Project description
The emergence of global trade in the 19th century
Commodities such as cotton, sugar, palm oil, and soy are often obtained at the lowest possible price, frequently resulting in harmful consequences for both people and the environment. Those repercussions are integral to the history of global capitalism. The ERC-funded SevenFrontiers project will investigate the transformative impact of commodity frontiers in the Global South during the pivotal decades following the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of the Industrial Revolution. By focusing on seven key commodities, the project will explore their social and economic effects, labour mobilisation, and contributions to global trade. Analysing historical databases and underutilised archives will shed light on the development of global trade.
Objective
Our lives would be unthinkable without the production of millions of tons of cotton, sugar, palm oil or soy. All these commodities are obtained at the lowest possible price with often detrimental consequences for people and nature. The scale of the resulting environmental crises may be something of recent making, its mechanisms can be traced many centuries ago and are crucially part of the history of global capitalism.
This project will go back to the pivotal decades when Europe recovered from the devastating Napoleonic wars, the Industrial Revolution picked up steam and global trade went through fifty years of rapid growth, a spurt even more spectacular than after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Against this backdrop the projects research team will examine the immense transformative effects of commodity frontiers in the Global South that fed the rise of early industrial capitalism.
We will assess these transformations by taking the seven most exported commodities from the Global South as the unit of analysis (sugar, cotton, coffee, tea, precious metals (gold/silver), opium and cereals). We will map the wide-ranging and diverse social consequences of the massive mobilization of labour and land necessary to produce these commodities using an extensive historical database on global labour relations developed by an international group of scholars. We will further examine how these commodity frontiers were organized and financed by using underutilized archives of prominent locally and globally operating merchant houses. Finally, we will assess the actual contribution of the production of the seven commodities in the Global South to the upsurge of global trade. Data mining from digitized sources such as newspapers will allow us to identify trade patterns that so far escaped historical statistics. Thus, we will break new grounds in understanding how early on in the nineteenth century global trade and production patterns emerged that shaped the world of today.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences computer and information sciences databases
- humanities history and archaeology history
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry transition metals
- social sciences political sciences political transitions revolutions
- agricultural sciences agriculture, forestry, and fisheries agriculture grains and oilseeds cereals
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Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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1011 JV AMSTERDAM
Netherlands
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