Local and Global Environmental Histories of Production and Trade

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the world’s economies became increasingly integrated. Global networks of trade and finance connected distant corners of the planet just as thoroughly as local networks of exchange connected adjacent communities. In many cases, the processes of globalization and industrialization created a logic in which it made more sense to source raw materials for production from distant landscapes than it did to source them from the local environment. The economic growth of places in Europe and North America were therefore intimately tied to the exploitation of an extraordinary number of resources from almost every corner of the world. As Kenneth Pomeranz has pointed out, the development of industrial capital relied on the extraction of resource wealth from ghost acres.
And yet the sites of resource extraction on the one hand, and manufacturing on the other, took place in specific places with distinct consequences for local ecologies and societies. As the scale of industrial capital expanded, so too did the footprint of global integrated commodity flows. Expansive and intensive resource extraction exhausted the natural capital of the global periphery, while the massive scale of industrial production created enormous quantities of point source pollution in the centre.
This panel seeks to draw attention to the process of global economic integration during the nineteenth century, and to situate that development within its ecological consequences for both the sites of resource extraction and industrial production.

Sub Unit

• ASEH Annual Conference

Individual Presentations

• Using and abusing a torrential urban river. Tanneries and other crafts at a Viennese Danube tributary before and during industrialization (Wien River, Vienna-Austria) - Gudrun Pollack, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt; Gertrud Haidvogl, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna

• The ecological consequences of London’s nineteenth century leather tanning industry - Andrew Watson, University of Saskatchewan

• Hunting, Ivory and Firearms Trade in the Ethiopian Region, c. 1840s-1940s - Guluma Gemeda, University of Michigan-Flint

Chair

• Colin Coates, York University