Commodities of Empire

The Commodities of Empire Project is an official British Academy Research Project, Commodities of Empire is a 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 project recognises the links between imperial expansion, global trade and the ongoing industrial revolution, and explores the networks through which commodities including 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) circulated within, and in the spaces between, empires.

A special 'Commodities of Empire' issue in the Journal of Global History was published in Spring 2009 (Vol 4, No.1). The project website also contains a series of online working papers.

These have been published since 2007 and topics include sugar, engineering and commerce in nineteenth-century Cuba; tobacco in the Dominican Republic; the role of the Canary Islands in the Atlantic coal route; the United Kingdom and the political economy of the global oil-producing nuts and seeds during the 1930s;

the history of Bengali raw silk; obscenity, empire and global networks; coffee and decolonisation in Kenya; tapioca-cassava; cotton, imperialism and public-private development in Britain’s African colonies, 1900-1918; the Kongo rubber trade; Indian Pale Ale; the battle for rubber in the Second World War; and Cuban popular resistance to the 1953 London Sugar Agreement.