Commodity frontiers as drivers of global capitalism

Frontier expansion, the proliferation of extractive economies in geologically and climatically distinct ecosystems, at ever greater distances and across ever broader space, has been a main driver for the expansion of a global capitalist system. This contribution develops the concept of commodity frontiers as part of a specific understanding of capitalism as a historical process of commodification of labor and nature, driven by the intrinsic need to permanently open up new opportunities for accumulation. The unstinting quest for the cheapest answers to environmental and resource problems has fundamentally transformed the global countryside and its rural populations. Commodity frontiers studies provide a comparative-historical lens to study three interrelated research fields: how global capitalism transformed rural societies and agricultural systems worldwide; how successive regimes of appropriation of nature, land, and labor developed; and how commodity frontier expansion has been the subject of profound social and political contests.