Commodity trade

Natural disasters can have lasting impacts on regional economies. Island economies, in particular, have protracted recoveries from disasters due to their location, size, and economic dependence on trading partners. As imports and exports are especially explicit and discernible in ports, islands facilitate investigations on the long-term effects of disaster relief, reconstruction, and redevelopment on trade. In this paper, we examine the transformational impact of the 2004 Indian ocean earthquake and tsunami. We examine changes to physical imports and exports in the archipelago to reflect on the social, economic, and ecological impacts of the 2004 disaster and subsequent recovery. We analyse disaggregated physical import and export data for 2003–2017 from revenue ports in the Nicobar Islands in India along with data from field surveys and interviews conducted on the islands. We find that while the archipelago’s physical trade balance has been continuously growing since 2003, it incre...

The “financialization” wave that has swept global markets in the past 30 years has only recently included extractive commodities: many of these commodities remain outside exchanges or are excluded from major commodity indices. Extractive commodities can be seen as a sort of litmus test for global economic cooperation and the functioning of global markets. Because these commodities usually lack substitutes and are frequently considered by states to be national security issues, these markets often involve national policy makers. These Commodity Markets can offer a window into the most pressing global governance issues including those on the agenda for the upcoming Russian G20 Leaders Summit scheduled for St. Petersburg. Commodity Markets have been at the forefront of yet another profound transformation in the global political economy in the past decade: the (re)emergence of China as, arguably, the single most important economic actor in many global commodity markets.

This article examines the history of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important exporters of Indian raw cotton and one of the biggest trading firms in South Asia during the colonial period. The study allows for a fresh look at Indian economic history by putting forth two main arguments. First, it charts the history of a continental European firm that was active in South Asia to offer a better understanding of the economic entanglements of the subcontinent with the wider world, which often had a reach beyond the empire. This ties in with recent research initiatives that aim to examine the history of imperialism from a transnational perspective. Second, the history of a private company helps in developing a micro-perspective on the often ambiguous relation between the business goals of individual enterprises and colonial rule. The article argues that this may be evidence of the fact that capitalism and imperialism were two different, although sometimes converging, spatial structures, each with a distinct logic of its own. What is more, the positive interactions between European and Indian businessmen, fostered by a cosmopolitan attitude among business elites, point to the fact that even in the age of empire, the class background of actors could be more important for the establishing of cooperative ventures than the colour of their skin or their geographical origin. It is argued that this offers the possibility of examining the history of world trade in terms of global social history. * I would like to thank Margret Frenz, Moritz von Brescius, and the two anonymous readers of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The article relies mostly on those unpublished records from the Volkart Archives in Winterthur that could be accessed for the first time for scholarly study. They have only recently been transferred to the Winterthur Municipal Archives and made accessible to the public.

Using objective measures of investor protections in 170 countries, I establish that the level of investor protection matters for cross-country differences in GDP growth: countries with stronger protections tend to grow faster than those with poor investor protections.

Framed within the common goal of advancing trade justice and South-North solidarity, The Fair Trade Handbook presents a broad interpretation of fair trade and a wide-ranging dialogue between different viewpoints. Canadian researchers in particular have advanced a transformative vision of fair trade, rooted in the cooperative movement and arguing for a more central role for Southern farmers and workers. Contributors to this book look at the issues within global trade, and assess fair trade and how to make it more effective against the broader structures of the capitalist, colonialist, racist and patriarchal global economy. The debates and discussions are set within a critical development studies and critical political economy framework. However, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers, as it translates the key issues for a popular audience.

Le riz  est une matière première importante dans l’agriculture et le commerce  dont le prix ne  cesse d’augmenter de jour en jour.    Le  but de ce  travail consiste à modéliser le prix du riz en fonction d’autres variables  explicatives.  Mais tout d’abord,  nous procéderons à une petite présentation de cette  plante, ses caractéristiques,  sa production, sa  consommation ainsi que
les échanges commerciaux.

Abstract: The developmentalist gaze of the Fair Trade movement is on Global South producers. In this article we turn our analytic gaze toward North American fair traders to explore the racialized, neocolonial power relations in which these movement actors are implicated. Section One is a brief historical sketch of Fair Trade certification. We argue that the certification system is a multi-sited, global institution that is shaped by and shapes neocolonial power relations in Fair Trade by exploring the consolidation and more recent splintering of the international certification system. Section Two provides a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, in order to lay a foundation for the remaining sections. In Section Three we analyze the spatiality of Fair Trade, with an emphasis on what and who are missing from or erased by the structural and conceptual frameworks of Fair Trade. In Section Four we explore the relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism, and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by Fair Trade advocates. Section Five is a critical analysis of the neocolonialist and racist discourse of Fair Trade, with a focus on the “helping” discourse. We contend that as Global North fair traders strive to “help” Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy and the desire to develop.

Ein bedeutender Teil des Welthandels wird nicht zwischen Export- und Importländern abgewickelt, sondern über Firmen in Drittstaaten. Man nennt das Transithandel. Am Beispiel der Schweiz, über die heute ein Fünftel des weltweiten Rohstoffhandels läuft, ohne dass diese Waren je Schweizer Boden berühren, zeige ich, wie sich seit Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts zentrale Techniken und Institutionen der Globalisierung herausbildeten: von Terminbörsen über internationale Schiedsgerichte bis hin zu Steuerprivilegien für multinationale Konzerne.

Rezensionen und Interviews:

- «Schweizer Händler dirigierten Waren rund um die Erde». Rezension von Jürgen Osterhammel, in: NZZ vom 13. Juni 2019, S. 44, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/transithandel-lea-haller-zeigt-kaufleute-als-globale-akteure-ld.1488120.
- «Wie die Schweiz zur Weltmacht wurde». Rezension von Andreas Tobler, in: TagesAnzeiger vom 11. Mai 2019, https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/kultur/buecher/wie-die-schweiz-zur-weltmacht-wurde/story/16229562.
- «Die unsichtbare Branche». Interview mit Tim Rüdiger, in: WoZ Nr. 20, 16. Mi 2019, S. 7, https://www.woz.ch/-9b6f.
- «Transithandel, helvetisch». Rezension von Friedrich Lenger, in: Soziopolis, https://www.soziopolis.de/lesen/buecher/artikel/transithandel-helvetisch.
- «Eine unsichtbare Branche». Rezension von Alexis Schwarzenbach, in: NZZ am Sonntag vom 30. Juni 2019, Bücher am Sonntag, S. 20, https://nzzas.nzz.ch/kultur/transithandel-ein-buch-ueber-eine-unsichtbare-branche-ld.1492632?reduced=true.
- «Sicher ist nur die Unsicherheit». Rezension von Thomas Speckmann, in: Tagesspiegel vom 7. August 2019, S. 21, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/literatur/das-weltweite-wirtschaftssystem-im-wandel-sicher-ist-nur-die-unsicherheit/24875962.html.
- Rezension von Philipp Müller, in: H-Soz-Kult, 17.9.2019, https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-28623.

There is hardly any country in the world, which does not have an Indian element in its
population. So wide is its spread that it could rightly be said that the Sun never sets on the
Indian population.
Among the Indian Diaspora, Tamils form a substantial minority – 8 million out of 35 million.
They constitute the overwhelming majority of the Indian population in Sri Lanka, Malaysia,
Singapore and Reunion. They are in good numbers in Myanmar, Indonesia, South Africa,
Mauritius, Seychelles, Fiji, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, Australia, New
Zealand, Gulf countries, England, United States, Canada and European Union.
The most amazing of these were the Tamilians... ancient traders who conquered the far and  Near  East and South East Asia

Kristiansen, K. "From memory to monument: the construction of time in the Bronze Age". In: Lehoërff, A. (ed.) Construire le temps. Histoire et méthodes des chronologies et calendriers des derniers millénaires avant notre ère en Europe occidentale. Lille,

During most campaigns at Dorestad, a significant number of beads were excavated. In contrast to beads from Scandinavian emporia such as Ribe, the beads from Dorestad have never been studied as a complete set. Several small bead assemblages from different excavation locations in Wijk bij Duurstede have been briefly published in excavation reports , but a closer look at these beads was necessary, focusing on their use, deposition and provenance. As the publications of beads found in Scandinavian emporia show , their study can contribute significantly to our understanding of the international networks Dorestad was part of.
Throughout the Early Middle Ages, beads occur very regularly in north-western Europe. In cemeteries dating to the Merovingian period  colourful strings of beads were deposited in graves on a regular basis.  This deposition pattern changed in the second half of the seventh century: beads were excavated from only a handful of cemeteries dating to the late seventh and eighth centuries in the Netherlands. These rare bead sets have not been intensively studied at all, which has resulted in a lack of knowledge of Late Merovingian and Carolingian  beads. This lack of bead studies in north-western Europe stands in sharp contrast to bead research in Scandinavia, where (pre) Viking-Age  beads have received a lot of attention during the past decades.  Some researchers of Scandinavian bead material have suggested that Scandinavians had few opportunities to obtain beads from the West, as they believe the use of beads had largely fallen out of fashion in north-western Europe.  The study of the beads from Dorestad thus presents an opportunity to create a basic corpus for beads from the late seventh, eighth and early ninth century in the Netherlands, and can indicate whether bead-networks between the west and Scandinavia had indeed come to a stand-still.
In this article, 395 beads found during the Dorestad excavations will be discussed. These are the Late Merovingian and Carolingian beads from twentieth- and twentyfirst-century excavations of the settlement sites at Hoogstraat, De Heul, Voorwijk, Veilingterrein, De Horden, Zandweg and Albert Heijn, and the cemeteries on De Heul and Willigenburg, plus some beads from nineteenth century excavations of which the find location remains vague. They are all kept in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.  Several more beads from nineteenth-century excavations are present in the PUG collection, but the largest “chunk” is definitely presented in this article. Hopefully the author will have the opportunity to study the remaining beads in the future. Due to a lack of sieving activities during the Dorestad excavations far into the nineteen-nineties, many more beads must have been missed. With this article comes a catalogue with a description per bead and a set of colour plates on which each bead from Dorestad is depicted.

Sintesi

In questo volume vengono presentati tutti i tipi ed elementi distintivi dei navigli menzionati nei primi tre volumi dei Regesti marittimi croati (RMC I-III) che comprendono circa 16.000 documenti riguardanti, tra l’altro, i velieri in uso nell’Adriatico durante il Settecento. Lo studio espone 18.536 menzioni di bastimenti classificati in 79 termini diversi messi a confronto rispetto l’etimologia e caratteristiche peculiari di ogni natante (quali stazza, attrezzatura velica, uso e quant’altro). L’analisi dimostra che i piccoli paroni preferivano velieri più piccoli, dalla portata fra le 20 e 300 t, essendo più veloci e manovrabili con buone capacità di navigazione. Si trattava innanzitutto del trabaccolo con il 14,55% di presenza nei documenti, poi della tartana (11,49%), del pielego (8,06%), della polacca (6,23%), della marciliana (6,18%), della feluca (5,10%), della barca (4,86%), della checcia (2,21%) e della brazzera (2,01%). I velieri minori, ovvero piccoli e medi, di portata inferiore alle 300 t, rappresentavano perfino il 70,82% di tutti i bastimenti nominati, mentre i velieri maggiori, di portata superiore alle 310 t, fra cui le grandi navi/nave ovvero vascelli (15,33%) ed i fregatoni (4,36%) avevano mantenuto il 20,65% del traffico marittimo, soprattutto verso le Isole Ionie ed altri porti mediterranei. Tramite l’analisi comparata delle loro caratteristiche e peculiarità è stato dimostrato che fra i porti delle coste orientali e occidentali dell’Adriatico nel Settecento vi era un intenso commercio quotidiano e che tale traffico era caratterizzato da un forte dinamismo del piccolo e medio ceto imprenditoriale che è riuscito ad imporsi sia nel commercio marittimo che nella costruzione navale che ha interessato ambo le coste adriatiche.

Parole chiave: velieri, terminologia, Adriatico, Settecento, navigazione, commercio, trabaccolo, nava/vascello, tartana, pielego, polacca, marciliana, feluca, barca, fregatone, checcia, brazzera

************

Abstract – Adriatic ships between the two shores in the eighteenth century. A historical and iconographic review

This historical and iconographic review outlines all the types and main characteristics of the sailers mentioned in the first three volumes of the Croatian Maritime Regesta (RMC I-III). These three volumes include around 16,000 documents which, among other things, present the sailing ships used in the Adriatic during the eighteenth century. The analysis shows 18,536 mentions of ships classified under 79 different names (types), and compares them with respect to etymology and characteristics such as DWT, sailing equipment, purpose. The analysis demonstrates that small shipowners preferred lighter sailing ships with a DWT of up to 300 t, being faster and more maneuverable with good navigation skills. The dominant type of ship was trabaccolo, which accounts for 14.55% of mentions in the documents, followed by tartane (11.49%), pielego (8.06%), polacre (6.23%), marciliana (6.18%), felucca (5.10%), barca (4.86%), ketch (2.21%), and brazzera (2.01%). Small and medium ships with a DWT of up to 300 t account for 70.82% of all the mentioned sailers. Larger sailing ships, with a DWT over 310 t, including navas/vessels (15.33%) and frigatoons (4.36%), maintained 20.65% of maritime traffic, especially towards the Ionian Islands and other Mediterranean ports. The comparative analysis of their characteristics and peculiarities has indicated that intense daily trade was taking place between the ports of the Eastern and Western coasts of the Adriatic in the eighteenth century, and that this traffic was characterized by a strong dynamism of the small and middle entrepreneurial class which established themselves both in maritime trade and in shipbuilding, and thus left an enormous impact on both Adriatic coasts.

Key words: sailers, terminology, Adriatic, 18th c., navigation, trade, trabaccolo, nava/vessel, tartane, pielego, polacre, marciliana, felucca, barca, frigatoon, ketch, brazzera

The concepts of resource frontier and commodity frontier are often treated interchangeably. This article suggests the benefits of clarifying these concepts because frontiers remain important analytics for understanding drastic land‐use changes and other socio‐environmental transformations. Based on long‐term field research in different parts of South and Central America, we use frontier concepts as heuristic devices to analyze heterogeneous frontier situations and make broader generalizations. Our synchronic and diachronic analyses of frontier dynamics elucidate different frontier modalities and shifting frontier expansions. The concept of commoditizing resource frontier is introduced to explain recent frontier‐makings in the Brazilian Amazonia and Cerrado and in the Nicaraguan Río San Juan. Although earlier frontier research took a short‐sighted time perspective and created conceptualizations based on a single modality of a particular period, our longitudinal analysis shows that drastic changes and complex overlappings are the hallmarks of frontier dynamics.

The Singapore and Melaka Straits are a place where regional and long-distance maritime trading networks converge, linking Europe, the Mediterranean, eastern Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent with key centres of trade in Thailand, Indochina, insular Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Japan. The first half of the seventeenth century brought heightened political, commercial and diplomatic activity to this region. It has long been clear to both the Portuguese and the Dutch that whoever controlled the waters off modern Singapore gained a firm grip on regional as well as long-distance intra-Asian trade. By the early 1600s Portuguese power and prestige were waning and the arrival of the Dutch East India Company constituted a major threat. Moreover, the rapid expansion and growing power of the Acehnese Empire, and rivalry between Johor and Aceh, was creating a new context for European trade in Asia.

Drawing on maps, rare printed works, and unpublished manuscripts written in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Latin, Peter Borschberg provides new information on the diplomatic activities of Asian powers, and shows how the Portuguese and Spanish attempted to restore their political fortunes by containing the rapid rise of Dutch Power in the region. Key documents, transcribed and translated into English for the first time, make up a series of appendices.

The product of more than two decades of research in European libraries, archives, The Singapore and Melaka Straits will be of great interest to readers in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, where little is known about this pivotal pre-colonial period. It is also an invaluable resource for historians and other students of early modern Europe and of the European presence in Asia.
"""

Bitter kola is very popular and common in our local market; they could be fresh or dried. Both types, as very knowledgeable experts say, possess healing power for various sicknesses such as cough. At the international level bitter kola is used for brewery purposes and that has been the reason why bitter kola is demanded in small and in large quantities by the international market.

The Flemish gem trader Jacques de Coutre visited Southeast Asia in the early 17th century, and his lengthy account of his experiences provides a glimpse of Singapore, Johor and the Straits of Melaka during an era for which little written material has survived. This special edition, which presents reworked highlights from the full translation, is designed to provide students, teachers and the wider public with a glimpse of this tumultuous region when it was still controlled by local rulers, and Western colonialism was just gaining a foothold. The author describes dangerous intrigues involving fortune hunters and schemers, as well as local rulers and couriers, adventures that on several occasions nearly cost him his life.
The manuscripts come from a bundle of documents preserved at the National Library of Spain in Madrid that includes De Coutre’s autobiography and several memorials to the Crowns of Spain and Portugal. Chapters from the autobiography have been excerpted from book I, which covers the writer’s life in Southeast Asia between 1593 and 1603. A glossary and list of place names provide information about officials, goods and places mentioned in the text that will be unfamiliar to readers of English.

Empire of Tea is a beautifully written and illustrated cultural history of tea. While the title suggests a world focus, the book primarily looks at the introduction of tea into British society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, emphasizing the shifting ways that tea is understood, how it transforms British diets and culture and the cultural practices and politics around its trade, marketing and consumption. This focus on the cultural history of the eighteenth century in particular separates this book from the numerous other published histories of tea. As such, it spends less time on the broad structures of the tea trade than some may want, though it gives enough detail on tea production and trade to contextualize its cultural history. While extensively researched and detailed—based on a fine reading of British tea documents—the book is written in a manner that invites both an academic and general audience.

Through ethnographic interviews with soybean traders in a mandi in western Madhya Pradesh, this paper explores the intersection of the online market created by new technology with the physical market of commodities, intermediaries, and life in the mandi [market yard]. Known as ‘dabba’ in local parlance, the online futures market was much maligned by traders who described it as “nothing but satta [speculation].” Ironically, traders who should benefit most by hedging their risks on the futures market had, instead, stopped participating altogether. This paper argues that the criticism expressed by traders needs to be taken seriously because they form the backbone of the agricultural marketing system in India and their lack of participation takes away from the credibility and completeness of information on the online futures market.

Draft chapter for Claiton Marcio da Silva, ed. The Age of Soybeans: An Environmental History of the Soyacene During the Great Acceleration. This chapter is the book's only China content, so we wanted to tell the whole story, from beginning to present day, in a way that could be used in courses on environmental, business, and food history.

The PRIX index value for Q4 2016 is 44.09, based on input from 268 country analysts. This is the lowest PRIX index value ever registered, indicating a significant reduction in the flow of oil onto international markets and promoting an oil price rebound. The drop of 3.57 index points from Q3 to Q4 is the largest quarterly drop ever registered by the index, strengthening the prospects for a fall in global oil exports. It is the third quarter in a row that the index is significantly below a neutral value of 50, indicating a clear trend over time towards a weakening global supply side in oil markets. However, the impact on the oil price also depends on other factors, and in particular how much of the gap is filled by a rebound of US shale oil production. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are among the biggest exporters that have seen major drop s in their index values, pulling the global index downwards. At 93.75, Libya has the highest index value of all of the countries, pointing towards a possible end to its export problems. Iran has bounced back to a high index value of 85.00, meaning that the Iran Country Analysts continue to expect rapidly rising exports from Iran.

Foodborne diseases are responsible for 420,000 deaths each year, one-third of them in Africa. Food safety issues are usually attributed to traditional food systems, but the development of modern food systems in low-income (LI) and lower middle-income (LMI) countries brings with it new risks. The setting of private standards can counterbalance the poor capacity of States to enforce safety regulations, but can also contribute to a dual system that concentrates the flow of unsafe products on the most vulnerable section of the population. Unsafe food not only poses significant public health risks but also contributes to large food losses and insecurity, and creates barriers to trade. Dealing with it requires a multi-sectoral approach.

This article highlights the importance of sugar trade journals from the second half of the 19th century to the first of the 20th century. specifically the French-Le Journal des Fabricants de Sucre, the British - The Sugar Cane y the U.S.- Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer. Their coverage of Caribbean sugar production, processing and marketing (namely, the commodity chain) makes then an indispensable source for Caribbean sugar histories not usually consulted by historians. The paper centers on The Louisiana Planter as a case study by explaining its establishment and international expansion, clientele and its coverage of the Caribbean, particularly, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico but also with references to the British, Danish, Dutch and French Caribbean.

This article highlights the importance of sugar trade journals from the second half of  the 19th century to the first of the 20th century. specifically the French-Le Journal des Fabricants de Sucre, the British - The Sugar Cane y the U.S.- Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer. Their coverage of Caribbean sugar production, processing and marketing (namely, the commodity chain) makes then an indispensable source for Caribbean sugar histories not usually consulted by historians. The paper centers on The Louisiana Planter as a case study by explaining its establishment and international expansion, clientele and its coverage of the Caribbean, particularly, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico but also with references to the British, Danish, Dutch and French Caribbean.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the role of the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange in stimulating agricultural commodity exports with the case of export coffee. A structured questionnaire was prepared to collect data. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation & regression. The findings of descriptive statistics of the independent variables showed that the facilitation of the physical trade dimension scored the highest rating with a mean value of 3.83 while the storage and grading dimension scored the least mean value of 2.86. The correlation analysis results indicated that the facilitation of physical trade had a significant correlation with the export performance and the remaining variables’ result indicated that they were moderately correlated with export performance. Regression analysis was conducted, and the result indicated that storage and grading, market information provision, and market development dimensions of ECX’s roles had a significant positive...

This study examines the economic activities of Izmir's entrepreneurs in a broad specturm of economic sectors: from trade and manufacture to banking and infrastrucutre building  so as to better understand and account for the evolution and development of the city's and region's economy.
It also analyzes the activities, business strategies and interrelationships of Ottoman and Western entrepereneurs both amongst each other and with each other in a long and formative period for the region's economy that goes from the 19th to the early 20th centuries.

This paper examines the impacts of regional trade agreements (RTAs) on commodity trade, with a particular focus on trade creation and diversion effects. Based on the estimation of the gravity equation for commodity trade, dealing with zero-trade flow and endogeneity problems, we analyze the impacts of various types of RTAs involving 67 countries for 20 commodities during 1980-2006. We identify that partial scope (PS) RTAs and RTAs among developing countries tend to cause trade diversion. Taking tariff rates into consideration explicitly, our results suggest that trade diversion is likely to be caused by the remaining tariffs on imports from non-members, while trade creation would be caused by various factors besides the reduction in tariff rates. As for specific RTAs, the EU is shown to have a trade creation effect in trade of agricultural commodities, while the AFTA and the NAFTA have trade creation effects in all types of machinery trade. These results seem to indicate that region...

The growing body of literature concerning cultural transformations associated with long-distance trade networks between western Anatolia, the Aegean, and Cilicia in the third millennium BC still lacks synthesis regarding social processes and types of exchange involved between trading groups. This paper addresses the issue of long-distance transactions of metals in western Anatolia during the Early Bronze Age. The argument seeks to demonstrate that contact between a predominantly decentralized non-state and an early state society does not necessarily lead to immediate political centralization of the former but rather to a new spectrum of co-existing transactions and socio-political forms. The following contribution derives from empirical evidence of Near Eastern balance weights from the Early Bronze Age 1 (2950–2750 calBC) settlement of Çukuriçi Höyük, a coastal site in western Anatolia. This article is based on previously published archaeological material and addresses wider social implications that weighing and metrology may trigger in a nonscriptural society. The paper draws extensively on ethnographic records of metal trading societies and economic anthropology, in which assiduous attention is given to exchanges conducted outside of the ‘cultural sphere’.

This chapter shows that the analysis of commodity chains can be fruitfully employed to respond to recent calls in the field of global/world history for a periodisation of globalisation.  The commodity-chain approach is ideally suited for advancing global historians’ understanding of the way that particular places are positioned within a changing capitalist world system. This is important because it is this capitalist world system that ultimately defines globalisation in a particular place and therefore also the periodisation of globalisation.

The place to be studied in this chapter is Mauritius, a small island in the Western Indian Ocean that has a very particular history of colonial and postcolonial integration into the capitalist world system and its sugar commodity chain. I discuss Mauritian history within the framework of bilateral and multilateral trading agreements that had significant impact on the sugar industry and kept the island economically dependent on this single crop.

After briefly sketching the early centuries of colonisation I analyse the inclusion of Mauritius in the British Empire’s 1825 West Indian Sugar Protocol. From there on, I divide the paper chronologically into four broad periods: first, the long nineteenth century of intra-empire trading agreements and economic diplomacy; second, between 1919 and 1937, when the sugar sector in Mauritius transformed into a system of income redistribution; third, the period through the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement of 1951 up to the Lomé Convention of 1975; and finally, the contemporary developments, shaped by the extension of the GATT into the World Trade Organisation and a revival of free-trade ideology .