CALL FOR PAPERS
Commodities of Empire Annual International Workshop
2-3 September 2026, Spanish National Research Council, Madrid
Locating Knowledge: Science and Technology in Commodity Frontiers
Organisers: ‘Commodities of Empire’ British Academy Research Project, ERC Consolidator Grant WILDHIST, and the AMBTEC project funded by the Spanish State Research Agency.
Deadline for abstract submissions: 14 February 2026.
The scientific and technological dimensions of commodity history have long attracted attention, with recent work offering comprehensive accounts of the transnational movement of experts, technologies, and scientific ideas. Yet the skills, techniques, and expertise required for resource extraction and processing in and around commodity frontiers remain less thoroughly explored. This workshop seeks to redirect attention to these frontiers of commodity production as sites of knowledge generation, codification and exchange from early modern times to the present. While remaining attentive to imperial, trans-imperial and transnational knowledge networks, the primary aim of this workshop is to examine commodity frontiers themselves as key locations for the development of techno-scientific knowledge and practice by both local and transnational actors. We are especially interested in historical research on indigenous technologies and traditional practices of commodity production, many of which held central economic and cultural significance.
The workshop also welcomes works that reflects on the historiographical and epistemological implications of recognizing local protagonists –such as indigenous peoples, colonized populations, and migrants at commodity frontiers– as active contributors to the production and circulation of knowledge. The workshop further examines the role of institutions and associations (cooperatives, workers’ unions, botanic gardens, agricultural stations, etc.) that operated in these regions as generators, intermediaries, translators, and sometimes gatekeepers of knowledge.
The workshop aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to make the history of science and technology less Eurocentric and US-centric by explicitly broadening inquiry into knowledge histories in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, while remaining open to cases from all geographical regions. By placing local knowledge at the center of global commodity history, it frames commodity frontiers as complex technological landscapes and sites of experimentation shaped by plural socio-economic and ecological contexts as well as by unequal power relations. The workshop therefore invites papers that critically engage with these trans-local dynamics and local-global articulations, while also illuminating alternative histories of the making of scientific and technological knowledge.
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