Corporate actors have played a hidden yet highly influential role in shaping the global order, often securing their interests in international organizations, such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Extractive industries, which focus on natural resources such as oil, gas, minerals, and metals, including rare earths, were the bedrock of capitalism in the long twentieth century. How did they exert their influence within, through and against international organizations? What tools did they adopt to attain their goals at global metropoles such as Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Geneva, New York, and Santiago? Who challenged their efforts and who supported them and how? What effects did formal decolonization have on the role of extractive enterprise in these global spaces?

Argument

Corporate actors have played a hidden yet highly influential role in shaping the global order, often securing their interests in international organizations, such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Extractive industries, which focus on natural resources such as oil, gas, minerals, and metals, including rare earths, were the bedrock of capitalism in the long twentieth century. How did they exert their influence within, through and against international organizations? What tools did they adopt to attain their goals at global metropoles such as Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Geneva, New York, and Santiago?  Who challenged their efforts and who supported them and how? What effects did formal decolonization have on the role of extractive enterprise in these global spaces?

Businesses, banks, lobbyists, experts, advisors, activists, investors, engineers, geologists, cartographers and even mercenaries comprise the complex ecosystem of finance and mercantile capitalism that make up the world of extractive enterprise. Historically, these actors have at times worked hand in glove with international organizations, shaping policies and guiding investments in development programs, while at other moments, they have resisted or undermined the League or the UN’s efforts to regulate their activities. We regard the different and thus far often obscured ways in which corporate influence was wielded within, through and against the League and UN systems, particularly in the areas of economic development, state-building, and environmental degradation in recently decolonized areas, as an important and underexplored subject of inquiry in new histories of capitalism. 

Submission guidelines

This small workshop invites proposals for short papers (4,000-5,000 words with notes) on extractive industries and international organizations over the long twentieth century for publication in a forum. 

Papers that connect the nineteenth century to the 1970s and 1980s are encouraged.

Papers that investigate the economic ideas that corporate actors introduced, the political agency they exerted and the structures that they established, which shaped the global economic and political order through the League and UN systems, are also particularly welcome.

We are also interested in explorations of the landscape in which these actors were embedded, from boardrooms to mining markets, and of political effects on the development of post-colonial states and the processes of decolonisation.

The workshop will be focused on sharing papers and developing the forum’s ideas.

Participants will peer review each other’s work and will be offered a short time to defend their paper following organized comments from 2 designated reviewers. 

The intention is to produce a publication with a very short turnaround time.

Paper proposals with abstracts are due

by Monday, 6 October 2025. 

Please send proposals to siobhan.smith@eui.eu

We aim to have a quick turnaround of acceptances, and contributors will be given the option to revise accepted abstracts by Monday, 1 December 2025.

Full paper drafts will be due by Friday, 28 February 2026.

Workshop : 26 April 2026

Travel and accommodation funding is pending, with priority given to early career scholars. Applicants are encouraged to seek some contribution to these costs separately.

Organizers

• Glenda Sluga (EUI)
• Alanna O’Malley (Erasmus University)
• Jayita Sarkar (Glasgow University)