At the Crossroads of Commodity Frontiers: Food, Agriculture, and the Environment in Switzerland in the Age of Global Capitalism, 1870s-1930s

The history of modern capitalism can be understood as a history of shifting, expanding and interlocking commodity frontiers. The cultivation of land and the breeding and the reproduction of plants and animals, the extraction of fossil fuels and raw materials, the rise of industrial manufacturing and the industrial processing of raw materials and agricultural produce, the mobilization of labor and knowledge – all these historical processes contributed to the formation and proliferation of commodity frontiers in the modern era. With the transport and communication revolution in the last third of the 19^th century, commodity frontiers increasingly expanded across the globe, incorporating more and more land, labor and natural resources into the orbit of the capitalist economy to supply the urbanizing and industrializing societies of the 19^th and 20^th centuries with their growing demand for food and raw materials. In this process, landscapes and ecologies were profoundly transformed, social relations changed, modes of production were reshaped, labor practices and work regimes underwent profound shifts, food cultures were modified, cultural perceptions of agricultural production and its role in industrial societies were reinterpreted and recoded.

This SNF-supported research project, conducted in cooperation between the Institute of History at the University of Bern and the Archives of Rural History, suggests exploring how different global commodity frontiers merged and interacted to shape agricultural production, food processing and consumption, and ecologies in late 19^th and early 20^th centuries’ Switzerland. As the Swiss political economy was tightly interwoven with the global economy already in the 19^th century, it provides a unique case to analyze how past societies dealt with the challenges of globalization and industrialization in the fields of agricultural production, food provisioning and environmental impact. The research project aims to explore the interactions of key commodity frontiers that shaped the Swiss countryside’s integration into global capitalism and to understand how these processes influenced agriculture, food cultures, ecologies, social movements, and State institutions in modern Swiss society. Three commodity frontiers in particular will stand at the center of the research project: Firstly, the analysis of the dairy/cheese frontier that focuses on the integration of Swiss milk products and cheese production into the global economy. Secondly, the reconstruction of the grain frontier that provides an in-depth analysis of the trajectory of grain production in Switzerland, the politics of grain provisioning in the context of newly emerging global trade systems. Thirdly, the exploration of the livestock/deadstock frontier that examines how the breeding and reproduction of farm animals and their import and export as well as the provisioning of an increasingly urban population with meat became a crucial part of Switzerland’s involvement in global capitalism.

The research project argues that the consideration of biophysical resources like land, plants, and animals enhances our understanding of global socio-economic inequalities and provides a new view on the history of Switzerland in the formation of a global capitalist economy. Moreover, a central thesis of the project consists in the claim that commodity frontiers and frontiers of agro-environmental knowledge were deeply intertwined; by struggling with the challenges of increasingly globalized commodity frontiers, the social actors involved created and transformed specific regimes of agro-environmental knowledges that helped to shape the perception of Switzerland’s political economy within global capitalism. By reconstructing the economic, social and environmental repercussions of global commodity frontiers on Switzerland and by analyzing the modes of perception, the production of knowledge, the State’s regulating capacities and the coping strategies of actors on the ground, the research project thus contributes to a global history of Switzerland in the age of modern capitalism while et the same time paying attention to the local specificities and complexities on the ground.