International Workshop, 5 May 2025, Sciences Po Paris
Conveners: Patricia Clavin (University of Oxford), Jakob Vogel (Sciences Po, Centre d'histoire)
From the late 18th century onwards, the exploitation of “natural resources” in agriculture, mining and other fields of economy became the focus of the work of international experts trying to maximize the profit of their activities by the use of modern scientific methods and technologies. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, the colonies, and the non-European world generally, became a crucial field for their work allowing them to shape a global order of industrialist extractivism which became the backbone of the modern industrial society. As historical research has revealed shown, this process was never just a one-sided, undisputed path towards an ever-growing technical exploitation of the natural world. Some, though not all key players, recognized that extractive endeavours necessarily had to be sustainable. The state and increasingly international organizations also came to believe some regulation of the extractive industrial activities was needed. These organizations became the platform to establishment international practices and legal norms relating to extractive industries. They also facilitated and supported the transnational exchange of knowledge and expertise between the industrialized North and the countries of the “Global South”, many of which were their former colonies.
The case studies presented at this workshop will analyse the complex role that experts and international organizations played for the evolution of the extractive industries (including food production) in the changing global order of the 19th and 20th centuries. They will explore, for example, the ways in which colonial agricultural experts of the late 19th century sought to balance their extractivist endeavours with notions of sustainability of natural resources. Recent work has underlined the ambivalence of these early politics of “preservation” and the creation of natural reserves but rarely addresses the concurrence of these debates in industrialist projects of the colonial era. They also explore how international expert bodies, such as the League of Nations and UN bodies such as the Food and Agricultural Organization, navigated between productivist visions of “modern” industrial agriculture and the demand for regulation of the extreme extractivism by some international companies. And they examine how colonial experts in agriculture, mining and other extractive industries, tried to sustain their own roles in the international policies of extractive resources, international development in the context new world order after the independence of former colonies.
The workshop programme will include a Keynote given by Hibist Kassa, Institute for Environmental Futures, University of Leicester in the United Kingdom/MIAS, with commentary by Andrew Thompson, co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Changing Global Orders. More information on the Keynote at Sustainability for Whom? Challenging Power and Privilege in the Global Order | Sciences Po.
The workshop ”Sustainability, Experts, and the Global Order” is supported by The Oxford Martin Programme on Changing Global Orders and Sciences Po. It is a sequel of the workshop “Sustainable Past and Resilient Futures”, organized in May 2022 at the University of Oxford. The full workshop programme is available here.
