Resources and their substitutes: natural surrogates and synthetic competitors in world history
This international conference brings together the histories of various natural resources with a particular focus on the rich histories of their potential substitutes. It works with the hypothesis that any profitable commodity at one point faced possibly cheaper, more easily accessible or producible surrogates, and seeks to explore such competing resource cycles and their social, ecological, economic and political effects.
WEDNESDAY, June 8, 2022
9.00–9:15: Welcome and Introduction
Elaine Papoulias, Executive Director, Center for European Studies (Harvard)
Moritz von Brescius (Harvard)
9:15 – 10:15: First Keynote Lecture
Corey Ross (Birmingham):
The Ecological Life of Things: Environmental History, Commodity Production, and Commodity Substitution
10:15-10:30: BREAK
10:30–12:00: Panel I: Ivory, its Uses and Substitutes
Robert Friedel (Maryland): Rescuing Elephants: Ivory, Scarcity, and Material Choice
John McNeill (Washington): East African Ivory and Yankee Ingenuity, ca. 1820-1930
Commentary: Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia)
12:00–1.30: BREAK
1:30–3:00: Panel II: Medicinal Resources and Substitutes
Anna Winterbottom (McGill): Substitution, Confusion, and the Origins of Aloe vera
Harold J. Cook (Brown), Quid pro quo: Substitutions among Medicines or Bodies?
Commentary: Mary Lindemann (Miami)
3:30–5:15: Panel III: Asian Commodities
Jessica Ratcliff (Cornell): “Improving” Colonial Market Knowledge in Mid-nineteenth-century Britain: The Decline of the East India Company’s Monopoly and the Rise of the Economic Museum Movement
Prakash Kumar (Pennsylvania State University): Global Indigo Texts
Commentary: Ghulam Nadri (Georgia State)
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THURSDAY, June 9, 2022
9:00–10:00: Second Keynote Lecture
Edward Melillo (Amherst): When Silver Bullets Miss their Marks: Reflections on the Promises and Failures of the Synthetic Age
10:15–11:45: Panel IV: The science of polymers: rubber and synthetic fabrics
Moritz von Brescius (Harvard): Entering the Rubber World: Perceptions, Industrial Uses and the long Quest for Substitutes
Erin Freedman (Harvard), Polymer Science and the Birth of Synthetic Fibers
Commentary: Erika Rappaport (Santa Barbara)
11:45–1:00: BREAK
1:00–2:30: Panel V: Oils and Substitutes
Fredrik Jonsson (Chicago): The Great Coal Panic and the Invention of Modern Scarcity
Jonathan E. Robins (Michigan), ‘What Nature Provided’: Palm Oil’s Changing Fortunes 1800-2020
Commentary: Arnab Dey (Binghamton)
2:30–3:00: BREAK
3:00–4:30: Panel VI: Early ‘Plastics’ and Plastics
Suzanne L. Marchand (Louisiana State University): On Porcelain and its Substitutes
Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Paris), From Substitution to Colonization. Synthetic Polymers as Candidate Markers of the Anthropocene
Commentary: Jeffrey L. Meikle (University of Texas at Austin)
4:30–6:00: Concluding Discussion
Input paper by Edward Barbier (Colorado State University): Reflections on Resources and their Substitutes from the Perspective of Scarcity and Frontiers throughout World History
Conference Commentary: Stuart McCook (University of Guelph)
Moritz von Brescius (Harvard)