Carleton history professor Danielle Kinsey gave a special lecture entitled “Diamond Mobility and Imperial Authority: from Mine to Market to Pawn Shop” as part of the Institute of African Studies’ Brown Bag Seminar Series taking place this year.
The subject of the lecture comes from her research on imperial Britain and its relations to South African mining and commodity chains.
In her lecture, she talked about the long history of commodity trades.
“By commodity, I mean, of course by historicizing how a commodity was produced, manufactured, marketed, distributed, consumed,” Kinsey said during the lecture.
“A commodity chain is never simply about one chain,” she said. “All commodity chains develop within and alongside other chains.”
She said that chain is not the best term to use, but rather ‘constellation’ because of all the connections between each of the individual commodities.
“By the 1890s the diamond market was heavily controlled, which is a statement that probably would’ve raised a lot of eyebrows,” she said.
“Between 1866 when diamonds were discovered by Europeans in South Africa and 1873 some 50,000 people rushed to Kimberley [South Africa] for diamonds.”
“With all the different sugar, cocoa, coffee, all of the different commodity chain books out there, I didn’t see one on diamonds, so I thought, ‘hey.’ I had to write a PhD dissertation of British Imperial history and I thought ‘India, okay check,’ and then it turns out the British were a huge presence in Brazil I didn’t know about prior to working on the dissertation, but they did,” Kinsey said.
“Professor Kinsey is my supervisor so I thought I’d come check out what her work was,” first-year masters in history student Arpita Bhapeyi said.
“Mostly I’m really interested in empire and consumption and movement of commodities. I thought that would be really interesting,” she said.
“I was really interested especially by the question of racial identities within South Africa and the different communities that were being formed and working and intermingling together and how that kind of reflect imperial policies and politics in South Africa,” Bhapeyi said about the lecture.
