About the Commodity Frontiers Initiative

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).

We currently organize four main activities. First, the leadership’s agenda-setting article, Commodity frontiers and the transformation of the global countryside: a research agenda, was published in the Journal of Global History in 2021 . The paper anchors our ongoing work in the CFI. Second, with our CFI Editorial Board, we publish a bi-annual journal called Commodity Frontiers that convenes multidisciplinary and multisectoral approaches to particular commodity frontiers, from mineral, to human bodies, to “renewable” energy. Third, we are compiling a Lexicon of commodity frontiers through a series of overtures and keyword conversations among international scholars. Finally, we are launching a series called Global Conversations on Commodity Frontiers that will explore new books, articles, and initiatives related to the Initiative.