Spring 2025
Launch new website of Commodity Frontiers Journal and issue #7
Online Journal
The Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI) is a network of scholars, research teams, artists, and civil society organizations from all over the world. With more than 25 partner institutes, CFI collaborators have been working extensively on global commodity production, rural societies, labor history, the history of capitalism, and social and ecological frictions and capitalist fixes in the global countryside. Collaborators have published some of the most important books, articles, and reports in their fields. Together they are expert on a wide range of global commodities, covering all the principle producing regions of the world, from the early modern period to the present day, employing a range of approaches from social and economic history, anthropology, sociology, political science, ecology, and development studies.
The Commodity Frontiers Initiative aims to systematically catalogue, study and analyze a wide variety of commodity frontiers over the past 600 years. By providing a long historical perspective on problems that are often assumed to be modern, and linking historical and contemporary research, the Initiative endeavors to recast our thinking about issues of sustainability, resilience, and crisis and thus contribute to the politics of our own times.
The CFI operates through the leadership of Mindi Schneider (Brown University), Sven Beckert (Harvard University), Eric Vanhaute (Ghent University), and Ulbe Bosma (International Institute of Social History).
Screenshot from the new website
The 7th issue of Commodity Frontiers is now live on our new journal website.
Thanks to the work of Simon Bouvier, Antoine Gelgon, and Lionel Maes at those.tools in Brussels, we are thrilled to share Issue 7 on our new, bespoke, open source website. With great care over the past several months, our friends at those.tools developed this platform to meet our unique needs as a volunteer-run, open-access, collaborative journal that aims to serve academic and extra-academic communities.
The issue explores carbon frontiers through carbon histories, carbon technocracy, carbon sovereignty, carbon financing, carbon credits, carbon offsets, and carbon capture and storage.
Multidisciplinary authors take us on a journey through carbon debates and conflicts (Shin and Jackson), from energy use and resilience in colonized India (Sayako Kanda) to carbon and state power in 19th century East Asia (Bartoletti, Coghe, and Seow) to agricultural education in the Central Valley in present-day California (Gharibian and Cruz). We read about carbon financing and violence in the rangelands of Northern Kenya (Atieno Owino), the invisibilized and exploited labor of “decarbonization” in Indonesia’s palm oil industry (Roswaldy and Sawit Women’s Education Group), and the false promises of carbon capture and storage in Norway (Dijkman and Ressler). Julia Loginova reviews Andrew Curley’s book, Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, development, and energy transition in the Navajo Nation. The issue also includes an in-depth article about the metal mining giant, Zijin, by Joan Martinez-Alier and Marcel Llavero-Pasquina from the EJAtlas.
