Commodity frontiers: concepts and history

Abstract

‘COMMODITY FRONTIERS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE GLOBAL COUNTRYSIDE: A RESEARCH AGENDA’ provides an opportunity to connect recent topics in global history, environmental history and the new history of capitalism. I will first summarize the key points of the paper and the way it engages in particular with global economic history. I go on to discuss key concepts of commodity frontiers and frontier zones, and set out and critically assess the historical phases delineated in the article. I welcome the position of the authors on aspects of the research strategy they offer to global historians; histories of natural resources and of the countryside and its peoples have not been sufficiently addressed by global historians. I argue, however, that the large-scale theory of commodity frontiers conflates too many concepts, leaving confusion rather than clarity of analysis. There is a great need for new histories of the natural world, rural and forest communities, of common lands and agriculture and of natural resources. Commodity frontiers, as defined and used in this article, unless carefully refined, cannot, I fear, open the deep historical analysis and comparative and connective history I identify with global history. Commodity frontiers as a concept has been defined as the processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy. To quote the authors