We don’t think about commodities very much. They’re all around us: cotton, sugar, oil, gas, chickens, cattle, and so many other things we take for granted. But a closer look at the history of commodities tells a revealing story about the expansion of capitalism and its profound impacts on land, labor, economics, and human rights. In this episode, we talk to four scholars who study commodity frontiers—with case studies in soybeans, honey bees, renewable energy, and more—to learn how commodities have literally altered the planet and society.
We don’t think about commodities very much. They’re all around us: cotton, sugar, oil, gas, chickens, cattle, and so many other things we take for granted. But a closer look at the history of commodities tells a revealing story about the expansion of capitalism and its profound impacts on land, labor, economics, and human rights. In this episode, we talk to four scholars who study commodity frontiers—with case studies in soybeans, honey bees, renewable energy, and more—to learn how commodities have literally altered the planet and society.
Sven Beckert opens by explaining commodity frontiers as a framework for studying the history of capitalism. We think of capitalism as exploding in cities, but actually it began in the countryside where land is used to create goods for global markets, he says. As a result, the countryside has been profoundly transformed.
Hard to believe, but Americans had never heard of soybeans a century ago. Rachel Steely tells the story of the remarkable rise and pervasiveness of soy and its versatile properties that spurred multiple industrial applications, along with its massive role in agriculture.
The honey bee we are all familiar with is not native to North America. It’s a European invasion that has now spread to every country in the world. Angélica Márquez-Osuna traces the history of the bee species Mellifera, which has displaced nearly every other bee species in North America. She shares a hopeful story: a native stingless bee species, Melipona, in the Yucatan is being kept alive by artisan beekeepers.
Just because renewable energy is not a tangible thing, it doesn’t mean it’s not a commodity. Myles Lennon removes the layers that separate consumers from the actual means of production and extraction of minerals used for renewable energy. Though extraction and labor exploitation are devastating to the environment and human rights, he emphasizes there are ways to raise awareness and make sustainable choices for the future.
Sven Beckert, Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History. Laird Bell Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University.
Myles Lennon, Dean's Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology, Brown University.
Angélica Márquez-Osuna, Assistant Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago.
Rachel Steely, former Raphael Morrison Dorman Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program. PhD, Department of History, Harvard University.
Jessica Barnard, Administrator, Weatherhead Research Clusters on Global History and on Migration.
“African Moon” by John Bartmann. Source: Free Music Archive (CC0 1.0 Universal License)
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JESSICA BARNARD: Welcome to the Epicenter podcast from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. I'm your host, Jessica Barnard. Here's a quiz. What do soybeans, honeybees, and renewable energy have in common? Are you scratching your head? Well, they're all examples of commodities.
And we are so used to living amongst commodities that we hardly notice them. Think of cotton, or sugar, or oil. The list is seemingly endless. Scholars of global history want to get a better insight on how so-called commodity frontiers have dramatically changed our world, not only since the Industrial Revolution, but also centuries in the making, transforming the countryside, capturing labor and land, altering supply chains, and even geopolitics.
Our guests today will look at the commodities of soy, honey bees, and renewable energy as case studies to help us understand the expansion of capitalism and its global impact. Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University, and the Chair of the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global History. Myles Lennon is Deans Assistant Professor of Environment and Society and Anthropology at Brown University.
Angelica Marquez-Osuna is an Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University-Chicago. Rachel Steely is a Scholar of the History of Capitalism and Commodities, and is currently a writing consultant for the Weatherhead Center. Sven, to start us off, how would you explain the concept of commodity frontiers? And how does it work as a tool to study history?
SVEN BECKERT: So, commodity frontiers are both places and processes where raw materials, agricultural commodities, things that we use, are commodified and sold on markets. These are places at the edge of the expansion of global capitalism. They are places where new lands and newly-recruited labor are commodified and put to the production of commodities for markets. They are moving-- over a very long time period, over the past 600 years, they're moving from one part of the world to another part of the world.
So, for example, I think a very good example is the sugar commodity frontier. So, with the advent of capitalism, 500 or 600 years ago, sugar, which had been an ancient commodity that has been used by people for thousands of years, new demand for sugar arose in European markets. And European capital owners sought ways to produce that sugar. And they produced it in ever new places, drawing on ever new, freshly commodified land. And they drew on ever different labor and different forms of labor.
So, sugar production, for example, took first off in the Mediterranean-- for European markets, took off on Mediterranean islands. Then it moved to islands off the Coast of West Africa. Then it moved into the Caribbean. Then it moved partly back into Europe with the advent of beet sugar. But it also moved into islands off the Coast of East Africa, like Mauritius and La Réunion. It moved to various parts of Java, India, and elsewhere.
And so, studying commodity frontiers would basically be the study of how this commodity production of, in this example, sugar, how this moves from one part of the world to another part of the world. And it draws on ever different forms of the organization of production, ever different forms of the commodification of land, ever different forms of the commodification of labor, all the way from slavery in the Caribbean, to wage labor in the European countryside. And the argument being here is that capitalism, in some ways, is a process of commodity frontier extension.
So to study capitalism, to understand capitalism, one way to do so is to study it through the expansion of commodity frontiers. And there are, of course, many different commodity frontiers. Sugar is just one example. But we can think about-- we're going to hear about soy. We're going to hear about the honeybee commodity frontier. But you can also study things such as renewable energy, oil, coal. There are multiple possibilities of studying commodity frontier expansion.
So if you look at these commodity frontiers, it's not that the entire world becomes ever more of the same. But it's a process also of differentiation, how different places take on very different kinds of characteristics. So Barbados looks very different, for example. 16th century, 17th century Barbados looks very different from, let's say, 19th century Prussia.
And both produce sugar. So it is a way for us to understand the global connectedness of the capitalist revolution, but also to understand how capitalism produces a great diversity of labor regimes, land tenure regimes, processes of commodification, and so on.
JESSICA BARNARD: So what makes something a commodity? You write that commodities have transformed the countryside. Can you give us an idea of the scope of that transformation?
SVEN BECKERT: The transformation, I think, is gigantic. I think that the expansion of commodity frontiers has left, just like the expansion of capitalism more broadly, has left a tremendous impact on the shape of the world. It begins with the ecological imprint, like the transfer of ecological resources from one part of the world to another part of the world-- the simplification of nature.
Barbados, for example, was a place which had a very rich ecology before the advent of sugar agriculture. And then it was greatly simplified. Nature was greatly simplified, in the sense that it just became one gigantic sugar plantation.
So commodity frontiers have tremendous ecological implications. And, of course, there are also places in which land ownership, the forms of land ownership change. And land properties are redivided. This is a place where massive amounts of labor get mobilized for commodity production.
JESSICA BARNARD: Right.
SVEN BECKERT: When we think about capitalism, usually, we think about the cities. And we think about industry. But, in some ways, by looking at commodity frontiers, you begin to see that the capitalist revolution takes place just as much in the countryside, and perhaps even more impactful in the countryside, than in cities and in industry. And so, it reorients our way of thinking about capitalism by putting more emphasis on changes that happen in the countryside and the importance of these changes to the capitalist revolution, more broadly.
But then, commodities are just the production of things that are being sold on markets, and then purchased on markets and consumed on markets. If you have a garden and you grow some sugar cane, and then you extract the sugar juice and eat that, that would not be a commodity. But if you produce the sugar and you sell it on markets, then you have a commodity on your hands. And you sell a commodity. So I think it's just-- in short, I think it's a particular way of looking at the capitalist revolution by illuminating what, I think, is one of the core processes in the unfolding of global capitalism.
JESSICA BARNARD: Great. Thank you, Sven. Now, Rachel, I'm going to move over to you to discuss a specific commodity. In the last 100 years or so, soybeans have gone from being unknown in the United States to pervading all parts of life. How did this come to be?
RACHEL STEELY: Yes, that's right. So, before the early 20th century, soybean was unknown to most people, not only in the US, but in most parts of the world outside of East Asia. Today, most people encounter soy on a daily basis, often without realizing it. When people think of soy, they might think of things like tofu, soy sauce, maybe soy milk. But, actually, this is not how most soy is used.
Far more soy is used in ways that typically escape our notice. Soy is in junk foods, like Pop Tarts and Oreo cookies. It's in protein bars and imitation meat products. And because soy is a major component of livestock feed, by eating a hamburger or a chicken nugget, you are consuming soy and grain converted into flesh. But soy is also another surprising places, like building materials and cosmetic products, biodiesel, candles, and many other things that we use every day.
There is a lot of soy being grown for these uses. The United States, for example, grows more soybeans today than any other crop, except for corn. And this is a global phenomenon. Soy has been the most rapidly expanding crop in the world since World War II. And today, soy occupies more of the Earth's surface than any other crop, aside from those traditional staples of wheat, corn, and rice.
So, as you suggested, in just over 100 years, soy has gone from a virtually unknown entity in most parts of the world to a dominant commodity, one that winds up in all kinds of expected places. By tracing soy's history, what I have found is that the expansion of soy commodity frontiers was driven by the industrialization of chemical and biological sciences. So in the early 20th century, many American businesses began hiring chemists and chemical engineers for the first time.
Firms believed chemistry could facilitate growth by improving raw materials and diversifying product offerings. Soy was a particularly intriguing raw material to scientists. People had known for a long time that it was possible to extract oil and other materials from soybeans. But especially in the 1920s and beyond, emergent chemical technologies made it possible to identify and extract very specific components.
For example, researchers identified, they discovered specific amino acids, fatty acids. They learned how those molecules were structured. And, critically, they discovered how to manipulate molecules in ways that would change the physical characteristics of raw materials. This is important because, for the first time, researchers could adjust the color, the smell, the plasticity, and other properties of soy-sourced substances in ways that made them useful to different industries.
Companies like Glidden, Procter & Gamble, and many others, have engaged in this research. One of my favorite examples is research directed by Henry Ford in the 1920s and 1930s. Ford built a soybean laboratory where he instructed chemists to focus their research on this plant. In Ford's words, soy was, quote, "the thing of the future" because it breaks up into so many elements.
So, on the one hand, research into the chemical realm created new markets for soy. These sources of demand spurred the advance of new soybean frontiers. At the same time, other scientists made similarly precise adjustments to the soybean plant itself. This means they bred new varieties of soybeans to optimize their contents, to suit industrial needs.
Scientists also tailored soybean plants to grow well in different environments, work that was essential for spreading soy frontiers to new places, both in terms of creating markets and expanding production. The integration of chemical and biological research into businesses, and this ability to make very targeted adjustments to raw materials and to plant life, these things encouraged people to use and grow soy in really enormous quantities.
JESSICA BARNARD: So you write, "the globalization of mundane things can change the world," which seems like a very profound quote. How does soy fit into that?
RACHEL STEELY: Yeah, this, I think, speaks to some of Sven's comments, about the role of commodity frontiers in the historical development of capitalism. We heard about sugar cane. Cotton's another example. So, during the 18th and 19th centuries, the spread of these crops integrated distant regions of the world. The production, the trade, the use of those commodities, forever altered patterns of labor, habits of consumption, even the global balance of power. Soy is comparatively a newcomer on the global scene, compared to these crops.
But I would argue that it is just as influential. And I see four primary ways in which soy has changed the world. First, soy has become an economic force. In the US, soy ranks among the top 10 US exports. It's the only plant to make that list, alongside things like petroleum and vehicles and pharmaceuticals. In Brazil, which today grows more soybeans than any other country, soy makes up 40% of the country's export revenue. And in many other countries as well, major initiatives have proposed using soy frontiers as an instrument to achieve economic development.
JESSICA BARNARD: And you mentioned, soy has been used for political means.
RACHEL STEELY: Closely tied to soy economic force is its weight in geopolitics, a second way in which I'd say soy has changed the world. Because soy markets-- trade of soy, this has become so large and so significant. Soy programs and trade are a lever through which countries can attempt to exert pressure on each other. We saw this in 2018 with the trade war between the US and China, when one of the big actions taken by Chinese officials was to implement a 25% tariff on imports of American soybeans, of which they had been purchasing in huge quantities.
That's just one recent example. But soy marketing, soy products, soy frontiers, have been tools in geopolitics for decades. Third, soy insertion into the global food supply has had very real health effects. Especially since the 1950s, companies have used chemical technologies to integrate soy into processed foods. Things like soy lecithin and soybean oil are super abundant in processed foods because they are cheap and because they do things like help extend shelf life. We are eating a lot of this stuff.
By some estimates, 10% of daily caloric intake now comes from soybean oil, a substance that most humans had never encountered just a couple of generations ago. Some nutritional experts have identified consumption of soybean oil as the most drastic dietary change that our species has ever experienced. And I want to underscore how incredible that is, because people aren't generally trying to eat soybean oil at all. Really, how many of us are going to the grocery store or a restaurant, intentionally looking to eat this stuff?
So while the spread of soy is helping to feed some of us in other formats, like those tofu's and soy milks, and, certainly, the meat that soy is used to produce, soy is also wreaking havoc on our bodies through processed foods and all of the really catastrophic effects on our health that those products have. Fourth, and finally, the other main dimension I would point to in terms of soy's global influence is environmental.
Soy commodity frontiers affect the environment in many ways, including through clearing land of native vegetation, a really radical simplification of landscapes under a single mono-crop. There are other considerations, too, like runoff from fertilizers and pesticides that are used to grow it. When we think about the globalization of a seemingly mundane bean, these are some pretty incredible, wide-reaching changes that we are experiencing.
JESSICA BARNARD: So as we think about sustainable ways to produce goods in the future, what kinds of lessons can we learn from this story of soy, from its history, its proliferation, the way it's become so dominant in our lives?
RACHEL STEELY: Yeah, I think one of the most interesting aspects of soy's history is the sheer number of arguments that people have made about soy's potential. Some of those arguments have been technical or economic. But a great many of those arguments have also been ecological. That is, people have had all kinds of ideas about how soy could, in some way, improve the health of human beings or other living things, or how soy could restore balance to an ecosystem.
To name a few quick examples, some researchers have argued that nitrogen from soybean plants could restore vitality to soils, to land that had been drained of nutrients from the repeated planting of other cash crops. That's one argument for soy as a soil renovator. Other researchers have claimed, soy could help solve hunger, or to address protein deficiency, more specifically. And people continue to articulate arguments for soy as a kind of environmental salve, as a more sustainable alternative to other materials.
Advocates of Brazilian soy biodiesel have celebrated it as an environmentally-friendly source of energy. Goodyear Tire and Rubber has pledged to entirely replace petroleum with soy oil in the production of its tires by the year 2040 to make a more sustainable product. And there are many other examples of cosmetics and food companies making claims like these. And, yet, if we assess how soy has spread historically and what its effects have actually been on environments and the beings that populate them, what we find doesn't quite measure up to those promises.
Soy, in fact, seems to have supported and sustained other environmentally-damaging industries throughout the last century, rather than having shifted us away from them. Perhaps no clearer example of this exists than the meat industry. While soy is used today for many things, the majority of it goes to feeding livestock. And the global livestock industry is one of the most damaging industries that there is, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
On top of that, the transportation required to ship massive quantities of soy around the planet for this use makes the soy crop one of the least environmentally-friendly in terms of carbon emissions. And that's to say nothing of the cost of clearing land and vegetation to grow it. All this isn't to say that soy can't be used in sustainable and healthy ways. But the lesson here, I think, is that, to develop truly sustainable forms of production, we are going to need to think more systematically, more holistically.
Technical developments and product innovations can be part of those solutions. But without a deeper rethinking of what plants we choose to grow, how we grow them, and for what purposes, the history of soy suggests that technical solutions alone will not get us very far, no matter how complex or clever those innovations might be, and no matter how well-intentioned they might be.
JESSICA BARNARD: Thank you, Rachel. That's a really fascinating look at something that we see every day and don't notice anymore. To move on to Myles for a different kind of commodity, you work on renewable energy as a commodity frontier, which, unlike soy or sugar, is not something that you can touch or hold. In what ways do you see that as a commodity? And can you tell us how access to this commodity of renewable energy tells a bigger story of race and power in the United States?
MYLES LENNON: Thank you. Yes, so, indeed, renewable energy is a commodity. And I agree with what you just said, Jessica. There's a certain novelty in the fact that it's a commodity by virtue of its ostensible immateriality, the fact that so many of us don't have a direct, tangible relationship with renewable energy technologies.
And I think this basic idea that renewable energy is a commodity is really important because, again, to your point, we often think of renewable energy as a force of nature, as the wind and sunshine and water, in contradistinction to the corrosive, extractive forms of energy produced by humans. And we really see this contrast in images all over the internet. I've done a ton of Google searches on renewable energy.
And you find these images that visualize solar panels and wind turbines in grassy fields beneath blue skies, suggesting that they're these natural forms of life that humans can organically cultivate, like seeds, soil, crops. But under the conditions of global capitalism that Sven spoke to, the power of the wind and sunshine and water is cultivated not like a crop on steward and land, but rather through the production of surplus value, through transnational supply chains, and through consumer markets, such that renewable energy, as we know it, is less of some kind of non-human, natural force, and more of a commodity.
And while, historically, humans have harnessed the wind and water to power their societies in ways that were not commodified, today, we have an electricity and fuel production system predicated on endless economic growth and on enhancing and growing human mobility and human lifespans, as opposed to stewarding the interdependent webs of life, of which humans are only one humble part.
And, as a result, this energy system depends, demands, not the sort of thoughtful engagement with sunshine and water and wind that characterize pre-modern energy systems, like Indigenous-prescribed burns, but instead forms of production that view the wind and the sunshine as simply resources that can optimize human society and grow our economies indefinitely. And under these conditions, energy production relies on a level of destructive extraction, technological sophistication, efficiency, that historically has only occurred through capital, through the pursuit of profit, which, in turn, has transformed energy, all forms of energy, including solar and wind energy.
We're not just talking oil here, right? It turned all energy into commodities, which is to say that, when we tap the power of the sun with the goal of optimizing modern society, disentangling us from the limits of seasonal cycles, and ultimately yielding profits, when we do this, we end up producing solar technologies and energy storage technologies that rely on the toxic and violent extraction of things like cobalt and copper and arsenic and silicon.
And, historically, this sort of extraction and transnational coordination relies upon capital and a system of consumption, in which most of us, certainly me, have no real relationship with the things that get inputted and processed to make the things we need to survive, as you gestured to, Jessica. So a solar panel is not just a helpful tool for tapping into the natural power of the sun. A solar panel is also something that is created for a modern, growth-oriented, anthropocentric energy generation system. And it therefore requires that we extract power in unaccountable, profitable ways, that most of us, as energy consumers, give little consideration to.
So this is how I see solar and renewable energy, more generally, as a commodity. And to speak to your second question about how this commodity tells a bigger story of race and power, we need to recognize that this growth-oriented, profit-driven energy system that supplants our relationships with the non-human world around us, this system was, in many respects, seeded by the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economies that it sprouted, that Sven spoke to briefly.
The efficient extraction of energy from enslaved peoples, enslaved peoples on plantations throughout the African diaspora, was, in many respects, the first industrial scale system of energy production that ever existed. And it reduced energy to a matter of quantifiable power that we can economize and purchase on an open commodity market. So race was foundational to industrial scale energy as we know it.
And with the first industrial scale energy transition from enslaved bodies to fossil fuels, the political hierarchies of slavery stayed intact, such that non-white peoples were disproportionately burdened by the production of energy from coal mines to oil refineries, all of which worked to generate surplus value for elites, the overwhelming majority of whom were white. And as we today are undergoing another industrial scale energy transition, this time from fossil fuels to renewable energy, we see those same political hierarchies continue to be intact.
So, Uyghurs, for example, an oppressed, Indigenous, racialized minority in Western China, Uyghurs are essentially imprisoned in forced labor programs to produce the poly-silicon used in a sizable portion of solar panels. And they're doing this, working in coal-powered manufacturing plants, manufacturing plants in Western China. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, women and children work in dangerous, hazardous, and often deadly conditions, to mine the cobalt that is essential for much of the battery storage technologies that we need for a renewable energy transition.
And there are even cases of Black and Brown prisoners right here in the United States, making solar technology for almost no pay in prison. So the point here being that Black and Brown workers, the world over, are exposed to hazardous chemicals and brutal working conditions to power the green energy revolution. And so, precisely because renewable energy is a commodity, it is wrapped up in the broader dynamics of race that commodified energy has upheld since the transatlantic slave trade.
JESSICA BARNARD: So you talk about how these well-meaning intentions to use renewable energy have all of these terrible unintended consequences in terms of exploiting labor and other things. On a larger scale, do you think all commodities have this balance of positive and negative effects?
MYLES LENNON: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say that, yes, absolutely. We need to recognize that there's, as you put it, a balance of positive and negative effects. And that's not a general observation that there are good things and bad things in life, right?
Instead, the point that I really think we need to hammer home in any discussion of renewable energy transitions is that the commodity formed is deeply insidious in a society in which we depend upon commodities to survive, because, insofar as we provision electricity or any other essential good or service through any market that is organized around the extraction of surplus value, that is, the imperative to make a profit, these goods, necessarily, have a bad side, even if they enable us to survive and thrive.
And I think that any work for an effective and equitable energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables needs to entail a recognition that, while there are better ways and not so great ways to power our society, that there are better infrastructures and not so great infrastructures.
In other words, when most of us have no relationship with the production of things like electricity that we need to survive, and when these things are produced largely to enable someone else to make a dollar, production will necessarily occur in a way in which someone or something is being exploited, where our dependencies on life forms, like rare Earth metals, and fossilized plant matter, and silicon, and toxic chemicals, and, in the case of solar panels, silicon tetrachloride, these dependencies have corrosive and destructive impacts on marginalized communities throughout the world.
So, while solar, for instance, can help poor communities of color transition from a system of fossil energy production that is polluting their air, and burdening them through high energy bills, and making them disproportionately vulnerable to climate change-- so, solar can have really incredible impacts, positive impacts, for poor communities of color. This work of energy transition also has the effect of depending and exacerbating the extractive, exploitative commodity frontier of solar that I just spoke to. So to answer your question, yes, there is always a balance of positive and negative effects. And instead of unilaterally valorizing or demonizing renewable energy technologies, I think we need to be mindful of these complications and contradictions.
JESSICA BARNARD: Myles, let me ask you one more question. How can you reconcile the need for a rapid transition to renewable energy with the extractive commodity frontier, like coal or oil or cobalt?
MYLES LENNON: Yeah, so many things. It's a matter, I think, of not succumbing to silver bullet thinking or polemical thinking. We need to be doing a number of things at once. So, on the one hand, there are a lot of very practical things we can do to dramatically reduce the extractivism and exploitation of the renewable energy commodity frontier. We can be investing more in R&D to develop iron flow batteries instead of relying on lithium ion batteries, which require greater extraction, destroy Indigenous ancestral homelands, and which are also harder to recycle and can cause more e-waste, right?
There are better ways that we can do energy storage technologies. We can prioritize solar panel manufacturers with recycling buyback programs, right? So, a lot of things we can do to make things better. Part of the work here, I think, must entail transforming our relationship with energy, seeing . Energy not as this thing that we can grow and use endlessly, as something that we can extract from the Earth or sun or wind, but instead as a capacity, a capacity that is at the core of our relationships with anything, as something that we regenerate, in conjunction with other forms of life.
So I like to think of the energy flows of composting, composting, which returns nutrients and life to the soil. There are composters today who are tapping the power of the sun with micro-solar to collect more organic waste and process more compost. And so, essentially, they're integrating solar into an energy commodity, or an energy economy, rather, that is about returning life to the Earth, and not just extracting light from the Earth. We need to think of regenerative energy economy like this, even as we take practical measures to improve the extractive and exploitative commodity frontier of renewable energy. We need to be doing both things at once.
JESSICA BARNARD: Thank you for those really powerful insights. Angelica, we'd like to move on to you now. You work on honeybees, and, specifically, a native species to the Yucatan and the introduction of a European bee species, almost like a metaphor for all of colonization. Can you tell us a little bit about that story, about the introduction of this new species? And just to reference for our listeners, the native species, the sting-less bee, is called melipona. And the European species is called mellifera, for short. They sound very similar.
ANGELICA MARQUEZ-OSUNA: Yeah. So, as you said, yeah, this is almost like a metaphor of the colonization process and the colonization of the Americas. OK, let's think about the countryside and the way we understand the countryside now. And, usually, when we think about a healthy environment, it always has honeybees, these hives with beekeepers with these healthy insects flying around crops or in the farm.
But the thing is that that idea, or that reality, it's something new, that it started happening in the late 19th century, and this idea of having beehives as part of the countryside. And so, those hives are from apis mellifera, which is the honey bee, the common honeybee that we all are familiar with. And they are native from Europe.
But their arrival to the Americas occurred in the context of what is called the Columbian Exchange, but in a very particular process, which, I think, it follows a very slow process in cooperation with other animals that are also the result of the European Exchange, such as pigs or cows, that started in the early period of the colonization, of the European colonization of the Americas.
What happened with honeybees, and it's because honeybees are difficult to transport overseas, is that they were brought in the second half of the 19th century, systematically. So there were different attempts. But they didn't work. And so, the expansion of the honeybees to the northern side of the Americas, which is the US and Canada, started in that century, and first the East Coast, then the Midwest, with this temperate weather, and in different parts of Canada.
And then, what we had by the late 19th century, when beekeepers were able to develop different technologies and industry, they realized that honeybees could be also part of the tropical environment of the Americas. So, in the early 20th century, we had this expansion of honeybees to places that they didn't exist before, such as the Yucatan Peninsula. We also see different attempts to relocate European honeybees to Cuba, for example, Puerto Rico, other parts of Mexico.
And the thing is that, after 30 years, by the first half of the 20th century, the honeybee, which is the honeybee that we are all familiar with, it started this expansion around the world. And, now, it populates every corner of the Earth, even if it's not native from those places. And, of course, it had implications in terms of the environment. And there are not a lot of species, around less than 10 species around the world, that produce good honey for humans.
But the thing with apis mellifera is that beekeepers were able to design a very specific hive, an artificial hive. And, also, they breed different types of bees, honey bees, to be more productive in different areas. And so, what happened is that the native bees that existed in other locations, they were replaced by the honey bee. And it's for that reason that we think that honey bees have existed in our world forever. But, no, it's something relatively new.
And it's the result of this frontier expansion that involved the industrialization of honey, and, also, the commodification of the instruments for beekeeping practices and honey bees themselves. And, now, we have this market of honey bees and queens that you can send from, I don't know, from Ohio, to Mexico, to, for example, to Yucatan. And so, this circulation is the result of that expansion. And it had implications in terms of environment, in terms of the beekeeping practices that existed before.
JESSICA BARNARD: So tell us about the traditional beekeeping practices with the melipona stingless bee. They are not completely gone, right?
ANGELICA MARQUEZ-OSUNA: What happened in the Yucatan Peninsula is that, for more than 2,000 years ago, beekeepers used to produce honey with a very different species of bees. And they are stingless bees called melipona. The scientific name is melipona beecheii. It's a very specific bee that produces really good honey.
And the Maya, the Yucatec Maya, were able to domesticate melipona. And with the arrival of the Spaniards, they realized that this location, which is in between the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, it didn't have gold or other kinds of commodities that they were looking for extraction. But it was an apiary, yeah, with melipona. So this practice changed a lot with the colonization process and continued.
The thing is that these bees continue to exist in that place and evolved with the colonization process. All that changed in the early 20th century, when beekeepers started to relocate a new species of bee with a very different system and with different types of hives, and the desire of having a more modern industry of honey production. So that completely changed, not only the practices, but the way people interacted with honeybees.
It also changed land tenure and distribution because it's not the same, having, for example, hives of honeybees that, they stink, that, sometimes, they are dangerous for people, and also for livestock, than having this kind of sting-less bees that, yeah, they don't mean any risk to other beings. So, yeah, it started this kind of transformation that we can look, particularly in the case of the Yucatan Peninsula.
JESSICA BARNARD: Thank you. That's really interesting. It sounds like we have two kinds of bees that are both commodities, but ended up operating in somewhat different ways through this process. So all of these commodities have really interesting lessons we can take from them. Could we maybe go back to some of you and talk about the most important lessons learned from each commodity?
ANGELICA MARQUEZ-OSUNA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's super interesting. And one of the things that I have found in my research is that the way we understand honey now is in part of the result of the relationship that beekeepers found in the mid-19th century, were very interested in, in the mid-19th century, with sugar, right? So they said, OK, we have this industrialization of the agrarian landscape and with honey production. That is a very competitive commodity.
But we have also in our hives this kind of sweetener that maybe could compete with sugar. So let's try to transform the production to something industrial. And what happened, particularly, with this case, is that beekeepers didn't rely on-- well, beekeepers relied on the exploitation, not only on people and their land, for having this more productive system, which is apiculture, but, also, they relied on the exploitation of the hives themselves. So they not only transformed the human environment, if we can say that, or the countryside, but also inside the hive.
JESSICA BARNARD: But melipona survived, in spite of the expansion of the honeybee industry, right?
ANGELICA MARQUEZ-OSUNA: In the case of melipona bee, what makes it different from the honeybee or the apis mellifera is that it didn't follow this industrialization process. But they continued to be there in the environment. So this is more like a story about coexistence. The honeybee replaced, in many different ways, the melipona bee in the Yucatan Peninsula. It is still there, in different ways. So it became more like a traditional practice.
And so, usually, beekeepers, for example, now, they have both species of bees. And, sometimes, they have melipona in their backyards. But, also, they have this kind of apiary that produces this industrial honey that they can sell to the global market of honey production. But, on the other hand, they also have this more traditional honey that they can also sell in the local market, and also with tourism.
JESSICA BARNARD: Thanks. In your writing, you describe the melipona honey as thick and a little bit green, which sounds strange to those of us used to the honey we buy in the grocery store. But, I guess, in another timeline, we would all think of honey as being green. Would any of you like to comment on each other's work, or any cautionary tales to take away from your own commodity? Sven, yes, please.
SVEN BECKERT: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Jessica. And, listening to all of you, I think these are three really powerful examples of how a perspective, thinking about the making of the modern world and making modern capitalism through the perspective of commodity frontiers expansion, is a really promising way to understand the making of the modern world in novel ways.
And I think what I take away from these contributions, from all three contributions, is that they allow us to see certain things about global economic life, about the expansion of global capitalism, that otherwise would perhaps escape us, and certainly has escaped the attention of many people who think have explained the advent of modern capitalism. So, for example, we've seen, all three examples, their fundamental importance of global connections to the expansion of capitalism. Capitalism cannot be understood from the perspective of one particular place, one particular location.
It cannot be understood purely from a Eurocentric perspective, as something that spreads out from the European continent. But it's really a co-production of people, willingly or unwillingly, in all parts of the world. And the soy example, the bee example, the renewable energy example, reaching all the way back to, let's say, 18th century, into the present day, would show how important that global perspective is, and that we see that through focusing on commodity frontier expansion.
I think we also see the great importance of the countryside in all of these processes. I mean, certainly, much electricity consumption takes place in cities. And when we think about electricity, we probably mostly think about pictures taken from space of planet Earth, which show that urban spaces are brightly illuminated. And agrarian spaces are usually much darker.
But as Myles shows, so much of that story actually takes place in the countryside, such as in the lithium mines of Katanga in the Congo. So this kind of churning of the countryside, the complete redoing of the world's countryside and the labor that takes place in the world's countryside, is clearly very crucial to the expansion of these commodity frontiers and becomes visible through focusing on commodity frontiers expansion. We see, also, in all of these examples, we see the great diversities that capitalism produces.
I mean, the enormous importance of coercion and violence in the transformations of capitalism become clear, from the colonialism that Angelica describes, to the dis-possessions of Indigenous lands in Brazil that Rachel describes, to the violent exploitation of labor in the Congo that Myles describes. And we also see the enormous importance of the transfer of ecological resources from one part of the world to another, and the concentration of these ecological resources in some parts of the world, who become, as a result, much richer than other parts of the world.
And, last but not least, and what we haven't really commented on so far, is that the focus on commodity frontiers, I think, also allows us to combine very global perspectives, as we just discussed, but combine them also with very local perspectives, to understand what is happening in a particular community, in the Yucatan, what is happening at a particular mine, and the mobilization of workers in a particular mine in Katanga, or what happens on the soy fields of China under the conditions of Japanese colonialism.
I think there is something particular about this perspective, in that it allows us to think about the global and the local, simultaneously, and to understand the great importance of the local, of social conflict on a local level, on local ecological resources, to constituting the global world of capitalism.
MYLES LENNON: Can I jump in?
JESSICA BARNARD: Absolutely. Please jump in, Myles.
MYLES LENNON: Sorry, yeah, I want to build on the points that Sven just made. I mean, I agree with them completely. And, to me, what I really appreciate about the commodity frontier frame that I certainly got from the different examples we heard today was, it really helps to, I think, destabilize the really violent banality of the commodity form. Commodities are things that are so embedded in our everyday life, in just such ho hum ways, that it's quite easy.
Part of why the commodity form is so effective is that it obfuscates how it comes into being. And the commodity frontier as a framework really underscores all of the, not just violence, but really remarkable human ingenuity and transnational coordination, to say nothing of the extraction and exploitation, that makes the very banal things possible.
And, to me, a statement that I'm really left struck with, that seems quite obvious, in retrospect, but is nonetheless very novel to me, is Rachel's contention that, before the 20th century-- and correct me if I-- I hope I'm not misstating it, Rachel. So please correct me if I do. But before the 20th century, outside of Asia, soy was not really a thing, right? That seems like a very obvious statement. And, yet, that still strikes me as so novel because soy is so ubiquitous.
Soy is just such a part of who we are today, in the ways that Rachel spoke to. And the idea that this wasn't even really a thing outside of Asia before 150 years ago, I mean, that's wild. And so, that's a simple example of the kinds of statements and ideas that really illuminate all that goes into producing the madness and craziness that is global capitalism in the 21st century. And that's why I really appreciate the commodity frontiers framework.
JESSICA BARNARD: Yes, violent banality, that's a really evocative phrase that I think captures these everyday commodities that we all deal with, and their very tangled histories. Rachel, do you something to add?
RACHEL STEELY: Yeah, I just thought I'd add, very quickly, one thing, to build on the last couple of comments. Sven spoke of, how did you put it, the churning of the countryside and the development of capitalism, which I love, that way of putting it. I think something that I appreciate about the commodity frontier framework, the analysis of commodity frontiers, the attention to ongoing interactions between local and global scales.
This can help us see that these relationships and interactions continue to evolve. It points us to that, this is an ongoing process. This isn't something that just happened in the past, and now is fixed or static in some way. The commodity frontier helps us see things and see ways in which these relationships and dynamics continue to be refashioned, and the stakes of that. So there's great contemporary importance to analyzing commodity frontiers as well.
JESSICA BARNARD: Thanks. Angelica, do you have any final words?
ANGELICA MARQUEZ-OSUNA: Yeah. I just want to continue with this idea about, every commodity has its own movement and connections with other types of commodities. And I think it's something that this commodity frontier expansion helped us-- and not only to think about just one commodity, right, but how it interacts with others. And this is an example of this, how this framework opened up to us to rethink profound or deep histories.
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JESSICA BARNARD: Well, thank you all for this really fascinating discussion. You've all shed light on these seemingly mundane aspects of our modern lifestyle that we don't think about, but have really profound impacts.
SVEN BECKERT: Thank you for having us.
MYLES LENNON: Thank you so much.
RACHEL STEELY: Thank you.
JESSICA BARNARD: This is Jessica Barnard, signing off from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Please follow the Epicenter podcast for more in-depth conversations about issues that shape our world.
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