The composition and decomposition of commodities: the colonial careers of coal and ivory

Commodities are composed of heterogeneous parts, for they are not pure, despite coal being almost 100% carbon. With the introduction of steam ships in the Indian Ocean trade that was at the nexus of Africa, Middle East, South Asia and China, the economic viability of coal had to be constructed from the different parts of the imperial political machinery of administration, technology and modernist fantasy. Ivory was also a key commodity in the Indian Ocean, contributing considerable wealth to that early global market. Leaving one environment in Africa, it gained value by being culturally reworked and aestheticised, and in the process humans’ feelings for it were enhanced as a part of the value-adding, if not fetishing, process. Later in its colonial career, elephants’ feelings about being slaughtered were also taken into account by their human advocates, and under this new environmental alignment the trade in ivory eventually came to a halt in 1989. This paper argues, in a Latourian fashion, that affects are key agents in a chain of associations that have transformed the careers of ivory and coal as ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett) transformed from its original living sources to its lively appreciation by humans.