Welcome to the Commodities of Empire Project

This is a research collaboration between the Open University's Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies and the University of London School of Advanced Study's Institute for the Study of the Americas.

The mutually reinforcing relationship between ‘commodities’ and ‘empires’
has long been recognised. Over the last six centuries the quest for profits has driven imperial expansion, with the global trade in commodities fuelling the ongoing industrial revolution. These ‘commodities of empire’, which became transnationally mobilised in ever larger quantities, included foodstuffs (wheat, rice, bananas); industrial crops (cotton, rubber, linseed and palm oils); stimulants (sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and opium); and ores (tin, copper, gold, diamonds). Their expanded production and global movements brought vast spatial, social, economic and cultural changes to both metropoles and colonies.

In the Commodities of Empire project we explore the networks through which such commodities circulated within, and in the spaces between, empires. We are particularly attentive to local processes – originating in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America – which significantly influenced the outcome of the encounter between the world economy and regional societies, doing so through a comparative approach that explores the experiences of peoples subjected to different imperial hegemonies.

The Commodities of Emipre Project is a British Academy Research Project Find out more

Announcements

NEW The Commodities of Empire Working Papers series, new paper No. 13 Find out more

NEW The Commodities of Empire Working Papers series, new paper No. 14 Find out more