University of Heidelberg

This one day workshop was organized as a joint project by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at the University of Heidelberg and the Modern European History Research Centre (MEHRC) at the University of Oxford. The workshop was envisaged as an event to incite debates among young scholars working on different but often overlapping historical phenomena of transnational entanglements in the broad area of biopolitics. Mainly funded by the Cluster and hosted by the MEHRC at the History Faculty in Oxford, the workshop set out to challenge conventional representations of international and transnational cooperation by opening up the debate into hitherto neglected thematical and geographical areas. The historical trajectories of social, economic, political and cultural forms of internationalism since the mid-nineteenth century and the impact of semi-official cooperation and transnational networking have been major research topics in the last two decades. Yet, the topics of agriculture, health, food and the environment, have predominantly been treated in specific disciplinary boundaries (economic history, history of medicine, environmental history, agricultural history) and mostly within national frameworks. Thus, recent historical literature has only just begun to acknowledge that technical and scientific questions posed particular challenges to international networks, in which both European and non-European actors sought international agreements and met at conferences and in commissions to coordinate international information and policies. Notably, the workshop proposed to examine the social, political and economic challenges for European-Asian relations posed by the creation of international standards in these fields remain to be examined and conceptualised.

After a short welcome by the two convenors AMALIA RIBI (Oxford/Heidelberg) and CORNELIA KNAB (Heidelberg), the floor was left to the two keynote speakers, MADELEINE HERREN (Heidelberg) and PATRICIA CLAVIN (Oxford). Herren began her introductory remarks by reflecting on the use of the concept of ‘transculturality’ for the analysis of global transnational networks and on its potential to overcome frequent implicit methodological nationalisms in historical scholarship. Herren further reflected on how to apprehend and to rephrase transgressions of borders as narratives of transcultural entanglements in research. As a point in case she examined the evolution of agrarian internationalism through a range of international institutions and organisations and their multiple interaction with noninstitutional and civil society initiatives. In doing so, Herren underlined the permanent ambiguity of international and transnational initiatives, arguing that greater attention should be paid to the  “dark sides” of their ideological entanglements.

In her comment, Clavin pointed out the novelty of methodological challenges connected with the thematical area of the workshop by focusing on several key questions: The handling of shifts between seemingly fixed categories and labels in prosopographical research; the question of chronologies and generational characteristics; and the role of institutional and individual connections and changes in dissemination and communication strategies. Clavin also raised questions about the intellectual touchstones and key concepts of transnational movements, as well as their religious and moral dimension, and the general processes of transition affecting the development of transnationalist networks – especially with the breakdown of international organisation in the 1930s and 1940s.

Chaired by CORINNE PERNET (Zürich), the first panel was devoted to transnational networks in the field of agriculture. INES PRODOEHL (German Historical Institute, Washington) began by exploring transcultural and political transfer processes in the case of US soybean cultivation and trade. She examined the increasing industrial demands in soybeans in the first half of the twentieth century and highlighted the diverse cultural perceptions and usages of this agricultural product originally linked with East Asia. Prodöhl focused on the various actors involved in soybean cultivation, research and business – governmental institutions, international organisations, international technical experts and commercial agents. She illustrated how they balanced their different interests to react to a mixture of local and global changes influencing the soybean trade, such as the frequent political changes in “Manchuria”, the main soy exporting region. GEORG VON GRAEVENITZ (EUI, Florence) assessed the effects of transnational co-operation in the world sugar market during the Great Depression taking the Javanese industry as a point in case. He discussed how the Chadbourne agreement played a major role in shrinking the importance of Javanese sugar by forcing Java to cut back sugar export and production. Economic internationalism, Graevenitz argued, was more about power and coertion than about cooperation and it should be seen as a strategy of the Western/European sugar industries to anchor and complement their policy of protectionism. Finally, AMALIA RIBI (Oxford/Heidelberg) explored the shifting and contested meanings of agricultural labour regulation in the International Labour Organisation during the interwar years. Her paper focused on the ILO’s Permanent Agricultural Committee which became a focal point of non-European technical expertise in the late 1930s, embracing a transnational vision of agricultural labour and labour relations. Contributions by non-European experts uncovered a new set of social concerns such as the thorny question of unwaged agricultural labour and the necessity of defining a living standard for agricultural workers, thus relating the problem of labour to issues of food production, nutrition and health.

The workshop’s second panel was chaired by SUNIL AMRITH (Birkbeck, London) and moved the focus from agriculture and food to the topic of health. CORNELIA KNAB (Heidelberg) presented a paper on how the spreading of animal diseases and epizootics beyond the seemingly fixed borders of nation states led to the creation of new field of international action between the mid-nineteenth century and the interwar years. Knab analysed how these efforts in international cooperation were organised, negotiated, and finally institutionalised in the League of Nations system. Through a range of case studies, Knab traced different perceptions and assessments of disease risks by experts and institutions. She argued that the ways in which these risks were communicated beyond this sphere of expertise were decisive for effective reactions against diseases and the formation of anti-disease activities within the broader public and the civil society. Another aspect of transnational networks on health was presented by STEFFEN RIMNER (Harvard) who traced the global amalgamation of the movements opposing the spread of opium monopolies from the 1880s to the First International Opium Conference in 1909. He argued that the movement’s health rhetoric was countered by socio-economic and environmental constraints that most policy-makers invoked in their defense, thus delaying exhaustive opium prohibition until the end of the Second World War.

The third panel, chaired by DAVID LEWIS (LSE), was dedicated to transnational networks in the environmental field. ANNA-KATHARINA WOEBSE (Bremen) examined the UNESCO’s early environmental efforts by taking its International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature in 1949 as a case in point. She showed how the conference’s interdisciplinary, transnational and often idealistic approach turned it into a hot spot of international debates. UNESCO embraced a much more integrative approach to the protection of nature than her predecessor, the League of Nations, by focussing on education and ecology, thus fostering a growing global awareness of environmental issues. DANIEL LAQUA (UCL) offered a complementary view on transnational environmental cooperation by contextualising the activities of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) in the late 1960s and 1970s. He described the rise of major international meetings and initiatives on environmental questions, which were organised and partly institutionalised by UN and UNESCO programmes. Laqua focused on the multiple entanglements and interactions between semi-and non-governmental actors as decisive factors in forming the agenda of scientific and environmental internationalism.

The conference was remarkable for the degree of coherence and congruence between the different thematic areas, the consistent high quality of presentations and for the range and depth of new archival research articulated by participants. The workshop’s stimulating agenda of combining several thematic areas and of illuminating their connections highlighted the importance of international collaboration and methodological innovation within and beyond the historical discipline. These are essential when investigating the new, imperative questions raised by the workshop concerning the interdisciplinarity of the field and the handling of different cultures.

The concluding discussion took on the challenge of determining an umbrella term to account for the interconnections between agriculture, food, health and the environment. Inspired by the workshop’s interdisciplinary and global orientation, the participants reflected on a number of existing concepts from a historical perspective thereby sounding the limits of terms such as ‘agricultural internationalism’, ‘global welfare’, ‘livelihoods’, ‘habitat’. The concept of ‘biopolitical economies’ with both its current and historical relevance was discussed as a particularly interesting approach for future research. The participants agreed that the discussion should be pursued through an online network and at an upcoming conference planned for spring 2010. 

(Amalia Ribi, Cornelia Knab) 

for more pictures see here