This project assembles an interdisciplinary team of researchers for a one-day workshop on the role of commodity trading firms in the global political economy. Commodity traders are among the most powerful firms in contemporary capitalism, attracting widespread criticism in recent years for business practices that promote environmental destruction, political corruption, and financial instability. Yet despite growing recognition of their clout, the commodity traders remain under-researched. The nascent literature on them tends to be highly specialized, focusing on individual firms or groups of firms within a single commodity market. Thus, the main purpose of the workshop is to bring together the main experts on this topic for the first time in order to integrate the insights of this specialized research into a more comprehensive analysis of the activities of commodity traders. On an analytical level, the workshop will reflect on whether the concept of financialization, predominant within existing studies of commodity traders, can provide the theoretical foundation for a comprehensive account of their activities. And on a methodological level, we will explore how we can leverage the team’s diverse range of qualitative and quantitative skills to overcome the challenges of studying these shadowy and secretive firms.

The immediate outcome of the project will be a series of papers that will be submitted for consideration as a special issue in the Review of International Political Economy. In an effort to disseminate our work to a wider audience, we will also collaborate on a blog piece for consideration in The Conversation, to broaden awareness of the commodity traders and summarize the main findings of the workshop. The longer-term aim is to use the workshop as a platform for future collaboration on larger funding bids that will help build upon existing research and integrate new researchers into the study of the commodity trading firms.