The value within multiform commodities: North African phosphates and global markets in the interwar period

Abstract Phosphates mined in France’s North African empire fed interwar Europe’s voracious appetite for chemical fertilizers. In critique of histories vesting commodities themselves with the agency to make the modern world, I trace not the substance but the value embedded within it. By following value, I argue that the ‘commodity’ is not a stable unit of analysis. Rather, commodities are multiform. They can acquire myriad properties when the value embedded within them changes across time and place. During the interwar period, phosphates’ character as a commodity transmuted in relation to flows of other goods, movements of labour, global financial exigencies and imperial considerations. As phosphates assumed new forms, the geographic scales over which they operated changed too. Through North African phosphates, I explore value-making processes that perpetuated capital-intensive farming, allowing for a history not of the commodity-as-substance but of the commodity-as-historical-object whose analytical boundaries and forms shifted across contexts.