Re-Appropriating World Market Production: Commodity Chains in the Project of Postcolonial Development (1920–2000)
International Workshop
Venue: University of Berne/Switzerland
Date: 18th – 19th June 2009
This workshop has been organised by the Historical Institute and the Institute for Social Anthropology at Berne University (Switzerland) in collaboration with the Commodities of Empire Project.
A perspective that explicitly focuses on post-colonial nation-states and looks at how commodity chains were established within competing projects of development and modernisation after World War II can shed new light on world economic developments happening from the 1980s onward. This workshop aims to bring together papers which look at the emergence of neo-liberal and structural adjustment policies from a wider perspective and thus question periodisations of globalisation and the often core-centred approaches to macro-scale developments. Because this perspective has the potential to show that events in the so-called peripheries actually triggered the slow-down of the growth of capitalism and the spectacular growth of finance capitalism in the West from the 1980s onward, it is important to take the postcolonial re-appropriation of world market production in the respective nation-states as a first empirical consideration.
The aim of this workshop is thus to compare different projects of postcolonial development, their origins and their trajectories in a comparative perspective that focuses on a single commodity central to the respective nation-state's ideology of development.
Universität Bern |
Historisches Institut |
Länggassstrasse 49 |
3000 Bern 9 |
Fon +41 31 631 80 91 |
Fax +41 31 631 44 10
