Over the past 600 years, commodity frontiers – processes and sites of the incorporation of resources into the expanding capitalist world economy – have absorbed ever more land, ever more labour and ever more natural assets. In this paper, we claim that studying the global history of capitalism through the lens of commodity frontiers and using commodity regimes as an analytical framework is crucial to understanding the origins and nature of capitalism, and thus the modern world. We argue that commodity frontiers identify capitalism as a process rooted in a profound restructuring of the countryside and nature. They connect processes of extraction and exchange with degradation, adaptation and resistance in rural peripheries. To account for the enormous variety of actors and places involved in this history is a critical challenge in the social sciences, and one to which global history can contribute crucial insights.

In this paper, we discuss the use of natural language processing and artificial intelligence to analyze nutritional and sustainability aspects of recipes and food. We present the state-of-the-art and some use cases, followed by a discussion of challenges. Our perspective on addressing these is that while they typically have a technical nature, they nevertheless require an interdisciplinary approach combining natural language processing and artificial intelligence with expert domain knowledge to create practical tools and comprehensive analysis for the food domain.

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Java tussen oud en nieuw kolonialismeThe Dutch state cultivation system and its global entrepreneurs. Java between old and new colonialism Since the reign of lieutenant governor-general Stamford Raffles (1811-1816 British trading interests had been firmly established in colonial Indonesia. The establishment of the cultivation system in Java by the Dutch colonial government in 1830 was an attempt to bring the potentially rich colony under economic control of the Dutch. It is also considered to be a departure from the principles of economic liberalism and a phase in which private entrepreneurs were barred from the emerging plantation economy. On the basis of census data and immigration records, and with reference to recent literature on the development of nineteenth century sugar industry, this article argues that British trading houses that were present in Java in the early nineteenth century continued to play an important role in the development of the production of tropical products in Java. They also attracted a modest influx of British technicians to manage the estates. The article proposes to consider the state Cultivation System and private enterprise not as mutually exclusive categories but as complementory factors in making the Java cane sugar industry the second largest in the world after Cuba.Het cultuurstelsel (1830-1870) werd door koning Willem i ingevoerd om de zwaar verliesgevende kolonie Nederlands-Indië winstgevend te maken voor de Nederlandse schatkist. Het koloniale bestuur nam zelf de leiding bij de bedrijfsmatige exploitatie van bevolking en grond. Onder toezicht van de koloniale ambtenaren werd de inheemse bevolking gedwongen tegen een laag en vooraf vastgesteld plantloon producten voor de Europese markt te verbouwen. De producten werden in consignatie gegeven aan de in 1824 opgerichte Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (nhm). Deze zorgde voor vervoer en verkoop tijdschrift voor sociale en economische geschiedenis 2 [2005] nr. 2, pp. 3-28

Existing literature and available demographic data suggest a strong divergence between Java and the Outer Islands with regard to nineteenth-century demographic trends. In this article, I argue that such a divergence is highly plausible, because of the inchoate vaccination efforts against smallpox in the Outer Islands in contrast with those on Java during the nineteenth century. I suggest that further research is needed into other factors that might also have contributed to the perceived divergence. These include relatively low birth rates in the Outer Islands as well as the ubiquity of slavery in this part of the Indonesian archipelago and its exposure to slave-raiding and the slave trade. The article concludes by arguing that, in all likelihood, demographic growth was very limited in most, but not all, of the Outer Islands up to the late nineteenth century.