Commodity frontiers and global histories: the tasks ahead

IF 1.7 1区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY
S. Beckert, U. Bosma, Mindi Schneider, E. Vanhaute
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Given the alarming pace of climate change, global environmental destruction, and associated social dislocations and inequalities, a global history that also speaks to the present is more important now than ever. We started our article with a pointed argument that ‘[t]he history of the making of the modern world is a history of the expansion of commodity frontiers, a historical conundrum so spatially, socially, and structurally all-encompassing that it still awaits its persuasive analysis’. This deep historical perspective, we argued, is crucial to understanding how we arrived at our current socioecological predicament. What is more, we proposed that transdisciplinary research among historians and social, ecological, and computational scientists is essential to engage such questions. To that end, we have developed our research agenda around an analytical framework that lets us trace the long history and present of capitalism. We look at the countryside through the lens of the history of commodity frontiers, using commodity regimes as an analytical framework to make sense of the vast amount of data we hope to uncover. The commodity frontier – the empirical core of our investigations – is not simply a place. It is a relational concept that grasps the flows of materials and energy between nature and society, between different societies and within them. These flows connect regions of extraction with the sites of production that organize capitalist modernity on a world scale. The commodity frontier stands for an inductive historical approach that starts from the far edges of global expansion. It includes agents other than the global hegemonic powers, spaces other than the metropole and relations that encompass more than the economic. Indeed, as we emphasized in our paper, ‘[m]uch of the writing on the history of capitalism privileges the perspective from the city and industry to the detriment of processes in the household, agriculture, and the countryside where the vast majority of humanity has lived until very recently and where many of the revolutions of capitalism have taken place’. Urban merchants, state bureaucrats, soldiers and lawmakers, of course, helped produce these commodity frontiers as much as commodity frontiers co-created them – yet the distinguishing feature of our work is that it thinks of these processes from the fringes. We welcome Maxine Berg’s observation that ‘histories of natural resources and of the countryside and its peoples have not been sufficiently addressed by global historians’. This lacuna stands in contrast to a growing number of scholars from other disciplines who have come to see ‘commodity frontiers’ as a promising approach to historical processes. As Ronald Findlay and Kevin O’Rourke conclude, such an approach is both exciting and necessary to avoid mono-causal explanations of historical change. The research agenda we propose, as Ruth Mostern observes, attempts to bridge the gulf between the conceptual focus of social science
商品前沿和全球历史:未来的任务
考虑到气候变化、全球环境破坏以及相关的社会混乱和不平等的惊人速度,一部反映当下的全球历史比以往任何时候都更加重要。我们在文章的开头提出了一个尖锐的论点:“现代世界的形成史是一部商品边界扩张的历史,这是一个在空间、社会和结构上无所不有的历史难题,它仍在等待有说服力的分析。”我们认为,这种深刻的历史视角对于理解我们是如何陷入当前的社会生态困境至关重要。更重要的是,我们建议历史学家和社会、生态和计算科学家之间的跨学科研究对于解决这些问题至关重要。为此,我们围绕一个分析框架制定了我们的研究议程,使我们能够追溯资本主义的悠久历史和现状。我们通过商品边界的历史镜头来观察农村,使用商品制度作为分析框架来理解我们希望揭示的大量数据。商品前沿——我们研究的经验核心——不仅仅是一个地方。它是一个关系概念,掌握了自然与社会之间、不同社会之间以及社会内部的物质和能量流动。这些流动将抽取地区与在世界范围内组织资本主义现代性的生产地点联系起来。商品前沿代表了一种从全球扩张的边缘出发的归纳历史方法。它包括全球霸权国家以外的代理人,大都市以外的空间,以及超越经济范围的关系。事实上,正如我们在论文中强调的那样,“许多关于资本主义历史的著作都从城市和工业的角度出发,而忽略了家庭、农业和农村的过程,而直到最近,绝大多数人类都生活在农村,也发生了许多资本主义革命。”当然,城市商人、国家官僚、士兵和立法者帮助创造了这些商品边界,就像商品边界共同创造了它们一样——然而,我们工作的显著特点是,它从边缘思考这些过程。我们欢迎玛克辛·伯格(Maxine Berg)的观察,即“全球历史学家对自然资源、农村及其人民的历史没有进行充分的研究”。这一空白与越来越多其他学科的学者形成鲜明对比,他们将“商品边界”视为研究历史进程的一种有前途的方法。正如Ronald Findlay和Kevin O 'Rourke总结的那样,这种方法既令人兴奋,又必要,以避免对历史变化的单一因果解释。正如露丝·莫斯顿(Ruth Mostern)所观察到的,我们提出的研究议程试图弥合社会科学概念焦点之间的鸿沟
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来源期刊
CiteScore
3.30
自引率
5.30%
发文量
28
期刊介绍: Journal of Global History addresses the main problems of global change over time, together with the diverse histories of globalization. It also examines counter-currents to globalization, including those that have structured other spatial units. The journal seeks to transcend the dichotomy between "the West and the rest", straddle traditional regional boundaries, relate material to cultural and political history, and overcome thematic fragmentation in historiography. The journal also acts as a forum for interdisciplinary conversations across a wide variety of social and natural sciences. Published for London School of Economics and Political Science
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