For details of our past events, click here.
Provisioning Conflicts: Food Commodities & War
Commodities of Empire International Workshop, History Department, University of Birmingham (UK) [12-13 September 2024]. Lead organiser: Dr Simon Jackson (S.Jackson.1@bham.ac.uk)
Following on from the 2022 and 2023 meetings, which focused on domesticated and wild animals respectively, on 12-13 September 2024 we held an international, two-day workshop on the theme of food commodities and war, hosted at the University of Birmingham (UK).
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As the present conjuncture makes all too clear, warfare has long been entangled with food and its commodification. Both as a stake in conflicts and as an instrument of them, food commodification has changed over time in part through varied and highly charged relationships to warfare, including irregular warfare and guerrilla activity. This workshop will focus on the study of food and war in order to examine the mutually constitutive operation of food systems and political-military conflicts – and to bring historians and scholars in cognate disciplines into closer conversation.
Researchers working with a wide range of methods have developed sub-fields of research on the interrelationship of food and war and we aim to build on this broad range, with an open chronological and geographical scope, while maintaining our core focus on commodities and imperial formations.
Economic historians of warfare, for example, have long analysed the role of shifting agricultural production systems in propelling geopolitical competition and military strategy, while international and legal historians have examined shifting norms and practices of food blockades and sanctions. Scholars of humanitarian activity, meanwhile, have produced rich ethnographies of the ethical matrices of food relief and historical studies of the operation of humanitarian reason or the lived experience of humanitarian predicaments. Global historians, for their part, have lately shown how warfare redefined notions of ‘raw materials’ and the mobilization of ‘natural resources’, durably reshaping landscapes and driving environmental change, for example by catalysing the rise of new technologies, input agriculture, and plantation monoculture. Finally, anthropologists and historians of ‘development’ have traced the impact of warfare on discourses, networks and practices of social transformation, increasingly paying attention to local social and cultural histories and to the operation of hierarchies of race, gender and class, among other categories, in shaping the interaction of food systems with warfare.
This workshop asks how historians and scholars in cognate disciplines should best work in dialogue to study how warfare shaped the production, processing, trading, transport, distribution, consumption and destruction of food commodities, even as the dynamics of conflict were themselves altered by the evolving characteristics of food systems. We are particularly interested in multi-scale and multi-local projects that work imaginatively with primary sources and in collaborative research strategies that seek to re-conceptualise the relationship of food commodification to systems of value and to local or regional cultures. We place emphasis on the experiences of peoples subjected to different imperial hegemonies and on networks of circulation within, between and beyond specific empires. We are particularly attentive to local processes originating in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America and to the impact of agents in the periphery on the establishment and development of commodity networks: as instigators and promoters; through their social, cultural and technological resistance; or through the production of anti-commodities.
