At the Margins of the Global Market

Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.

Making the leap: commodity chains and the potential for global environmental histories of capitalism

This article is a brief response to Leonardo Marques’ essay “Commodity Chains and the Global Environmental History of the Colonial Americas.” It focuses on the practical and theoretical limitations of commodity-chain histories as away to address our political and environmental moment. It argues that commodity-chain histories must overcome the complexity of their subjects, and leap the theoretical gap between local and global scales without losing sight of nature. To do so, the article advocates for more work by environmental historians, and a focus on transformation rather than commodity flows.

Ice and Ivory: the cryopolitics of mammoth de-extinction

Woolly mammoth tusk hunting has become a black-market industry in the Siberian region of Yakutia, where thawing permafrost due to climate change is revealing the bodies of thousands of mammoths. They are often in a state of incredible preservation, and their accompanying tusks can be sold to China where they are carved into ornaments as a marker of status. Alongside tusk hunting, another potential industry has emerged: de-extinction. Many of the mammoths found on the tundra have potentially viable DNA that might be used to resurrect a mammoth through genetic technology. Mammoth de-extinction is a cryopolitical process – a focus on the preservation and production of life at a genetic level through cold storage. 'Cryobanks' have emerged as a way to safeguard endangered and extinct species' genetic material, and forms part of a turn towards pre-empting conservation crises during what some scholars are calling the 'sixth great extinction.' The mammoth's body is broken down into pieces – tusks form luxury commodity chains, whilst flesh and blood is parceled into frozen genes and cells. The mammoth in the freezer is indicative of a reorganization of cold life in a warming world, with the specific cryopolitics found in the cryobank an attempt at extending human control over planetary processes that are now seemingly out of control. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken at the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, Siberia, and at the Natural History Museum's cryobank in London, I follow the mammoth from permafrost, to freezer, to back outside, and consider how her de-extinction is a response to a particular sort of future crisis –that of our own extinction.

Avian Influenza Risk Environment: Live Bird Commodity Chains in Chattogram, Bangladesh

In this paper, we identify behaviours in live bird commodity chains in Chattogram, Bangladesh, which may influence the risk of pathogen emergence and transmission: the nature of poultry trade, value appropriation and selling sick or infected birds. Examining the reasons why actors engage in these behaviours, we emphasise the politics of constraints within a context of real-world decisions, governed by existential and pragmatic agency. Focusing on contact zones and entanglement, analysing patron-client relationships and precarious circumstances, we argue that agency and structure specific to the Bangladeshi context produce a risk environment. Structural constraints may reinforce risky occupational practises and limit individual agency. Structural constraints need to be addressed in order to tackle animal and zoonotic disease risk along live animal commodity chains.

Sustainable Partnerships in Cassava Production and Industrial Sector: A Heckprobit Analysis of Indonesian Farmers

<p>Partnerships are instruments to overcome the inability of individual smallholders to solve the development problems associated with agricultural sectors and commodity chains. While vigorously advocated, a sustainable partnership is rare in the Indonesian cassava production and industrial sector. Knowledge of partnership from the sector is also limited. This study explores the reasons for previous partnerships in the cassava production and industrial sector discontinued and examine what factors determine farmers' willingness to partake in partnerships. The study administered a systematic random sampling to survey for 140 cassava farmers in Central and East Lampung Districts from November 2018 to April 2019. Farmers were interviewed and given a structural questionnaire. The quantitative data were analyzed by heckprobit regression. The results of the study show that the partnership ends because the two parties do not have the same vision for working together. Various variables (barriers to selling to non-industries, low prices, inaccurate weighing scales, high transaction costs, and discounted prices.) indicate the complexity of farmers' considerations for joining the partnership. This research impliesthat it is difficult to create partnerships in the future if farmers and industry have different visions and priorities.</p>

Global Commodities

Focusing on coca, coffee, gold, soy, sugar, and tea, articles in a special issue of the Austrian Journal of Historical Studies 30/3 (2019) on Global Commodities aim at tracing the emergence of commodity chains through the expansion and contraction of commodity frontiers. Frontier shifts imply complex – and potentially conflicting – interactions shaped by as well as shaping socio-natural systems. Thus, the contributions reveal commodity chains and their frontiers to be subject to negotiations between multiple actors, both human and non-human. Each of the contributions concentrates on one or more world region(s) of frontier shifts, while taking into account the transregional, transnational, and transcontinental connections via commodity chains. Thereby, these commodity-focused histories reveal the benefit of combining global with regional or even local perspectives (Joseph, 2019).

Thinking with the grain

In this short commentary, I consider William Jamieson’s proposal ‘For Granular Geography’. I focus on two parallel arguments at work in his piece: the proposal for a political ecology of sand foregrounding the physical dynamics of sand as a granular system; and second, his programmatic agenda for human geography in which the instability and unpredictability of granular systems become a ‘conceptual grammar’ for the material geographies of value transformation. I am sympathetic to thinking through materials and alive to the poetic possibilities of sand, but ultimately find neither of Jamieson’s arguments persuasive. I suggest a fuller engagement with existing ‘grammars’ – including those of new materialism, elemental geographies, and the role of friction in global commodity chains – could help clarify the contribution that ‘granularity’ might be able to make.

Global Fertility Chains: An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understanding the Reproductive Bioeconomy

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain.