The Great Frontier Game: How the Search for Economic Miracles is Re-Shaping the World
Name of applicant
Ravinder Kaur
Institution
University of Copenhagen
Amount
DKK 790,634
Year
2019
Type of grant
Monograph Fellowships
What?
The project delves into the yet unwritten global history of “economic miracles,” an idea which discloses counterintuitive connections between seemingly separate spheres of human life – of national economy and historical memory, economic growth and cultural imaginaries – as well as entanglements between the global south and north. Grounded in the speculative boom of BRICS nations or emerging markets as the millennial economic miracles in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the project examines how the new taxonomy of economic frontiers – of resources and labor – is produced in a world conceived as commodity. It traces how resources are accessed, captured, and integrated into the circuits of global capital.
Why?
The project addresses a key feature of the early twenty-first-century: the hyper-expansion of markets on the frontiers of global economy. It seeks to re-orient the world history perspective from classical imperial powers to emerging nations, and thereby it reflects the massive contemporary shift in power, economy, and culture. The project is comparative in an innovative way in the sense that it refrains from comparing countries or regions, but hones in on ‘economic miracles’, a phenomenon that has a global resonance in modern history.
How?
The grant enables me valuable research time which I need to systematically generate and analyse the archives.