2025/11/14 by Alison Bennett · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies #Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1344/rhi-ihr.48131
openalex publication_date 2025/11/14 · openalex created_date 2025/11/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
This article explores the role and representation of port warehouse labour in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century global commodity chains. Its lens is the Port of London’s Ivory Floor at St. Katherine’s Dock (built 1860, closed 1968), and its chief focus the warehouse workers and commercial agents who prepared ivory for market, as well as the Port’s publicity department who marketed their work through commissioned photographs and newspaper accounts. As the first article-length examination of ivory warehouses (in London or elsewhere), this case study sheds light on an overlooked part of the global commodification process of ivory and demonstrates the impact of global trade on a local workforce through their specialised epistemological and material skillset. Scholarship tends to approach this topic at the level of manufacture, yet material skills, knowledge, and marketing were also instrumental to port warehouse storage and trade, adding value to one of the most coveted raw materials of the nineteenth century.