Catalysing Socio-Ecological Change: The Extraction and Processing of Edible Oils, 1910-1940

Abstract

This article argues that histories of global north and south are interconnected and inseparable parts of the same processes that shaped different environments. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, systematic science-based commodification attributed economic and use values to natural resources. This changed western perceptions of natural environments. The commodification of plant and animal oils led to global entanglements of European production and consumption with resource extraction sites in Africa, Asia and the Antarctic. These historical accounts are often written in national frames or focused on one commodity. This article explores the global in ter- and cross linkages with and between extraction regions. The historical distribution of sustainability gains and costs was continuously negotiated through building these global supply chains. I trace socio-technical changes from 1910 to 1940, when West European margarine industries constructed the entangled global resource supply chains. This article scrutinises the contestation, tensions and outcomes, revealing the conflicting values, interests and differences in power relations between indigenous actors and the global system entanglers active in Congo, Indonesia and the Antarctic. My analysis highlights the social and ecological changes in the entangled regions, and sketches the global economic, social and ecological trade-offs of these developments.