2025/12/01 by Samuël Coghe · 1 voice
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Political Economy and Marxism #Natural Resources and Economic Development
paper · pdf · doi:10.13109/gege.2025.51.2.230
Rethinking Commodity Frontiers: Sub-Saharan Africa and the Capitalist World Economy The incorporation of sub-Saharan Africa into the capitalist world economy has been analysed from various theoretical perspectives.This article explores how a commodity frontier perspective can contribute to our understanding of this multifaceted process in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.A commodity frontiers perspective departs from related approaches, such as Wallerstein's world-systems analysis and global commodity/value chain analysis, by combining a systematic angle with a bottom-up perspective that focuses on transformative processes at the frontiers.Building on the examples of major cash crops, most notably cocoa and coffee, this article reveals how diverse these commodity frontiers were, both diachronically and synchronically, in the ways that land, nature, labour, capital and knowledge were used to produce commodities for global markets and in how Africans contributed to shaping these frontiers.The article also suggests that the focus on world-leading commodity production sites and global export markets obfuscates our view of broader processes of capitalist transformation beyond such "islands."Looking through the lens of cattle commodities, it argues that taking into account smaller, short-lived and failed frontiers as well as regionally oriented ones gives us a more nuanced view of how capitalist expansion reshaped sub-Saharan Africa's economies.