Syllabus
8 October 2020: Nature, History and Materiality
- Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. Chicago 1958, pp. 79-109.
- Ulrich Beck. The Metamorphosis of the World. Polity 2016, ch. 3, pp. 35-48.
- Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity 2017, ch. 3, pp. 75-111; ch. 6, pp. 184-220.
- Dan Hicks, ‘The Material-Cultural Turn: Event and Effect’, in D. Hicks and M.C. Beaudry (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies. Oxford University Press 2010, pp. 25-98.
- Alexander Etkind, A Natural History of Evil (forthcoming with Polity Press), Introduction.
15 October 2020: Fish and Fur: Natural Remains for Global Trade
- Regina Grafe, Distant Tyranny. Markets, Power and Backwardness in Spain. Princeton University Press 2012, ch. 3, pp. 52-79.
- Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada. University of Toronto Press 1956, Conclusion.
- Owen Matthews, Glorious Misadventures. Nikolai Rezanov and the Dream of a Russian America. Bloomsbury 2013, pp. 5-11, 129-141.
- Alexander Etkind. Internal Colonization. Russia’s Imperial Experience. Polity 2011, ch. 5, pp. 72-92.
22 October 2020: Grain, Food and Mercantilism
- James Scott, Against the Grain. Yale UP 2017, pp. 1-68.
- Robert E. Jones, Bread upon the Waters. The St. Petersburg Grain Trade and the Russian Economy, 1703-1811. Pittsburgh UP 2013, pp. 1-31
- Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton 2001, pp. 3-25, 313-316.
- Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behavior and the household economy, 1650 to the present. Cambridge 2008, pp. 40-72.
29 October 2020: Fuel: Wood, Coal and Oil
- J.W. de Zeeuw, “Peat and the Dutch Golden Age: The Historical Meaning of Energy-attainability”, A.A.G. bijdrage 21 (1978).
- Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso 2011, pp. 109-144, 231-255.
- Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Harvard 2007, Conclusion, pp. 227-255.
- Fernando Coronil. The Magical State: Nature, Money and Modernity in Venezuela. University of Chicago Press 1997, pp. 1-6, 67-118.
- Michael L. Ross, The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. Princeton UP 2012, pp. 1-14, 111-13
16 November 2020 - Workshop I: Commodity Capitalism: Intoxicants, Dyes and Metals
Session 1 - 9.00-11.00: Sugar and other Intoxicants
- Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power. Penguin 1986, introduction and pp. 3-18.
- Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Cornell UP 2010, ch. 7, pp. 141-72.
- Phil Withington, ‘Intoxicants and the invention of “consumption”’, Economic History Review 73/2, 2020, pp. 384–408.
- Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade. Pennsylvania UP, 2020, ch. 1.
- Paul Gootenberg, “Cocaine in Chains: The Rise and Demise of a Global Commodity, 1860-1950,” in Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000. Duke UP 2006, pp. 321-351.
Session 2 - 11.30-13.00: Dyes and Dyeing
- Elena Phipps, ‘Global Colors: Dyes and the Dye Trade’, in Amelia Peck, ed., Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800. Thames & Hudson, 2013, pp. 120-135.
- James W. Frey, ‘Prickly Pears and Pagodas: The East India Company's Failure to Establish a Cochineal Industry in Early Colonial India’, The Historian, 74/2, 2012, pp. 241-266.
- Prakash Kumar, ‘Planters and Naturalists: Transnational Knowledge on Colonial Indigo Plantations in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 48/3, 2014, pp. 720–753.
- Neil Safier, ‘Spies, Dyes and Leaves: Agro-Intermediaries, Luso-Brazilian Couriers, and the Worlds They Sowed’, in Simon Scheffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-between and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820. Watson Publishing, 2009, pp. 239-269.
- BuYun Chen, ‘Dyeing Fast and Permanent in the Ryukyu Islands: Prussian Blue in the Bingata Workshop’, Unpublished paper, forthcoming in Technology & Culture.
Session 3 - 14.30-16.00: Mining and Metals
- Jack Goody. Metals, Culture and Capitalism: An Essay on the Origins of the Modern World. Cambridge University Press 2012 ch.11-12, 249-300
- Orlando Betancor. The Matter of Empire. Metaphysics and Mining in the Colonial Peru. University of Pittsburgh Press 2017, 1-39.
- Dennis O. Flynn, ‘Silver, Globalization, and Capitalism’. In Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, eds., Capitalisms. Oxford, 2020.
- Nuala Zahedieh, ‘Colonies, copper, and the market for inventive activity in England and Wales, 1680–1730’, Economic History Review, 66/3 (2013): 805-825.
- B.-S. Grewe, ‘The London gold market, 1910-1935’, in C. Dejung, and N. P. Peterson (eds), Power, Institutions and Global Markets: Actors, Mechanisms and Foundations of World-Wide Economic Integration, 1850-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 112-32.
30 November 2020 - Workshop II: Manufactured Goods: Porcelain, Textiles and Pre-modern Luxuries
Session 1 - 9.30-11.00. Manufacturing in the Pre-modern World
- Walter B. Denny, ‘Carpets, Textiles, and Trade in the Early Modern Islamic World’, in Finbarr Barry Flood and Gülru Necipoğlu, eds., A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, Wiley 2017, ch. 37.
- Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to piazza: Islamic trade and Italian art, 1300-1600. University of California Press 2002, ch. 10 (pp. 171-179).
- Martin Kemp, ‘“Wrought by No Artist’s Hand”: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in Some Artefacts from the Renaissance’, in Claire J. Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance: visual culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450-1650. Yale UP 1995.
- Pamela H. Smith, ‘Nodes of Convergence, Material Complexes, and Entangled Itineraries’, in Pamela H. Smith, ed., Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, ch. 1.
Session 2 - 11.30-13.00. The Fibres that “Changed the World”
- Alfred W. Crosby, America, Russia, Hemp, and Napoleon: American trade with Russia and the Baltic, 1783-1812. Columbus: Ohio UP 1965, 1-40.
- Luca Mola, The Silk Industry of Renaissance Florence. Johns Hopkins UP 2000, XIII-XIX, 299-309
- Giorgio Riello. Cotton. Cambridge UP 2013, 1-17.
- Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton. Penguin 2014,
- Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta. Princeton UP 2018, pp. 1-36.
Session 2 - 14.30-16.00. Manufactured commodities: Materials, Design and Skills (with Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick)
- Ulinka Rublack, “Matter in the Material Renaissance” Past & Present 218, 2013, pp. 2-45.
- Maxine Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth Century Britain’, Economic History Review 55/1, 2002, pp. 1–30.
- Anne Gerritsen, The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World. Cambridge UP, 2020, chs 8-9.
- John Styles, ‘Product innovation in Early modern London’, Past & Present 168, 2000, pp. 124-169.
3 December 2020
09:00-10:50 The Material Crisis of Anthropocene
- Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Duke UP, 2019.
- Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives” Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2011) 369, 842–867.
- Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The shock of the Anthropocene: the earth, history, and us. Verso 2016, selected chapters.
- Bruno Latour. Down to Earth: politics in the new climatic regime. Selected chapters. Polity 2018.
16.15-17.45. Seminar by Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck College, University of London) on ‘The Material Culture of Energy’
- Hiroki Shinand and Frank Trentmann, ‘Energy Shortages and the Politics of Time: Resilience, Redistribution and ‘Normality’ in Japan and East Germany, 1940s–1970s’, in John Brewer, Neil Fromer, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Frank Trentmann, eds., Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability, 1800-2075. Bloomsbury 2020, pp. 247-65.
- Frank Trentmann, ‘Getting to grips with energy: fuel, materiality and daily life’ (2018): http://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/browse/issue-09/getting-to-grips-with-energy/
Additional Readings
- Frank Trentmann and Anna Carlsson-Hyslop, ‘The Evolution of Energy Demand in Britain: Politics, Daily Life, and Public Housing, 1920s-1970s’, Historical Journal 61, 2018, pp. 807-839.
- Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (London: Allen Lane, 2016).