The Cotton Empire in the East. A Commodity History of the Early Cold War Soviet bloc

The project takes cotton as a starting point to approach the history of the Early Cold war Soviet bloc and its transregional connections. In the global history of cotton socialist Eastern Europe had been mostly omitted. This project sets out to find out in how far the global capitalist “Empire of Cotton” (Sven Beckert) impacted the Soviet bloc and vice versa. Therefore, the project will follow cotton in the Soviet bloc through various layers of the commodity chain: from agricultural techniques and agro-biological knowledge transfers through international trade to textile production and the exchanges in the connected machine-building industry.
Such an approach thus leads us to cotton-growing fields in the Soviet Union (Central Asia/South Caucasus) and Bulgaria, to the attempts of socialist planners to move the cotton frontier and expand growing in the Balkans and the Soviet Union’s Southwest, to agro-biological research institutes in Bulgaria and the Soviet peripheries, to textile production centres in Central Europe, to the sites of textile machine production (not least in the East German city of Chemnitz), to UN commissions dealing with the regulation of the after-war cotton and textile trade, and to global cotton trading hubs like Alexandria or Liverpool. It highlights the intra-regional connections in socialist Eastern Europe as well as its integration into global knowledge circulation, economic flows and trade infrastructures.

During his stay as Visiting Fellow at ZZF Potsdam Dr. Jan Zofka reseaches in Dep. V: Globalizations in a Divided World.