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Commodities of Empire project
Greater Caribbean Post-Graduate Needs Assessment
Commodities of Empire Project and Global Commodities Network
This is a joint research collaboration between the Caribbean Studies Centre and the Open University's Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies.
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.
Further information...
Commodities of Empire Working Papers
Greater Caribbean Post-Graduate Needs Assessment
During the six-month period of October
2003 through March 2004, London Metropolitan University, through its
Caribbean Studies Centre, undertook a postgraduate needs assessment of
what has come to be known as the Greater Caribbean — spanning the
Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic and Dutch linguistic subregions of
the insular and mainland circum-Caribbean. The assessment was motivated
by a desire to explore possible Euro-Caribbean collaborative models to
meet those needs. In due course, we hope to make the data from this
study available as a resourse; and in the meantime, the executive
summary of the report will soon be available for download from this
page.
Further details...
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Last
updated on 14/02/09
