Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions: An Introduction

Abstract

Take a look around you. In our contemporary world, wherever your eyes fall and whatever need you seek to satisfy, it is near impossible to escape from a dependency upon commodities. Not only are we reliant upon goods that are bought, transported and sold for profit — as food, industrial components, even entertainment — but we have become ever more distanced from their geographical origins. We take for granted items that have come from the other side of a world that has become tied firmly into a single global economic system, while our news continues to be filled with the horrors and uncertainties of conflicts that are themselves the result of competition over resources; or an effect of a trading and banking system premised upon the conversion of objects for use into representations of value; or the overexploitation and destruction of our planet’s environment.