Societies are shaped by the materials they use. Extraction, production, circulation and trading of commodities determine the allocation of resources, which has influenced human settlement and the connection of towns and cities. Consequently, infrastructures and institutions were created. Numerous studies in global history have illuminated transnational and transregional interdependencies by focusing on goods and commodities from exploration, exploitation and processing to exchange and consumption. Raw materials like cotton, silver, copper, lead and zinc, fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, and foodstuffs like grain, tea, coffee and sugar open up important new perspectives on changes in working and living conditions as well as on underlying power relations. Beyond that, contemporary environmental history provokes investigations of the shifting relationship between humans and matter, as reflected by the accelerated overexploitation of natural resources over the past few centuries. Studies in this field also refer to changes in the use of materials and the development of substituting technologies as motivated by the scarcity of resources. East Central and Eastern Europe, however, remain rather marginalized in such works of global, economic, and environmental history. The annual conference of the GWZO is taking up this challenge. Through the prism of a history of commodities, it looks at transregional and global entanglements of East Central and Eastern Europe from the early Middle Ages to the 21st century.

We invite contributions to take one commodity or a group of commodities as a starting point to explore production chains, the circulation of goods, the exchange of knowledge, and the societal implications in relation to East Central and Eastern Europe. Of interest are, among other topics, the constitution and delimitation of interaction spaces, cross-border networks, as well as political and state regulations of circulation processes: How did protagonists from East Central and Eastern Europe position themselves in (trans-)regional and global chains of interaction? How did commodities and knowledge about them influence the integration of East Central and Eastern Europe into world trade and the global economy? What repercussions did networking have on social conditions in East Central and Eastern Europe? Papers with a longue durée perspective are just as welcome as those focusing on specific layers of time.

Please send a proposal of 300 to 500 words by March 15, 2022 to timm.schoenfelder@leibniz-gwzo.de. Applicants will be notified about acceptance in early April. Participants will then be asked to submit a short paper of 3.000 words by June 20, 2022. We plan to hold the conference in a hybrid format.