Commodity Frontiers in Eastern Europe. Environment and Societies at Global Risk, 16th–21st Centuries (COMFREE)
Project Leader: Guido Hausmann (IOS)
Project Partners: Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, Leibniz Research Museum for Geo-Resources (DBM) and Leibniz-Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig (GWZO)
Funding: Leibniz Association
Commodity frontiers and commodity histories are a challenging new current to analyze the dynamics of global capitalism. We identify them as processes that dynamically incorporate resources (land, energy, raw materials, knowledge and labour) into global cycles. Our research project identifies commodity frontiers in Eastern Europe and situates them in the historical geography of global capitalism. It explores the formation and dynamics of these frontiers by examining their political, economic, environmental, and geographical contexts and the interplay of these contexts in past and present. A focus on Eastern Europe, hitherto largely neglected in the debate about commodity frontiers, allows to shed light on the margins and fringes of global capitalism and to critical re-exam the concept. Particularly, the question of environmental and social risks as part of the current and past commodity frontiers, will be taken into the focus.
The project consists of four subprojects, which explore early modern Central European mining industry, modern manganese ore extraction in Western Georgia and Ukraine, the cotton economy in the Soviet Block and trade agreements in Eastern Europe in past and present. This thematic and analytical framework draws on established historiographical traditions of local, regional and global history in a long-durée perspective. It encompasses the imperial, socialist and post-socialist periods, seeking a fuller understanding of the rise and dissolution of commodity frontiers as shaped by the rise of capitalism and of the modern state.
For this purpose, the project brings together scholars from various disciplines, above all historians and economists. The case studies apply four research perspectives: 1) the concept of commodity frontier, 2) regional actors, contexts and processes of spatialization, 3) relations between foreign trade costs and political and economic power relations, 4) ruptures and (dis-)continuities. These research perspectives propose a systematic understanding of the commodity frontiers in Eastern Europe and of Eastern Europe as a commodity frontier in global capitalism.
As part of the project, a company register is being digitized and will be made publicly accessible as a database. It contains information on 5,000 companies of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
At the IOS Regensburg research on the following two subprojects will be conducted in the framework of the collaborative project:
Subproject 1: The Rise of a Manganese Ore Frontier in Western Georgia and Southeast Ukraine, end of 19th Century-1950s
Postdoc Researcher: Tamar Qeburia, Project Leader: Guido Hausmann
This subproject explores the global history of mineral resources from the geographic periphery of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, using the example of the exploitation, mining and sale of manganese ore from Western Georgia and Southeast Ukraine from the late 19th century to the 1950s. Manganese ore has a central importance in the refining of steel, its mining in the West Georgian deposits in Chiatura and in Nikopol in Southeast Ukraine was an important part of the global industrialization history. The high quality of the Western Georgian deposits was essential for the German (Ruhr area), other European and US mining and steel industry of the time. The research project explores this commodity frontier as one interrelated Georgian-Ukrainian commodity frontier. The frontier emerged in Western Georgia as an environmental space in the second half of the 19th century and spread as a result of rising global demand to encompass southeast Ukraine before World War I and in subsequent Soviet times. The project analyses the formation and long decline since the 1920´s of this manganese commodity frontier in the framework of the conceptual analysis of commodity frontiers in Eastern Europe. It explores also the role of key regional actors in the two subregions in a time of regime changes, first by examining their role in the social and environmental remaking of the two subregions, and second by analyzing their perception of and interaction with the global manganese ore market.
Subproject 2: Historical Trade Agreements – A Contemporary Economic Perspective
Project Leader: Arevik Gnutzmann-Mkrtchyan
This subproject focuses on the economic analysis of commodity frontiers in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region. Building upon the research in the preceding subproject, we examine how integration into global commodity trade and mining has reshaped the political economies of post-socialist countries since the end of the Cold War. We analyse historical trade and trade agreements applying contemporary analytical methods from international economics and empirical political economy. By linking insights from economic history with recent empirical research on the political economy of natural resources, the subproject sheds light on the institutional and societal consequences of commodity trade integration. The subproject considers commodity frontiers as dynamic processes that reorganise production, trade linkages, and institutions over time and space. The subproject provides an empirical comparative econometric analysis of commodity frontiers, using combined data on trade, institutional background, and individual preferences. It investigates whether the emergence of a commodity frontier supports local growth or reinforces extractive political institutions. In doing so, the project offers a broader, more historically and regionally grounded perspective on commodity trade and frontier development in Eastern Europe. It combines these historical examples with a perspective on the contemporary globalized and de-globalizing trade system and, in particular, on the specific role of the Eastern Europe region in it.