In keeping with the conference’s theme of coping with complexity, uncertainty, and disruption, this panel brings together three papers exploring how firms and state officials managed supply-chain anxieties and raw material security in the so-called peripheries. The papers present microhistories of the tin, aluminum, and manganese industries in the twentieth-century British Empire. Each metal was, and is, critically important to modern industrial life, but the mineral raw materials were located far from the sites of consumption. Together, these microhistories explore a global history of how US, European, and colonial firms and governments sought to manage the complexities and uncertainties of acquiring and marketing colonial mineral resources, for which the terms of production and trade were often contested.
Collectively, the papers consider how state and market actors adapted and responded to the anxieties, tensions, and uncertainties generated by geopolitical and economic disruptions from WWI to the Cold War. In doing so, the panelists explore the centrality of colonial institutions and networks to the global expansion of capitalism. Individually, the papers cover topics such as: colonial legacies in post-war industrial development; how post-colonial institutions accommodated, resisted, and adapted to these legacies; the ambiguous logic of raw materials “security” and “scarcity” from state and firm perspectives; the tensions and collusions between imperial states and business interests; how states and firms balanced strategic and commercial interests amid market volatility; and how imperial powers sought to manage how—and if—foreign interests accessed colonial raw materials.
The panel is global in its aspirations, spotlighting business histories spanning British Malaya, the Caribbean, central India, southern Africa, and elsewhere. The panelists are all late-stage PhD students: Jordan Howell (Harvard University), Yen Nie Yong (Kyoto University), and Rob Konkel (Princeton University).