CFP: Workshop on “Ports and People in Commodity History”

The Commodities of Empire British Academy Research Project and the University of Glasgow are jointly sponsoring a two-day workshop on "Ports and People in Commodity History," to take place at the University of Glasgow, September 5-6, 2019. According to the call for papers:

Long gone seem the days when empires were described as political entities tightly controlled by metropolitan elites. . . . Studies highlighting the role of individuals, families, diasporas, guilds, religions, and other social groups, in and across empires, have prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries,’ causing some historians to speak of ‘decentred empires.’ Ports large and small, crucially including their hinterlands, have emerged as relatively autonomous nodes in global flows of people, goods, and ideas. These ports acted as centres of production, maintenance, supplies, financial intermediation, information flows, and knowledge exchange. A host of shippers, merchants, brokers, dealers, commission agents, auctioneers, issuers of futures contracts, warehousers, clerks, accountants and the like all regulated inflows and outflows of commodities, in relation with an army of artisans, industrialists at all scales, workers, farmers, and consumers. 

In this two-day workshop, the organizers "aim to explore, through the prism of port cities and the agency of those connected to them, what these new approaches mean to the study of commodities that were mobilised within and between empires in the early modern and modern eras." For a fuller discussion of the workshop's goals and organization, please see the full call for papers.

Papers presented at the workshop may be considered for publication in the Commodities of Empire Working Papers series.

Please e-mail expressions of interest, with a title and an abstract of no more than 300 words, by January 31, 2019, to Jelmer Vos, University of Glasgow.