domestic demand for a wide range of ‘exotic’ products,portrayed as having origins both distant and imperial. Kaori O’Connor focuses onhow empire foodstuffs were promoted in Britain in the aftermath of the First WorldWar, through recipes, menus, and cookbooks. She shows that the king’s acceptance of aChristmas pudding entirely made up of ingredients from different parts of the empire waspart of an attempted reinvention of empire as a peaceful commercial civilization, with theking as presiding father figure. Advertisements and posters targeted women, particularlyhousewives, who were urged to follow the king’s example. They were now assigned a cru-cial role in the popularization of empire foodstuffs, which coincided with the emergence ofmiddle-class women who aspired to novel ways of cooking and eating that reflected theirnew status.The articles featured in this special issue collectively illustrate the principal themeswith which the ‘Commodities of Empire’ project is concerned. They identify concrete histor-ical changes, reveal inequalities in political and economic power, demonstrate patterns oflocal resilience, provide insights into local–global interactions, and emphasize the import-ance of communications and culture. Much historically sensitive work remains to be doneon the nature, extent, and limits of a ‘globalized’ world, which commodities played sucha fundamental part in bringing about. There is here the potential to make a significant4 jjE D I T O R I A Lcontribution to the evolution of global history, by realigning the lens away from teleologicalideas about ‘globalization’ and the power projections of various imperialisms, and towardsa focus on emerging thinking about the plurality of spatial linkages, networks, and connec-tions, which were more than local but less than global. This also involves the recognition ofthe agency – in all its complexity, unevenness, and contradictions – of those living in thecolonized spaces of the world.Sandip HazareesinghJonathan Curry-MachadoE D I T O R I A L jj5