Commodity Frontiers and Transimperial Science (19th-21st centuries) (Double Panel) Part 1

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J Global Environmental History

Commodity Frontiers and Transimperial Science (19th-21st centuries)

Event Details

Date

III. Thursday, 11th September, 11:00-13:00
Location
N2040
Theme
J Global Environmental History

Convenor

Tomás Bartoletti (ETH Zurich)
Samuël Coghe (Ghent University)

Chair

Tomás Bartoletti (ETH Zurich)
Samuël Coghe (Ghent University)

Panelists

Marta Marcedo (Instituto de Hístoria Contemporanea Lisboa)
Samuël Coghe (Ghent University)
Nadin Heé (University of Leipzig)
Tomás Bartoletti (ETH Zurich)
David Pretel (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Leida Fernández Prieto (National Spanish Research Council )
Moritz von Brescius (Bern University )

Papers

Tomás Bartoletti

Coconut Plantations and Rhinoceros Beetles in German Samoa: Transimperial Pest Control at the Commodity Frontiers in Early Twentieth Century

Coconut Plantations and Rhinoceros Beetles in German Samoa: Transimperial Pest Control at the Commodity Frontiers in Early Twentieth Century

This paper examines the transimperial formation of pest control research, taking the case of the “insect invasion” of 1909 in German Samoa, when the rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes nasicornis) was taken unnoticed from Ceylon. This species found such a favourable environment there that it multiplied exponentially, killing thousands of palm trees and threatening the entire copra industry. In order to avoid the loss of coconut plantations, the German colonial regime, under pressure from the Deutsche Handels- und Plantagengesellschaft, took different measures. With extra-funding, planters redirected local labour to collect beetles and their larvae. Given that this first approach was unsuccessful and under pressure from Samoan people who saw how their food security was also at risk from the beetle pest, the colonial administration brought in the entomologist Karl Friedrichs to develop methods to control the plague. After a scientific tour of South Asia and East Africa, Friedrichs found a biological enemy, the insect fungus Metarhizium anisopliae, and introduced it to Samoa. The paper analyses the “success” against the rhinoceros beetle in German Samoa showing the intermingled scientific, private and imperial interests directed against the loss of economic profit and the cooperation between the German colonial spaces linking agricultural stations in Africa and the Pacific, and British and French stations in Ceylon and Madagascar. It will reconstruct the transimperial emergence of economic entomology and demonstrate how productive this knowledge was in different plantation economies and commodity frontiers in the early twentieth century.
Samuël Coghe

Veterinary Medicine at the Cattle Frontier. Local Knowledge, Imperial Technopolitics and Transimperial Exchanges in Colonial Madagascar

Veterinary Medicine at the Cattle Frontier. Local Knowledge, Imperial Technopolitics and Transimperial Exchanges in Colonial Madagascar

In the late nineteenth century, Madagascar became an important frontier for cattle commodities, most notably hides and meat, that were sold on global markets. Although this process started before the onset of French colonial rule, the cattle frontier was fuelled and profoundly reshaped by French colonization in 1895. Through a broad series of interventions, French administrators, enterpreneurs and scientists tried to transform cattle bodies, pastoralist minds and socio-economic practices to fit a colonial-capitalist model of commodity production. One important challenge was the biopolitical management of cattle diseases. Although Madagascar was free from many epizootic and enzootic diseases scourging the African continent, giving it a comparative advantage, anthrax and bovine tuberculosis were a real threat and needed attention.

This paper shows how disease management at Madagascar’s cattle frontier was shaped by local ecological conditions and pastoralist agency, the “imperial technopolitics” (Velmet 2020) favoured by French Pastorians, as well as the transimperial circulation of experts, vaccines, testing methods and other veterinary practices. It also analyses to what extent “agnotological roadblocks” (Schiebinger 2017) such as scientific nationalism, inter-imperial rivalries and colonial racism hampered transimperial exchanges and led to distinct forms of disease management on “la grande Île” under colonial rule (1895-1960).
Marta Marcedo

Transimperial Plantations. Cocoa connections between São Tomé and Belgian Congo

Transimperial Plantations. Cocoa connections between São Tomé and Belgian Congo

São Tomé, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea and a former Portuguese colony, was in the early 1900s the world’s major cocoa producer. In 1905 its cocoa amounted to around 1/6 of the total global supply, some 140.000 tons. São Tomé’s cocoa was grown on large, highly capitalized, labor intensive and technology-driven plantations, able to meet the requirements of the growing north European chocolate industry. The success of this experiment transformed the island into a model for other plantation projects throughout west Africa. This paper focus on the movement of plants, technological apparatus, racialized labor relations between São Tomé and Belgian Congo. The choice to bring together those apparently unrelated historical and geographical imperial contexts aims at reconsidering the conventional geographies and objects adopted in the study of the early 20th century colonialism in Africa. Going beyond analysis centered on nation-based empires and exploring the transnational connections established around a specific crop and production system it is possible to show how European competition for resources relied on the circulation of scientific and agricultural practices and knowledge and the effective, but tense, cooperation between different colonial agents.
David Pretel

Health and Medicine at the Rubber Frontiers of Africa and Latin America

Health and Medicine at the Rubber Frontiers of Africa and Latin America

My presentation examines the role of workers’ health in commodity frontiers, specifically focusing on rubber production in the Amazon, West Central Africa, and the Yucatán Peninsula. It explores how transnational experts, during the 1920s and 1930s, studied the environmental and working conditions at tropical rainforests and plantations such as plant species and disease outbreaks. Almost all contemporary reports emphasized the oppressive heat, poor hygiene, contaminated water, insufficient diet, and the prevalence of insects and parasites as major obstacles to the development of rubber industries. These conditions led to deadly diseases among local and migrant workers. The recruitment of migrant laborers also posed significant challenges due to the harsh working conditions and frequent accidents. More specifically, my presentation focuses on the expeditions led by Harvard professor George C. Shattuck across Africa (Liberia and the Belgian Congo), Central America (Quintana Roo in Mexico and the Petén Region in Guatemala), and South America (the upper Amazon in Brazil) during the 1920s and 1930s. Shattuck dedicated much of his career to researching and teaching tropical medicine, conducting clinical and laboratory work at several rubber and chicle frontiers. He left behind a substantial body of work, including publications, personal notes, correspondence, photos, and various objects and instruments.
Leida Fernández Prieto

Plantation Pathologies: Negotiating the Glocal Boundaries of Tropical Sugar Agriculture Science

Plantation Pathologies: Negotiating the Glocal Boundaries of Tropical Sugar Agriculture Science

This paper explores the Cuban and Puerto Rican plantation as a site of experimentation, creation and exchange of knowledge, plants and practices between local producers and the monopolistic companies that were part of tropical sugar phytopathology in the early twentieth century. In doing so, the text will analyze the place of agronomists, scientists and farmers in saving and expanding the frontier of the tropical sugar industry during the sugarcane mosaic virus epidemic. The text will dialogue with the recent transimperial turn, the history of science and technology, and the environment. It will also address both the successful circulation and local resistance to commercial homogenization of sugar hybrids.
Moritz von Brescius

The Mobile Plantation of Charduar: Local Connections, imperial Portfolios, and the Global Pathways of Assam Rubber

The Mobile Plantation of Charduar: Local Connections, imperial Portfolios, and the Global Pathways of Assam Rubber

In 1873, one of the world’s first large-scale, scientifically managed rubber plantations was established in British Assam, northeast India, in response to global fears of scarcity. This paper provides a revisionist account of this groundbreaking experimental field, which influenced rubber cultivation not only regionally and throughout South and Southeast Asia, but also globally. I call it the “mobile plantation”. The agronomic practices and protocols developed through trial and error at the foothills of the Himalayas were studied, adapted and transformed on all five continents by the early 20th century, as the Assamese rubber tree, called Ficus elastica, entered trans-imperial networks of knowledge and seed exchange, many of which were orchestrated by the managers of the government plantation at Charduar. Rethinking global/local dynamics as they played out in the realm of plantation knowledge mobilized at shifting commodity frontiers, the paper concludes by showing how Charduar exemplified a hybrid form of agronomic enterprise at the intersection of state-sponsored science, commodity colonialism, and private speculation.
Nadin Heé

Meandering Oceanic Currents, Migrating Species, and Unending Fisheries Frontiers. Dealing with Uncertainty in the Transimperial Indo-Pacific

Meandering Oceanic Currents, Migrating Species, and Unending Fisheries Frontiers. Dealing with Uncertainty in the Transimperial Indo-Pacific

In the 20th Century the Indo-Pacific was in many ways a transimperial hotspot. The scramble for marine resources got fiercer during the 1930s and it became one of the main commodity frontiers for fish. Yet, imperial powers struggled to predict fluctuating fish resources, not to mention the migration routes of large predators such as tuna across empires. Many fishery labor migrants followed “the way of the fish”–as they put it–through the Indo-Pacific. This talk tackles the question of unpredictability and uncertainty in harvesting the ocean. For the migrant laborers, the availability of fish resources was a precondition to migrate. On what kind of knowledge did they rely on? What was deemed to be useful knowledge in that case? Their activities interfered with extractive practices of various empire’s imperial authorities and resulted in tense resource conflicts. At the same time it was also a scramble for overcoming uncertainty and the desire to know more about fluctuating fish stocks, and the Kuroshio-currents meandering. This talk will point to some of the transimperial patterns in the attempt to fight uncertainty and the role of vernacular and academic knowledge across the Indo-Pacific.

Abstract

This panel explores the role sciences and scientists played in the emergence and expansion of commodity frontiers in the 19th to 21st century across the globe. In recent years, historians and social scientists have increasingly used and adapted Jason Moore’s concept of ‘commodity frontiers’ to study dynamics and processes of global capitalism during the last 500 years. These scholars especially examine how, at the margins of an expanding world economy, land, labour and capital were reallocated to transform available natural resources into commodities for global markets. Yet, commodity production also deeply depended on scientific knowledge, not only of the plants, livestock or minerals that were to be commodified, but also of the environments and potential pests and diseases. Because of these challenges, commodity frontiers were sites of experimentation, adaptation and constant innovation. These were processes in which often very mobile agronomists, veterinary doctors, botanists, entomologists, geologists and other scientists played an eminent role, but that, more often than not, relied also on the expertise of peasants, indigenous people and other non-scientific experts. Crucial for the advancement in commodity and epistemic frontiers was, hence, the interplay between transimperial and local actors, between the transimperial circulation and formation of knowledge and local processes of negotation and adaptation. Building on the recent transimperial turn, this panel examines how the emergence and expansion of commodity enterprises across the globe relied on scientific ideas, practices and tools (such as drugs or chemicals), that were intrinsically shaped across and beyond empires, and renegotiated locally. Papers will, hence, not only focus on ‘successful’ transimperial scientific circulation, but also on how scientific ideas, practices and artefacts were adopted, adapted and/or resisted locally, at the frontiers, or even failed to circulate.