IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB527946594

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

Journal of Global History
Volume: 16
Issue: 3
Pages: 315-335

DOI: 10.1017/S1740022821000097

URI: http://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-global-history/article/value-within-multiform-commodities-north-african-phosphates-and-global-markets-in-the-interwar-period/61293E9B88C8C3514D1477613A51E002

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Mines and mining Commodity exchanges Capitalism Phosphates and phosphate industry France, colonies 20th century North Africa

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.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB527946594/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Barbara Hahn; Bruce E. Baker; (2016)
The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and corruption in turn-of-the-century New York and New Orleans (/isis/citation/CBB214809756/)

Article Pritchard, Sara B.; (2012)
From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism: “French” Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond (/isis/citation/CBB001250763/)

Review Peter A. Coclanis; (July 2016)
Review of "Empire of Cotton: A Global History" (/isis/citation/CBB369516381/)

Thesis Casey Primel; (2016)
Calculating Futures: Debt, Markets, and the Science of Prices in Colonial Egypt, 1882-1912 (/isis/citation/CBB658107916/)

Book David A. Guba Jr; (2020)
Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France (/isis/citation/CBB831549564/)

Book Richard C. Parks; (2017)
Medical Imperialism in French North Africa: Regenerating the Jewish Community of Colonial Tunis (/isis/citation/CBB663158260/)

Article Kory Olson; (2021)
Come Drive French North Africa: Cartographic and Guidebook Discourse in Michelin's 1929 Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie (/isis/citation/CBB997414083/)

Article Clark, Hannah-Louise; (2013)
Civilization and Syphilization: A Doctor and His Disease in Colonial Morocco (/isis/citation/CBB001252858/)

Book Keller, Richard C.; (2007)
Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (/isis/citation/CBB000772376/)

Article Núñez Espallargas, José M.; (2002)
La correspondencia científica entre Santiago Sánchez Cózar y Emilio Huguet del Villar (1946-1949): La investigación botánica y edafológica en el norte de África en la época del protectorado hispano-francés (/isis/citation/CBB000410669/)

Article Oliver Cussen; (2020)
The Lives of Merchant Capital: The Frères Monneron and the Legacy of Old Regime Empire (/isis/citation/CBB587360844/)

Book MacLeod, Roy; (2000)
Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (/isis/citation/CBB000110572/)

Book Sarah E. M. Grossman; (2018)
Mining the Borderlands: Industry, Capital, and the Emergence of Engineers in the Southwest Territories, 1855-1910 (/isis/citation/CBB770104351/)

Book Jeannette Graulau; (2019)
The underground wealth of nations : On the capitalist origins of silver mining, A.D. 1150-1450 (/isis/citation/CBB154339259/)

Article Paul Lucier; (2018)
Comstock Capitalism: The Law, the Lode, and the Science (/isis/citation/CBB209706890/)

Article Tuffnell, Stephen; (2015)
Engineering Inter-Imperialism: American Miners and the Transformation of Global Mining, 1871--1910 (/isis/citation/CBB001422658/)

Article Derek Byerlee; (2021)
The Super State: The Political Economy of Phosphate Fertilizer Use in South Australia, 1880–1940 (/isis/citation/CBB126344986/)

Article David E. Lewis; (2017)
A Ye. Arbuzov: Father of Organophosphorus Chemistry in Russia (/isis/citation/CBB545460291/)

Book Carlo Fumian; (2024)
Pane quotidiano. L'invisibile mercato mondiale del grano tra XIX e XX secolo (/isis/citation/CBB087774034/)

Article David Pretel; (2023)
Hidden Connections: The Global History of Jungle Commodities (/isis/citation/CBB116320978/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}