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Book
Review |
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Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal
and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine, Latin American Commodity
Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006. Pp. 377. $23.95 (paper).
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What are commodity chains and why should you care about them? |
1 |
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According
to this volume's editors and contributors, commodity chains reveal the complex
connections between producers of export goods, the intermediaries who process
and distribute them, and the consumers who buy them worldwide. These essays
follow Latin American products through commodity chains, demonstrating that
while Latin Americans were not always passive victims of international economic
systems and that consumption in other regions dramatically shaped Latin
American economic, political, and social structures. |
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Forty
years ago a Marxist historian at Moscow State University, P. A. Zaionchkovskii,
sought to align Russian developments more closely to the dialectical class
struggle in Western Europe. He broadened the post-Crimean war malaise in
Russia to a general crisis, the broad-based harbinger of the rise of the
bourgeoisie, similar to France before its revolution. Furthermore, in the
early decades of the cultural exchanges negotiated by Kennedy and Khrushchev,
he regularly accepted promising young American doctoral students and taught
them how to do archival research in Moscow on the legislative history of
Alexander II and his father. Collectively their efforts resulted in a series
of dissertations and then monographs by Terence Emmons, Daniel Field,
Bruce Lincoln, and others which substantially altered historians' perception
of the end of serfdom. |
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World
history educators will find much to value in this volume. The essays follow
twelve Latin American products through global commodity chains: silver,
indigo, cochineal, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cacao, bananas, fertilizer, rubber,
henequen, and cocaine. Arranged in rough chronological order, these analyses
do much to expand what we know about the relationships between Latin America
and a globalizing economy over the past five hundred years. Fans of The
World That Trade Created, an earlier book Topik wrote with Kenneth
Pomeranz, will recognize some of these stories. Here, however, the analysis
goes much deeper. |
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Among
the strengths of this volume are the opportunities it creates for useful
comparisons. Most world history teachers know the story of forced labor
in the silver mines of Potosí, mines that enriched the Spanish elite and
made the silver peso the global monetary standard. As part of a larger discussion
of silver, that story appears here. Howeve
r, essays on indigo, cochineal,
and henequen provide a more complex view of Latin America's coerced labor
systems. Another rich comparison might juxtapose global demand for fertilizers
(guano and nitrate) against the North American market for bananas. Of course,
student interest may be greatest around cocaine's commodity chains. Comparisons
to tobacco, coffee, and sugar can be particularly useful here. (Note, though,
that if students begin by reading the essay on cocaine, they will need a
brief introduction to economic history and the concept of commodity chain
analysis). |
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Though
not intended for introductory world history classrooms, the collection is
surprisingly accessible. Most of the essays minimize the specialized jargon
useful to economists. The visual resources are useful: many articles graphically
illustrate interactions among producers, distributors, and consumers and
chart those relationships over time. Equally valuable are extensive footnotes
and bibliographies as well as frequent references to current academic debates
around, for example, the exploitation of Amazonian rubber workers. For analyzing
and historicizing the Latin American role in an increasingly globalized
economy, there is much to recommend From Silver to Cocaine.
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Sharon
Cohen
Springbrook High School |
