News, thoughts and perspectives

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In both world wars, blockades constituted a key means of warfare, which impacted profoundly on the living conditions of European and non-European populations, on world trade, on major strategic decisions (like unrestricted submarine warfare), on neutrality, on technology and science, on war economies and resource management, and on...

One of the first edited volumes published by what would become the Fate of Nations research group, From Warfare to Welfare: Business-Government Relations in the Aluminium Industry is now available for free pdf from the Fate of Nations website.

In the latest round of FRIPRO-grants, the Norwegian research council has awarded Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia NOK 9,7 million (roughly € 1 million) for his project Missing Girls in Historical Europe. In this project, Fran and his team will examine the extent and impact of excess female mortality in infancy and childhood. This definitely calls for a...

While the importance of copper for the modern industrial world and global economic development is undisputed, a broader overview and synthesis of the historical conditions and circumstances under which copper was extracted, traded and consumed remains up until now absent. Organised by Robrecht Declercq (University of Ghent), Hans Otto Frøland...

The author's workshop for the planned edited volume "A Global History of Copper" is due to commence in Trondheim on August 15, with fifteen papers presented over two days. To see the full program, click the link bellow.

Full program

Chile, with its long history of natural resource dependent economy, from salitre to el cobre, was an eminently suitable place to discuss the divergence between the economies of Latin America and Scandinavia. Despite their many differences, Sweden, Finland and Norway all started the 20th century as economies with similar levels of resource...

Thanks to El Niño, Papua New Guinea was experiencing an intense heatwave and prolonged drought when I arrived in the capital early December 2018. Coming from a longer research stay in Australia, I was visiting Port Moresby in order to gather archive material for my PhD project about the country's mining history.

The new Fate of Nations anthology "The Political Economy of Resource Regulation: An international and comparative history, 1850-2015" was published on UBC Press April 1. To celebrate this little milestone, the group organized a book launch through the "Stay on Campus" lecture series on April 10, with presentations by editors Andreas R.D. Sanders,...

The prestigious Business History Conference took place on 14-16th of March, in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cartagena de Indias. This was not just the first time the conference was held in Latin America, but was also among the best ever attended BHC conferences. The theme of the conference was "Globalization and De-Globalization: Shifts of...