Abstract
AbstractOver the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights.
Highlights
The history of the making of the modern world is a history of the expansion of commodity frontiers, a historical process so spatially, socially and structurally all-encompassing that it still awaits its persuasive analysis
We claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and the modern world
We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature
Summary
Considering the spectacular rise in the growing of agricultural commodities and the mining of minerals in the past centuries, and the stunning and ongoing social and environmental effects of their production and circulation, it is not surprising that many scholars from a variety of disciplines have tried to grasp the underlying mechanisms of commodity frontier expansion. Economist Joan Martinez-Alier, along with human ecologists working on distributional conflicts such as Alf Hornborg, for example, are sceptical that capitalist externalities can be priced into submission They offer alternative conceptions of how to define capitalism’s ecological problems, seeing them as the political results of uneven distribution.. They deploy concepts such as social metabolism and unequal ecological exchange to analyse how the flows of energy and materials between places and peoples generate and maintain inequalities These scholars contend that the capitalist system, rather than being able to self-correct by pricing externalities, is based on crushing forms of ecological debt created by rich nations underwriting their growth with the resources of poor nations. Many (though not all of them) tend to focus on contemporary problems, their analysis limited by a failure to fully consider the many centuries of commodity frontier expansion
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