Primer: Commodities

Commodities are raw materials or basic goods that are produced, transported, traded, and consumed. They are interchangeable, anonymous and are conventionally traded in vast quantities. While scholars have studied commodities like oil or coal or silk for decades, the bulk of this work was oriented around a single stage or link in a wider commodity chain. In this way, studies tended to focus either on the opposing poles of consumption or demand without connecting the two in a systematic way. Framed within a history of capitalism and trade, they often divorced commodities from the cultural institutions and the labor that created them. This treatment frequently obscured how commodities became entangled within both local and global systems.

Sidney Mintz’s landmark study of sugar, Sweetness and Power (1985), marked the birth of a new approach to doing history focused around a single commodity. Mintz’s work expanded beyond a purely economic lens to explore the cultural and social aspects involved in the construction of global commodity chains.

For Mintz, “the first sweetened cup of hot tea to be drunk by an English worker was a significant historical event, because it prefigured the transformation of an entire society, a total remaking of its economic and social basis” (Mintz, 214). His research set out to trace the many different factors that came together to enable the mass consumption of a commodity (Mintz, xv). By examining these networks of exchange across a long period he sought to illuminate an “entirely different conception of the relationship between producers and consumers,” and to explore how whole societies transitioned “from one kind of society to another (Mintz, 214). By doing this, his work showed how seemingly disparate people were “linked through space and time…along a particular chain of connection maintained by their production” (Mintz, xxiv).

Working in the wake of Mintz’s historiographical corrective, a wide range of historians sought to illustrate the often-invisible histories that underpinned the creation, circulation, and use of commodities. They argued for an expansive exploration of the links between people, regions, and cultures through the examination of production, consumption, and the creation of cultural value and taste.

Such studies took many forms. By “lifting the lid” on a pot of tea, Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire, sought to understand how the intersection between tea and empire combined to exert power over the land, labor, tastes, and daily habits of millions of people across the globe. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton highlighted the millions of small-scale relationships across time and space that comprise a global system like the world’s cotton textile industry.

A commodity-focused examination of the past allows scholars to pivot easily between the local and the global. It enables historians to connect together diverse groups – miners, farmers, slavers, and workers – with sites of consumption and to argue for transformative effects on both.
Practitioners of commodity history sought to uncover the human relationships shaped in production processes and how the variation of local conditions across countries and regions influenced the production of commodities differently. At the same time, commodity histories offer a polycentric methodology that transcends the frequently utilized center-periphery model of world history. Studies, such as John Soluri’s Banana Cultures, highlight how myriad people, regions, and cultures along commodity chains influenced changes in tastes, desires, and production.

The popular success of commodity histories has come with their own challenges and critics have accused single volume commodity histories of exaggerating the impact of the commodity under discussion. In a critical review, Bruce Robbins calls attention to what he describes as the “flagrant after-the-colon excesses” of commodity histories’ titles and narratives that attribute transformative properties to single items. In this way, he suggests they mimic the attributes of the “great men” histories of the past, which oversimplified complex events (Robbins 455). In some studies, commodities become powerful forces in and of themselves, driving world history. The criticism does not apply uniformly but Robbins is right to call attention to potential excesses in one of the few historical fields that reliably sells large numbers of copies. Without well-balanced accounts, scholars can fall into the trap of fetishizing commodities thus alienating the labor behind the commodity’s production, transportation, and consumption. Without carefully analyzing commodity chains, historians risk either diminishing the intimate relationships between people and commodities, or losing them altogether.

A commodity history approach provides a valuable analytical lens by illuminating the economic, cultural, and political transformations that emerge from production, exchange, and consumption. Across all societies, commodities provide scholars with a multi-faceted methodological tool to engage across temporal and spatial divides with a remarkable array of topics, including capitalism, gender, and democracy. Studying commodities not only links diverse cultures, people, and regions, but also fosters connections across disciplines and historical subfields. In an increasingly integrated world, commodities provide historians with a vehicle to effectively explore social and historical processes across constructed boundaries at both local and global levels.

Further Readings:

1. Clarence-Smith, William G, eds. The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 1500-1989. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
2. Cushman, Gregory T. Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
3. Elmore, B. J. Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
4. Gaytán, Marie Sarita. Tequila!: Distilling the Spirit of Mexico. Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.
5. Gootenberg, Paul. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
6. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
7. Stein, Sara Abrevaya. Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
8. Topik, Steven, Carlos Marichal & Zephyr L. Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Raymond Hyser is a PhD student in history at the University of Texas at Austin. He focuses on environmental history and the history of science within trans-imperial spaces during the nineteenth century with special interest in world history and digital humanities. His current research traces the agricultural knowledge networks of coffee cultivation between the West Indies and South Asia.

Adam Clulow is Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas-Austin. A historian of early modern Asia, his work is concerned broadly with the transnational circulation of ideas, people, practices and commodities across East and Southeast Asia. Clulow is the author of two books, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan, published in 2014 and Amboina, 1623: Conspiracy and Fear on the Edge of Empire, published in 2019.