Global Commodity Studies

Open only to doctoral students based at universities within the U.S.

Workshop dates:

Spring - May 29-June 2, 2013 in Chaska, Minnesota

Fall - September 18-22, 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Commodity studies highlight the historical, environmental, and political contexts of commodity flows. The commodity emphasis offers a way to think about contemporary globalization and historical capitalism, connecting shifts in the global economy to diverse peoples and practices grounded in specific localities and environments. Ecological, socio-economic, cultural, spatial, and multi-scalar considerations are foremost in recent academic and popular writings on commodities. The entry of novel commodities into the global marketplace, along with repurposed traditional ones like chocolate and coffee for specialty niche markets, is receiving considerable research attention. So, too, is the commerce in medicinal plants of specific cultural heritages, the commodity chains of illegal drug production and consumption, and the commodification of nature—from selling “place” through bottled water to carbon credits and debt-for-nature swaps. By unpacking the processes by which goods, markets, and consumption are historically defined, constructed, peopled, and changed—the “social life of things”—commodity studies make an exciting entry point for innovative proposal writing.

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Field Directors

Paul Gootenberg

Professor, State University of New York at Stony Brook, History and Sociology [ bio ]

Paul Gootenberg, a Professor of History and Sociology at Stony Brook University, the State University of New York, has interdisciplinary interests in commodity studies, state formation, and social inequality. He trained at St. Antony’s College, Oxford and the University of Chicago, and began his career as an economic historian and specialist on Peruvian history. He has held various research and training fellowships, including a Rhodes, Guggenheim, Fulbright, SSRC, ACLS, and been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Russell Sage Foundation, and Wilson Center. He works with various programs of the Social Science Research Council, including most recently the Drugs, Security, and Democracy (DSD) fellowship program. Gootenberg’s first commodity-related books were Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (Princeton, 1989) and Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru’s ‘Fictitious Prosperity’ of Guano (California, 1993). Since the 1990s, his research and writing have turned to the history of drugs, on which published Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge, 1999) and Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (UNC Press, 2008), a transnational political-commodity history of cocaine between 1850 and 1980.

Judith Carney

Professor, University of California, Los Angeles, Geography [ bio ]

Judith Carney is a Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research and teaching focus on critical development studies, political ecology, environmental history, Africa and the African diaspora. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist in environment and development issues, she has examined the commodification of several West African production systems associated with female labor: rice, shea butter, and mangrove oysters. An additional research focus is the contribution of African crops and enslaved Africans to the technology and culture of the Americas. She is a 2005-06 Guggenheim fellow and the recipient of research fellowships from the ACLS and Rockefeller Foundation. Her books include Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received the Melville J. Herskovits and James M. Blaut book awards, and (with Richard Rosomoff) In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (University of California Press, 2009), a recipient of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

Research Fields