Article ID: CBB527946594

The value within multiform commodities: North African phosphates and global markets in the interwar period (2021)

unapi

Phosphates mined in France’s North African empire fed interwar Europe’s voracious appetite for chemical fertilizers. In critique of histories vesting commodities themselves with the agency to make the modern world, I trace not the substance but the value embedded within it. By following value, I argue that the ‘commodity’ is not a stable unit of analysis. Rather, commodities are multiform. They can acquire myriad properties when the value embedded within them changes across time and place. During the interwar period, phosphates’ character as a commodity transmuted in relation to flows of other goods, movements of labour, global financial exigencies and imperial considerations. As phosphates assumed new forms, the geographic scales over which they operated changed too. Through North African phosphates, I explore value-making processes that perpetuated capital-intensive farming, allowing for a history not of the commodity-as-substance but of the commodity-as-historical-object whose analytical boundaries and forms shifted across contexts.

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Authors & Contributors
Olson, Kory
Mitchell, Timothy
Kerkhoff, Kathinka Sinha
Parks, Richard C.
Guba, David A., Jr.
Grossman, Sarah E. M.
Concepts
France, colonies
Capitalism
Commodity exchanges
Imperialism
Colonialism
Mines and mining
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Enlightenment
21st century
Places
North Africa
France
United States
Canada
Tunisia
Tropics
Institutions
New York Cotton Exchange
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