The Global South in the Age of Early Industrial Capitalism: Commodity Frontiers and Social Transformations (1816-1870)

Our lives would be unthinkable without the production of millions of tons of cotton, sugar, palm oil or soy.

All these commodities are obtained at the lowest possible price with often detrimental consequences for people and nature.

The scale of the resulting environmental crises may be something of recent making, its mechanisms can be traced many centuries ago and are crucially part of the history of global capitalism.

This project will go back to the pivotal decades when Europe recovered from the devastating Napoleonic wars, the Industrial Revolution picked up steam and global trade went through fifty years of rapid growth, a spurt even more spectacular than after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

Against this backdrop the projects research team will examine the immense transformative effects of commodity frontiers in the Global South that fed the rise of early industrial capitalism.

We will assess these transformations by taking the seven most exported commodities from the Global South as the unit of analysis (sugar, cotton, coffee, tea, precious metals (gold/silver), opium and cereals).

We will map the wide-ranging and diverse social consequences of the massive mobilization of labour and land necessary to produce these commodities using an extensive historical database on global labour relations developed by an international group of scholars.

We will further examine how these commodity frontiers were organized and financed by using underutilized archives of prominent locally and globally operating merchant houses.

Finally, we will assess the actual contribution of the production of the seven commodities in the Global South to the upsurge of global trade.

Data mining from digitized sources such as newspapers will allow us to identify trade patterns that so far escaped historical statistics.

Thus, we will break new grounds in understanding how early on in the nineteenth century global trade and production patterns emerged that shaped the world of today.