Commodities of Empire 2012 Workshop: Local forms of production as resistance against global domination: anti-commodities (II)
Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands. 27-28 September 2012
The workshop was organised as a part of the ‘Commodities and Anticommodities’ research programme – funded by the humanities council of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) – a collaboration between the Technology and Agrarian Development Group at the Wagengingen University and the Commodities of Empire research project (Open University and
University of London. This programme was set up to explore the histories of such local forms of production, through the notion of ‘anticommodity’. Anticommodity covers a variety of localized
processes designed to give producers greater control over their livelihoods; they may involve forms of production that resist coercive integration in larger export markets, that are concerned with
resource or environmental sustainability or that emerge as alternative modes of production for local and regional markets. The notion of anticommodity integrates various insights and approaches from fields like colonial and global history, development geography, regional studies, anthropology, science and technology studies. It resonates with studies that focus on the way goods and production processes are embedded in specific cultural settings and social networks (Appadurai 1988, Richards 1986, Dove 1983), histories emphasizing the hybrid nature of technology and production processes (Storey 1997, Edgerton 2006) or adaptive production in the context of challenging the homogenizing and exploitative forces of globalization whether state or market-led (Bebbington 1996, Scott 2009).
Networking Workshop: Designing a collaborative research web space: aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project
Open University London Regional Centre. 6-7 September 2012
Programme
Sandip Hazareesingh, Jon Curry-Machado, Mia Ridge, Aims, plans and challenges of the Commodity Histories project and website
Jim Clifford, Ewan Klein, Uta Hinrichs, Text Mining for the Nineteenth-Century Commodity Trade
Tim Hitchcock, Translating Data across Disciplinary Frontiers
Antonia Moon, Digitising India Office Records: Some Current Projects
Deborah Toner: Liberalism in the Americas: Building an International Network, Digital Library and Virtual Research Community
Bill Pidduck, Philippa Hubbard, Global Commodities: Preparing a Major Digital Resource
John McAleer, Curating Commodities: the East India Company gallery at the National Maritime Museum
Giorgio Riello, Early Modern Material Culture: Connecting Things & People
Ana Crespo: Trade Networks and Port Connections in the Hispanic Atlantic System: A Case Study of Use of Historical GIS
Bill Turkel, Creating Digital Infrastructure to Support Collaboration
Kate Lindsay, Writing History in New Ways
Implications of presentations for the development of the Commodity Histories website and for envisaged research collaborations. Roundtable discussion
