Commodity Frontiers Initiative Agenda

The emergence of modern capitalism would have been unthinkable without the millions of people producing the ever-increasing volumes of commodities traded across the globe. The growing popularity of the history of commodity frontiers brings the lives and work of these people into the fold. It focuses our attention on the countryside as the engine of capitalist expansion. It also reminds us that only very recently, in the twenty-first century, more than half the world’s population has moved to cities. For most of human history the countryside has dominated, while at the same time its inhabitants have been on the losing side in terms of the distribution of wealth.

It is this history that is central to the agenda of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, which was published in the Journal of Global History in 2021.Footnote ⁶ Its authors argue that a focus on commodity frontiers, defined as sites and processes of incorporation of labour and nature into the capitalist global economy, is essential to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism and, by extension, the modern world. Over the last six hundred, or perhaps even eight or nine hundred years, capitalism has grown from the margins of human existence into an all-encompassing force. It has resulted not in a homogenization of conditions in the countryside, but rather in an immense diversity of human conditions, processes of extraction, environmental degradation, and so on.Footnote ⁷ Nor can the history of capitalism be seen as a unilinear development, unchallenged and without social or political contestation.

The relentless expansion of commodity frontiers has fuelled our global economy, but at high social and environmental costs. Capitalist expansion has repeatedly run up against ecological and social limits, fundamentally changing its character while demonstrating capitalism’s remarkable adaptability. For many centuries, spatial expansion was the most obvious means of overcoming natural limitations. The “spatial fix”, a concept introduced by David Harvey, can be defined as addressing crises of accumulation through the geographical relocation of the production process, which could involve massive land grabbing, enslavement, and even genocide.Footnote ⁸ With the arrival of steam and steel, the gradual abolition of slavery, and improved modes of communication and transport, the exploitation of labour and nature became more sophisticated and intense.

Throughout this process, the state and its bureaucracies became an increasingly pervasive force in the economy and in people’s everyday lives. Starting by imposing and enforcing monopolies and tariffs, the state increasingly became a regulator of markets and a redistributor of wealth accumulation. The state also had to pick up the pieces when capitalism was on the brink of collapse during the Great Depression. This resulted in the Bretton Woods institutions under the aegis of the United States. A thirty-year period of strong global economic growth began to unravel with the unpegging of the dollar from gold and two oil crises. The late 1970s ushered in a new era of relentless expansion of corporate capitalism, which became known as neo-liberalism. The global crisis of 2008 may have triggered yet another new phase, in which big corporations have to address growing public concern about unhinged neo-liberalism. At the same time, global warming has led to growing calls for governments to interfere in economic life by setting environmental standards. Public concern about the environment is driving large corporations to improve their environmental performance. It encourages them to create new frontiers of “green capitalism”, or at least pretend to do so, a phenomenon for which the term “greenwashing” was coined.

Commodity Regimes: The Example of Sugar

Global capitalism has undergone a range of systemic crises that have forced it to adapt fundamentally. The research agenda has inspired the Commodity Frontiers Initiative team to propose a periodization of four distinct commodity regimes. The first was a period in which capitalist commodity frontiers expanded predominantly through spatial expansion, one marked by Harvey’s spatial fix. By the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization and increased bureaucratic capability had profoundly changed the character of capitalism. The state became an ever more important actor. The 1970s, however, saw the emergence of globally operating corporate capitalism as a dominant force, flanked by the so-called neoliberal ideology. From the early twenty-first century onwards, we may be witnessing a new era in which capitalism will have to adapt to the challenges of environmental crisis, in which not only climate change but also the rapid depletion of natural resources will test the limits of capitalism’s ability to privatize profits and externalize social and ecological costs.

The World of Sugar is the first major work to employ this notion of successive commodity regimes, separated by systemic frictions and phases of intense innovation to overcome them. It also argues that sugar capitalism started not in Europe, but more likely in south-east China, India, and Egypt. From these places it spread like an inkblot across the globe. It was a process with many sidesteps and resistances. India, for example, maintained a huge sugar sector that stayed embedded in a millennia-old agricultural rhythm, which proved largely impervious to the advance of industrial capitalism. This long, very diverse, yet highly globally integrated history of sugar provides us with invaluable insights into global labour history. It offers us a single analytical framework within which to study, for example, the labour relations involved in the most internationally traded commodity of the nineteenth century. Sugar is a case in point of relentless competition driving down prices and accelerating economies of scale towards producing at the lowest cost, with high socio-ecological costs.

Once a precious luxury, over the past five hundred years sugar has gained a bad reputation for causing widespread slavery, environmental destruction, and, more recently, adverse health effects. But for scholars of global labour history it is of particular importance that until the arrival of huge mechanical harvesters in the cane fields in the late twentieth century, sugar production required vast amounts of labour. This came with massive mobility, as capitalism moves people to where commodities can be produced at the lowest possible cost. Indeed, Harvey’s spatial fix is not a mere spatial shift of production sites but involves immense migrations under varying degrees of coercion. For example, Africans were brought to the Americas to produce sugar, rather than sugar plantations being introduced in Africa. Up to two-thirds of the 12.5 million enslaved people transported from Africa ended up on sugar plantations in the Americas. As we all know, they were subjected to the cruellest and most exhausting of labour regimes. Ever since Mintz published his Sweetness and Power almost forty years ago, we have known that sugar uniquely links extreme wealth with extreme misery and exploitation.

Widespread slave resistance and rebellions, culminating in a revolution on the world’s largest sugar plantation complex in Saint Domingue, led to widespread abolitionism and a systemic crisis of slave-based capitalism. Alternative sites of sugar production emerged in India, Java, and Cuba, where the ban on the slave trade was largely circumvented, and, finally, Europe turned to beet sugar. In the course of the nineteenth century a completely new configuration emerged. Colonial states guaranteed loans for infrastructure and created the institutional environment that allowed the massive expansion of sugar production. However, new technologies presented only a partial fix, as fieldwork – the planting, weeding, and harvesting of cane – continued to be largely a matter of manual labour. And thus, after the British Parliament banned the slave trade, slavery remained in force, primarily because of the growing demand for sugar. Alongside slavery, indentured labour systems emerged that bore many similarities to the conditions to which enslaved people were subjected. For good measure, the history of sugar also focuses our gaze on the millions of migrant workers employed in agricultural production. Sugar, of course, is not the only crop that requires high labour input.

In the nineteenth century, global sugar exports increased tenfold, requiring a massive mobilization of labour. Governments facilitated the construction of railroads, created the legal framework for banks to finance the expanding sugar industry, and in some cases became directly involved in its establishment themselves. In the wake of the abolition of the slave trade, they began to engineer large flows of migrant labour into the cane and beet sugar belts across the globe. According to Bernardi, we see “the strong intervention of institutions and capitalists in shaping the management of workers”.Footnote ⁹ Hundreds of thousands of indentured labourers were transported across the globe to the cane fields of the Americas, Hawaii, Australia, and South Africa. Polish workers (Figure 1) in the sugar beet fields of Prussia were subject to similar indentured conditions. But there are also examples of large-scale industrial sugar production being embedded in peasant societies. Java and Egypt are cases in point. The Dutch established the Cultivation System, which forced Javanese farmers to supply cheap cane to sugar factories owned by Europeans. In the nineteenth century, Egypt’s Mamluk sultans established an extensive sugar conglomerate along the Nile, forcing the peasantry to grow cane for their royal factories.

Figure 1.

Polish workers weeding a beet field in Funen, Denmark, 1913.

Source: Courtesy of Historiens Hus Nakskov, Denmark.

Throughout the nineteenth century, forced labour predominated on the sugar frontiers. By the early twentieth century, however, global demographic growth had turned labour from a scarcity into an abundance. Slavery, forced cultivation, and indentured labour gave way to free wage labour. Millions of severely impoverished rural workers – women, men, and children – filled the sugar cane and beet fields. At that time, around two per cent of the world’s population may have been involved in growing, harvesting, and processing sugar cane and beet roots into crystalline sugar.

Obviously, colonialism and slavery have not only left us with the bitter legacy of racism but have also cast their long shadows over labour relations in the cane and beet fields. The production of sugar cane or sugar beet through manual labour in the fields was race-making, as the influx of poor people with no rights of settlement occupied housing that was far below standard. In this respect, Jamaican and Haitian sugar cane workers in Cuba, Polish seasonal workers in the beet fields of Saxony (Germany), and Mexicans in the beet fields of Michigan and California were all subject to the same mechanisms of institutionalized xenophobia. Xenophobia was instrumental in conditioning and disciplining workers and legitimized their poor working and living conditions. As foreigners, they were vulnerable to many forms of abuse because their residency status was usually defined by their labour contract. Protection of these workers was poor if not absent, because they were both “alien” and working in the countryside, where trade unionism is historically weak. The World of Sugar provides many examples of how migrant agricultural labourers are among the least protected. Moreover, their presence, either forced or voluntary, fuelled xenophobia and sharpened racial prejudice. Vulnerable but not passive, the sugar workers of the twentieth century tried to unite, but employers invariably responded by replacing “unruly workers” with more docile labour, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, cane cutters’ unionism was usually responded to by sending mechanical harvesters into the fields.Footnote ¹⁰

Today’s sugar capitalism is characterized by a variety of labour relations, among which the position of agricultural labour is weak in every respect because of its abundance. Global sugar production and marketing is dominated by a small number of huge companies that have grown big thanks to the protectionist sugar policies of their countries of origin. The history of sugar is a prime example of how states have fostered sugar monopolies, while the sugar monopolies have used the state to maintain their privileged position. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Although most of the world’s sugar is now produced by smallholders, they can still be in the thrall of large sugar corporations, which provide fertilizers, pesticides, and seeds and set the price of sugar cane.

The history of sugar is one of glaring inequality and injustice, and although chattel slavery no longer exists, slave-like conditions in the cane fields of the Dominican Republic, Brazil, or India are by no means eliminated. Workers are indebted and live in precarious conditions. They are considered disposable, their bodies worn out after seven or eight years, just as in the days of the slave plantations. Meanwhile, the big corporations are barely held accountable for the contamination of water through the spillage of fertilizers and pesticides, the air pollution caused by the burning of cane fields to remove the leaves from the stalks, the severe dehydration of the soil, and their land grabbing in their quest to expand their acreages under cane. Terrible working conditions combine with environmental injustice. Moreover, the production of ever more sugar is causing more and more social and ecological damage at a rate that is hardly sustainable, given the impact it is having on the availability of arable land for food production and on the ability of local farming communities to grow the crops that are the most profitable for them.Footnote ¹¹

The neoliberal era of sugar production is producing its own systemic crisis and, not surprisingly, its own resistance. Farmers’ organizations such as Via Campesina advocate Food Sovereignty, a food system in which the people who produce, distribute, and consume the food also control the mechanisms and policies of its production and distribution. Indeed, health, ecology, and fair labour relations have become deeply intertwined. This notion of Food Sovereignty may find sympathizers and even supporters among consumers and governments, but the question is whether and how they can move large corporations towards more socially and ecologically responsible business models. Since the 1960s, Fair Trade – which increasingly includes ecologically responsible trade – has made a modest imprint on our consumption patterns. It is mostly the better educated and better paid who are aware of how their consumption patterns relate to labour and ecological conditions thousands of miles away. Nevertheless, most major food and other brands have jumped on the Fair Trade bandwagon. Will it be green capitalism or greenwashing? The World of Sugar is largely pessimistic and tends towards the latter, pointing to the tiny proportion of Fair Trade sugar in the total volumes that this industry disgorges every day.

By employing the concept of commodity regimes we can uncover how the state and ideologies have played a crucial role in shaping the course of capitalism. This obviously opens the door to historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to contribute to a conversation about ecologically and socially more responsible systems of production and consumption. The history of sugar capitalism shows how global inequalities consist of entanglements of ecological and social injustices. It is a history that can be read as an invitation to explore new directions in global labour history. It would include, for example, comparative research into labour conditions of migrant workers in the many sites in the Global South where, under dismal conditions, the commodities are produced that make the lives of urbanites comfortable; think about palm oil, cotton, coffee, and tea. These commodities are obtained against the lowest possible price, obscuring the massive amounts of work and human suffering, as well as ecological costs, required to produce them. These dismal conditions should motivate us to apply the concepts of commodity frontiers and commodity regimes to overcome the current fragmented, often single-commodity approach and move towards a truly comparative way of doing research that would at the same time do justice to the agency of the workers at the commodity frontiers in the Global South as well as make consumers aware of their role in sustaining unethical and irresponsible commodity chains.