Editorial – Commodities, empires, and global history

Commodities are back in the news. The early twenty-first century seems to have witnessed an upsurge in the old conflict over valuable resources, leading to a global scramble for commodities, and bringing in its wake renewed international tension, war, dispossession, and environmental degradation. The Cold War clash of ideologies, it has been argued, has been replaced by global competition between Western consumer nations, Russia, and China, occurring over oil, gas, and other vital economic goods that are required for the smooth functioning of modern industrial societies. In this view, we are witnessing ‘a new age of war’, most clearly exemplified by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. Meanwhile, the large-scale clearance of tropical forests for palm oil plantations, to satisfy a growing requirement for cheap vegetable oil used in the food, cosmetics, and biofuel industries, has been held responsible for rising emissions of carbon dioxide, the principle greenhouse gas and driver of climate change. War on Want, a non-governmental organization focusing on development, has recently highlighted the violent campaign to force peasants off their land in Columbia to make way for palm oil plantations, a process fuelled, it claims, by ‘Britain’s passion for chocolate, cakes and crisps’. Few can now doubt the renewed importance of commodities in the global political landscape of the early twenty-first century. Moreover, the current contests over primary resources, their acknowledged indispensability for present-day industrial societies, and their global features and reverberations have profound historical echoes. Most of all, perhaps, they recall the ‘great leap forward’ in the production, movement, and consumption of commodities inaugurated by industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century. The growing resource, manufacturing, and consumption needs of industrializing societies, the emergence of the steamship and the railways, the ‘dematerialization of telecommunication’ – all escalated demand for raw materials and foodstuffs, and quickened and intensified commodity transactions, bringing profound changes to regions and societies in both south and