How did different forms of cooperative economic entities come into being around the world? What were the particular articulations of the global cooperative movement and how did they inform cooperative experiments on the ground? The aim of the project Coop Entanglements and Connections: Towards a Global History of the Cooperative Movement, 1890-1970 is indeed to examine the global circulation of ideas and knowledge concerned with the establishment and running of cooperative bodies. This project has just been awarded CHF 408,080 by the SNSF for three years.
Nikolay Kamenov, who is joining the Institute to work on the project after a PhD at ETH Zurich, and Gareth Austin, project leader and Professor of International History at the Graduate Institute, give us some precisions.
What are the roots of the cooperative movement?
The Rochdale pioneers set an early example of consumer cooperative (1844), while later in the nineteenth century Friedrich Raiffeisen created the first rural credit cooperatives. Borrowing from various sources, different cooperative models were also established from the 1890s onwards in many independent countries and colonies, while organisations such as the International Cooperative Alliance (1895) and the Horace Plunkett Foundation (1919) helped the exchange of knowledge between regions. So, the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries saw the establishment and growth of cooperative credit societies and banks, cooperative production in the agrarian sector and consumer cooperatives worldwide. Colonial and postcolonial governments and nongovernmental organisations promoted and supported such entities in many countries, including, for example, Ghana and India. Knowhow was exchanged between countries in a broad cooperative epistemic network, while cooperatives on the ground were also part of commodity chains that spanned the globe.
What is the originality of the scientific and social context of the project?
Despite the pivotal importance of the cooperative movement in processes of social and political transformation worldwide – some 200 million people are employed in cooperatives today and many more are members or use cooperative services daily – its history has been studied overwhelmingly in a European context, and scarcely from a global perspective. A history of circulation – rather than the diffusion and spread – of ideas and knowledge concerning the establishment and running of cooperatives bridging different regions worldwide remains to be written. The project takes a single, global analytical plane, and shows an entangled history of economy and knowledge transfer that spanned networks beyond the conventional metropole-periphery axis. The study takes a further innovative approach in combining the analysis of such circulation with an examination of commodity chains in which various cooperative structures have been involved.
This project has three concrete objectives. Could you describe them for us?
The project aims, first, to expose some diffusionist fallacies, portraying colonies and the “Third World” as simply the receiving side in the international cooperative movement. Second, to examine the social and economic particularities of the cooperative movement in these regions. Third, to show how experiments, failure and success fed back to a global circuit of cooperative knowledge exchange and promotion.
Studying the history of the circulation of ideas is not simple.
Yes, you’re right. We decided to concentrate on a phase that bridges the colonial and postcolonial periods. It focuses on two seemingly distinct cases, one usually associated with cocoa-producing cooperatives and one associated with postindependence five-year plan initiatives, and draws attention to similarities and differences. Thus, not only were both movements initiated by the British colonial administration, but also knowhow and information were exchanged between agricultural experts involved in the development of the locales as early as 1920. The analysis of such partly South-South, partly colonial connections would be a long-awaited and much-needed contribution to the field of global history, with its defining emphasis on entangled connections and comparisons across world regions. Apart from the academic merit in the recovery and analysis of such connections, however, the study will also contribute to a broader understanding of the historic implications of cooperatives worldwide and illuminate what may be seen as the dialectical relationship between cooperatives and the growth of the global market economy.
The proposed research includes two case studies: the cooperative movements in Ghana and India. Why did you choose these two specific cases studies?
Against the background of the expansion and growth of global market economy, these two case studies will help us recover some of the epistemic networks and commodity chains in and through which cooperatives have appeared throughout the world. Apart from being stages on which cooperatives were established, Ghana and India were also major laboratories of cooperative experimentation and thus sites in which knowledge was produced and fed back into broader imperial, postcolonial and global frameworks of exchange. This project will be developed over three years at the Graduate Institute with inputs from three partners: the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Delhi and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich).