William Gervase Clarence-Smith – författare

Commodities provide a lens through which local and global histories can be understood and written. The study of commodity history follows these goods as they make their way from land and water through processing and trade to eventual consumption. It is a fast-developing field with collaborative, comparative, and interdisciplinary research, and with new information technologies becoming increasingly important. Although many individual researchers continue to focus on particular commodities and regions, they often do so in partnership with others working on different areas and employing a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, placing commodities history at the forefront of local and global historical analysis.This Oxford Handbook features contributions from scholars involved in these developments across a range of countries and linguistic regions. They discuss the state of the art in their fields, draw on their own work, and signal lacunae for future research. Each of the volume's thirty-one chapters focuses on an important thematic area within commodities history: essential approaches, global histories, modes of production, people and land, environmental impact, consumption, and new methodologies. The Oxford Handbook of Commodity History offers insight into the directions in which commodity history is heading, and the multiple ways in which it can contribute to a better understanding of the world.

Cocoa and Chocolate,1765-1914 focuses on the period from the Seven Years War, to the First World War, when a surge of economic liberalism and globalisation should have helped cocoa producers to overcome rural poverty, just as wool transformed the economy of Australia, and tea that of Japan. The addition of new forms of chocolate to Western diets in the late nineteenth century led to a great cocoa boom, and yet economic development remained elusive, despite cocoa producers having certain advantages in the commodity lottery faced by exporters of raw materials. The commodity chain, from sowing a cocoa bean to enjoying a cup of hot chocolate, is examined in Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914 under the broad rubrics of chocolate consumption, the taxation of cocoa beans, the manufacture of chocolate, private marketing channels, land distribution, ecological impact on tropical forests, and the coercion of labour. Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914 concludes that cocoa failed to act as a dynamo for development.

Cocoa and Chocolate,1765-1914 focuses on the period from the Seven Years War, to the First World War, when a surge of economic liberalism and globalisation should have helped cocoa producers to overcome rural poverty, just as wool transformed the economy of Australia, and tea that of Japan. The addition of new forms of chocolate to Western diets in the late nineteenth century led to a great cocoa boom, and yet economic development remained elusive, despite cocoa producers having certain advantages in the commodity lottery faced by exporters of raw materials. The commodity chain, from sowing a cocoa bean to enjoying a cup of hot chocolate, is examined in Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914 under the broad rubrics of chocolate consumption, the taxation of cocoa beans, the manufacture of chocolate, private marketing channels, land distribution, ecological impact on tropical forests, and the coercion of labour. Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765-1914 concludes that cocoa failed to act as a dynamo for development.

Coffee beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, or one of the other hundred producing lands on five continents remain a palpable and long-standing manifestation of globalization. For five hundred years coffee has been grown in tropical countries for consumption in temperate regions. This 2003 volume brings together scholars from nine countries who study coffee markets and societies over the last five centuries in fourteen countries on four continents and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapters analyse the creation and function of commodity, labour, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of coffee societies; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging of economic development and political democracy.

Coffee beans grown in Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, or one of the other hundred producing lands on five continents remain a palpable and long-standing manifestation of globalization. For five hundred years coffee has been grown in tropical countries for consumption in temperate regions. This 2003 volume brings together scholars from nine countries who study coffee markets and societies over the last five centuries in fourteen countries on four continents and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, with a special emphasis on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The chapters analyse the creation and function of commodity, labour, and financial markets; the role of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the formation of coffee societies; the interaction between technology and ecology; and the impact of colonial powers, nationalist regimes, and the forces of the world economy in the forging of economic development and political democracy.

First Published in 1989. Well over a million slaves were exported from Indian Ocean and Red Sea ports in Eastern Africa during the nineteenth century, and millions more were shifted around the interior of the continent and along the coast of East Africa. And yet we still know remarkably little about this great movement of people, particularly from an economic point of view. This is a collection of twelve essays looking at the economics of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea Slave trades of the nineteenth century.

First Published in 1989. Well over a million slaves were exported from Indian Ocean and Red Sea ports in Eastern Africa during the nineteenth century, and millions more were shifted around the interior of the continent and along the coast of East Africa. And yet we still know remarkably little about this great movement of people, particularly from an economic point of view. This is a collection of twelve essays looking at the economics of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea Slave trades of the nineteenth century.

The livelihood of Third World farmers conflicts with saving the remaining tropical forests. The consequent emergence of new 'pioneer fronts' has also been affected by cheap labour, relative commodity prices, pests and diseases, credit resources, entrepreneurship, information, physical infrastructures, and government policies.

In this important book, Clarence-Smith provides the first general survey of the Islamic debate on slavery. Sweeping away entrenched myths, he hopes to stimulate more research on the neglected topic. He draws on examples from the 'abode of Islam', from the Philippines to Senegal and from the Caucasus to South Africa, paying particular attention for the period from the late eighteenth century to the present. Once slavery had disappeared, it was the Sufi mystics who did most to integrate former slaves socially and religiously, avoiding the deep social divisions that have plagued Western society in the aftermath of abolition.