Ongoing since 2020
Commodity Frontiers Initiative
The Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI) is a network of scholars, research teams, artists, and civil society organizations from all over the world. With more than 25 partner institutes, CFI collaborators have been working extensively on global commodity production, rural societies, labor history, the history of capitalism, and social and ecological frictions and capitalist fixes in the global countryside. Collaborators have published some of the most important books, articles, and reports in their fields. Together they are expert on a wide range of global commodities, covering all the principle producing regions of the world, from the early modern period to the present day, employing a range of approaches from social and economic history, anthropology, sociology, political science, ecology, and development studies. Enough Room for Space is working as Creative Editor for the CFI journal.
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Partner institutes:
- The Transnational Institute (TNI) is an international research and advocacy institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable planet.
- The Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD), New Delhi, is part of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a public university founded in 1969 that is ranked second in India (2018).
- The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) is a multidisciplinary centre that promotes academic research and postgraduate education in environmental sciences.
- National Council of Extractivist Populations – CNS, Brasil.
- The Centre for Environment and Development (CED) / Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement is a leading socio-environmental NGO based in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
- Karti Dhartiis a public interest research space that promotes the study of land, culture, and community in South Asia.
- MedIns enquires into the correlations between insular space and the development of economic structures in early modern Cyprus and Crete.
- The Berkeley Working Group on Environmental Politics, University of California, Berkeley, USA
- El Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, Económicas, Políticas y Antropológicas, CISEPA, Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru
- Peru College of Humanities and Development Studies
- China Agricultural University
- China College of Sustainability Sciences and Humanities
- Zayed University, United Arab Emirates
- Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project, University of London (SAS and SOAS)
- United Kingdom Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS)
- International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and Erasmus University, The Hague, the Netherlands
- ‘Emerging Worlds’ Project at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Department of Food and Resource Economics (IFRO), University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA), University of Padua, Italy
- Economies, Comparisons Connections, Ghent University, Belgium
- Fernand Braudel Center, State University of New York, Binghamton, USA
- FIAN International, Germany
- Friends of the Earth International, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- Global change—Local Conflicts (GLOCON), Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
- Human Ecology Division, Lund University, Sweden
- International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- Institut de Ciència i Tecnologica Ambientals (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
- Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University, the Netherlands
- Interdisciplinary Commodity Studies, Johannes Kepler University Linz
The Commodity Frontiers Initiative aims to systematically catalogue, study and analyze a wide variety of commodity frontiers over the past 600 years. By providing a long historical perspective on problems that are often assumed to be modern, and linking historical and contemporary research, the Initiative endeavors to recast our thinking about issues of sustainability, resilience, and crisis and thus contribute to the politics of our own times.
The CFI operates through the leadership of Mindi Schneider (Brown University), Sven Beckert (Harvard University), Eric Vanhaute (Ghent University), and Ulbe Bosma (International Institute of Social History). Enough Room for Space is working as Creative Editor for the CFI journal.
We currently organize four main activities. First, the leadership’s agenda-setting article, Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside: a research agenda, was published in the Journal of Global History in 2021. The paper anchors our ongoing work in the CFI. Second, with our CFI Editorial Board, we publish a bi-annual journal called Commodity Frontiers that convenes multidisciplinary and multisectoral approaches to particular commodity frontiers, from mineral, to human bodies, to “renewable” energy. Third, we are compiling a Lexicon of commodity frontiers through a series of overtures and keyword conversations among international scholars. Finally, we are launching a series called Global Conversations on Commodity Frontiers that will explore new books, articles, and initiatives related to the Initiative.
Mission Statement
Commodity Frontiers is the Journal of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI). Edited by a group of scholars and researchers from various disciplines and organizations in the CFI Network, Commodity Frontiers explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying, teaching, and engaging commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at present. Contributors include historians, social scientists, (political) ecologists, artists, and activists who work on global commodity production and circulation, rural societies, labor history, the history of capitalism, social metabolism, and contemporary politics, conflicts, and counternarratives in the countryside.
Commodity Frontiers endeavors to carry out one of the central goals of the CFI: to provide long historical perspectives on problems that are often assumed to be modern, and to link historical and contemporary research to recast our thinking about sustainability, resilience, and crisis. Commodity Frontiers is a biannual open-access publication housed in the Brown Digital Repository, at commodityfrontiers.com, and distributed through email subscriptions. Its editorial collective is committed to inclusive, anti-racist, anti-sexist, decolonial scholarship and politics.
Objectives
Commodity Frontiers aims to provide “deep snippets” and accessible content from diverse perspectives on the past, present, and future of commodity frontiers and their dynamics. We feature research and educational activities undertaken by academics, artists, activists, and other civil society actors. By inviting short contributions from our multidisciplinary and multi-sectoral networks, and distributing the open-access Journal through our website and the Open Journal System, we aim to reach a broader audience than typical academic publishing allows. We strive for “real-time” reports and reflections on contemporary issues, as well as contributions that link the past and present.
Editorial Process
The articles in Commodity Frontiers are not double-blind peer-reviewed. Rather, Section Editors purposely invite contributions related to the theme of each issue from experts in respective fields. All articles are reviewed by Section Editors and at least one Editor-in-Chief.
Related News
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Fall 2023
‘Renewable’ Energy Frontiers – CFI Issue 6
Commodity Frontiers Journal, Online
From a technical point of view, renewable energy is energy from “natural” sources that can be constantly replenished; things like wind, sun, waves. Without a doubt, these are important fossil fuel alternatives. But when commodity frontier dynamics are the entry point for analyzing energy and energy transitions, the notion of renewability comes into question. To define an energy transition in technical terms without addressing the people who could make a transition possible, or the root causes of climate change, environmental degradation, and global inequality leaves a foundational question unanswered: in addition to energy, what else is being renewed in today’s renewable energy frontiers?
Several contributions in the Issue look at how renewable energy reproduces — or renews — extractive, colonial, exploitative relations. The first three articles are grounded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the mining of cobalt, a mineral marked as key for the renewable energy transition, including Maarten Vanden Eynde’s conversation with artist, documentary photographer, and journalist Pamela Tulizo who is living and working in Goma, in North Kivu, D.R. Congo.
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Spring 2023
Human Body Frontiers – CFI Issue 5
Commodity Frontiers Journal, Online
This issue of Commodity Frontiers is about our collective backs and what human bodies can tell us about commodity frontiers. It’s about the regimented bodies that sustain capitalism, and the (same) unruly bodies that challenge its smooth development. The issue is about labor, sex, blood, reproduction, racialization, decarceration, community, metabolism, and memory. It’s about what bodies do, how they are unevenly incorporated into capitalist economies, and how they resist or contest incorporation.
Issue 5 features many contributions, including a conversation between neuroscientist, André Fenton and CF editor, Maarten Vanden Eynde, in which they consider memory as a possibly emerging frontier. Their discussion ranges from what, actually, memory is and where it resides, to if and how AI (artificial intelligence) can duplicate it. Fenton helps us see bodies (and memory) as dynamic systems, full of complex and only partially understood relationships, comprised of individual and impermanent pieces that constitute networked and enduring wholes. To this reader, the parallels between what neuroscientists study inside of our skin, and what historians and social scientists study outside of it are exciting. The conversation also offers some clues for how we might connect these inner and outer realms.
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Fall 2022
Waste Frontiers – CFI Issue 4
Commodity Frontiers Journal, Online
This issue situates waste in the present and historical expansion of capitalism. The contributions to the journal ask questions about producing, managing, and theorizing waste. They examine equity issues around who is responsible for making waste, who is most intimately impacted by waste, and who is defined as waste, or as deserving of living among waste. They look at how patterns in the distribution of waste’s benefits and harms reproduce entrenched global and local inequalities. And they invite readers to ask what can be learned about capitalism - and perhaps about themselves - from studying how waste-in-capital is defined, produced, offloaded, recycled, valued, commodified, managed, experienced, countered, and unevenly invisibilized. In short, they open up “waste” as a material and discursive frontier, operating in service of capital accumulation, colonial expansion, and the maintenance of social hierarchies.
Issue 4 features several interviews, including Maarten Vanden Eynde's interview with Eli Carpenter, a Professor in Interdisciplinary Art & Culture at Umeå University in Sweden. They discuss her curatorial research in “The Nuclear Culture” project, the urgency of nuclear visibility, and notions of deep time responsibility and forgetting.
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Fall 2021
Livestock Frontiers – CFI Issue 3
Commodity Frontiers Journal, Online
In this issue of Commodity Frontiers, contributors take up issues relating to animals, livestock, and livestock production through a commodity frontiers lens. Fueled by increasing (local, national, imperial, and global) livestock production “developments” and demands for livestock products—most notably (but not only) meat—and reinforced by technoscientific innovations, new livestock frontiers have emerged and spread across the globe. With livestock frontiers we mean both processes and sites in which animals are bred, reared, cured, traded, and commodified in novel ways, by re-allocating land, labour, capital, knowledge, and other resources, to enhance productivity and maximize gains. By doing so, livestock frontiers have changed human-animal and interhuman social relations, economic systems, and ecological landscapes in various and often unintended ways. Furthermore, livestock frontiers have become deeply entangled with frontiers in agriculture, securing the production of fodder crops such as soy and corn. These changes include, but are not limited to, the industrialization of livestock production that we discussed above.
Issue 3 features several contributions, including Maarten Vanden Eynde's interview with Christien Meindertsma, the Dutch designer who has researched and wrote a book called Pig 05049 which relates the many consumer products made from a pig called 05049. They discuss Meindertsma’s motivations for making the book and reflect on some of the challenges of promoting and brining about social change regarding meat (and other) consumption.
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Spring 2021
Stimulant Frontiers – CFI Issue 2
Commodity Frontiers Journal, Online
Commodity Frontiers Initiative explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying and teaching commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at the present.
Issue 2: Stimulants have, in their own ways, played a leading role in shaping today’s globalised world. Their world-shaping power stems from their double role: as “agents” that stimulate bodies, and as things that “rouse and incite” capital. In this issue of Commodity Frontiers, contributions center on the histories and presents of some of the leading stimulant crops and the sites and processes of their cultivation, expansion, and transformations. Contributors variously consider stimulants from the perspectives of bodies and capital, sometimes touching on their overlaps.
In the framework of the 2nd Commodity Frontiers Initiative Journal with the theme of ‘Stimulants’ Maarten Vanden Eynde interviewed Roger M. Buergel and Sophia Prinz from the Johann Jacobs Museum, which owes its existence to the coffee and cacao trade, but more importantly is unique in its endeavour to lay bare the intrinsically interwoven histories of commodities. The museum is dedicated to the global interdependencies of our life-world that become especially clear when tracing the history of important trade goods and their transport routes.
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Fall 2020
Mineral Frontiers – CFI Issue 1
Commodity Frontiers Journal, Online
Commodity Frontiers Initiative explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological transformation in the global countryside. Each themed issue includes articles and interviews with experts about studying and teaching commodity frontiers in theory and in practice. The Journal features reflections and reviews on the dynamics of capitalist expansion, social change, and ecological transformation on global as well local scales, in the past and at the present.
Issue 1: Mineral Frontiers: Capitalism, Contestation, and the Transformation of the Global Countryside. Maarten Vanden Eynde & Marjolijn Dijkman (Enough Room for Space) are the editors of the journal's section Creative Frontiers. For this issue Lotte Arndt and Oulimata Gueye introduce an article on the transnational artist’s collaboration, On-Trade-Off, which critically examines extraction, power structures in global capitalism and the global art world, and searches for alternatives. (This is a pre-publication version of the piece that will appear in the upcoming Vertical Atlas book produced by Digital Earth in collaboration with Het Nieuwe Instituut.)