Following the publication of the first part of the Dossier “Commodity frontiers in Latin America and the Caribbean, 19th-20th centuries: agrarian, economic and environmental histories of local capitalisms”, the journal Historia Agraria de América Latina opens a new call for articles for the second part, to be published in May 2025, and edited by Dr. Andrea Montero (University of Costa Rica) and Dr. Santiago Colmenares (Universidad del Norte, Colombia). The dossier seeks to bring together a set of articles that revolve around the concept of “commodity frontiers” as a tool to critically examine the expansion of capitalism over rural areas and territories of a vast periphery. Due to its early incorporation into the world capitalist system at the beginning of the 16th century, the Greater Caribbean (i.e. the insular Caribbean and the continental territories surrounding the Caribbean Sea) has been one of the richest sites for the analysis of the agrarian transformations that arose from the export of commodities such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, cocoa, banana, among others. Although chronologically later, diverse processes of capitalist expansion also took place in other regions of Latin America, based on export cycles of wool, cereals, timber and meat, among other global commodities. Despite the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical advances of recent decades, the processes of regional incorporation into the capitalist global economy continue to be the subject of important research across diverse disciplines, including history, sociology, geography, anthropology and economics.
Of particular interest are articles that analyze the processes of agrarian transformation that have occurred since the incorporation of subnational regions into the world economy as suppliers of food and raw materials to the global economy, or that make comparisons between subnational regions. Contributions that propose original approaches to the effects of export specialization on the historical formation of markets for goods or productive factors (especially land and labor), the implementation of diverse labor control regimes, and the ways in which capital uses, appropriates and transforms natural resources are especially welcome. We also seek contributions that analyze commodity frontiers in the light of changes in the exploitation of soils, the rural landscape, the living standards of the working classes, the use of violence or market mechanisms for the dispossession and/or accumulation of land, or any other aspect implicit in the formation of commodity frontiers that the authors would like to examine.
Deadline for article submissions: March 1, 2025 at https://www.haal.cl/index.php/haal/about/submissions
All the articles are required to follow HAAL's format and citation system: https://haal.cl/index.php/haal/instruccionesenvio
Manuscripts may be presented in Spanish, English, or Portuguese.
Contact Email: lscolmenares@uninorte.edu.co