Commodity Extraction across Transimperial Spaces

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

Both specific places and commodities have long been indispensable frames in environmental history. Histories of the Bay of Bengal and Beringia, to take two recent examples, have shown how human migration, commodity extraction, and politics have shaped, and been shaped by, long histories of human and nonhuman relations that bind together specific places and regions. At the same time, histories of oil, cotton, guano and other commodities have shown how capitalism’s long-distance networks of trade, investment, migration and product have bound together humans and nonhumans across the globe, often in unequal and exploitative relationships.

Our panel places these two overlapping approaches in conversation to better understand the transimperial history of environmental change. We focus on things that crossed empires and places where different imperial entities – including corporations and states – acted to extract resources, often at the expense of colonized peoples and the environment. On one hand, our panel considers the history of two commodities, ramie and kapok, to ask how and why specific places became sites of extraction, how flows of these commodities across borders shaped, and were shaped by, environments, politics, consumer cultures, and technologies. At the same time, our panelists place in conversation distinct spaces, from the Svalbard Archipelago to Suriname, to foreground how imperial powers and their intermediaries have produced commodities that transformed regional ecosystems and human and nonhuman migration patterns over centuries.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Keeping power afloat: kapok across Dutch and American empires, 1900-1950 - Jonathan Robins, Michigan Technological University

• Ramie Disseminated: A Global History of Environment, Technology, and Market, 1840-1950 - Yiyun Peng, Cornell University

• Bauxite, Bonded Labor, and American Capitalists in Suriname - Jordan Howell, University of Manitoba

• An extractive base in the Arctic: environment and empire on Svalbard, 1750-1920 - Alina Bykova, Stanford University

Chair

• Angélica Marquez-Osuna, Harvard University