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Las islas del lujo: Productos exoticos, nuevos consumos

y cultura economica europea, 1650-1800

Article  in  Hispanic American Historical Review · January 2015

DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2874872

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 Hispanic American Historical Review

384 HAHR / May

gender and sexuality in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. Ochoa’s intellectual
and political commitment is to queer theory, the starting point of which is the criticism of
heteronormativity, although she engages also with mass media and colonial studies.
As I have already pointed out, Ochoa analyzes the complex process of ‘‘the pro-
duction of Miss Venezuela as a primary site for the discursive construction of national
femininity’’ (p. 7). Therefore, we can conclude that Miss Venezuela is as important at a
global scale as is oil production in national identity formation. From the author’s per-
spective, the transformation of bodies reveals both a certain kind of national femininity
and the history of Venezuela itself. She writes about the present and the past in prob-
lematic terms because it is complex to debate about Venezuelan democracy, about which
there has been an extensive political debate. It is important also to analyze the role played
by Hugo Chávez in national and regional politics. As a matter of fact, the book has an
open ending because Venezuela, as a democracy and a melodrama, can be explained in
multiple ways.

mirta zaida lobato, University of Buenos Aires / University of Cologne

doi 10.1215/00182168-2874863

International and Comparative

Las islas del lujo: Productos exóticos, nuevos consumos y cultura económica europea,
1650–1800. By marcello carmagnani. Translated by vito ciao and esther
llorente isidro. Ambos Mundos. Mexico City: El Colegio de México; Madrid:
Marcial Pons, 2012. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 307
pp. Paper, e30.00.

The importation of Asian and American luxury goods had a profound impact on
European society from the seventeenth century onward. Indian cottons and tea, Asian
and American coffee, sugar and American tobacco all were introduced as elite luxury
goods and slowly became mass consumption items. For this to occur, the major Euro-
pean overseas traders had to change basic mercantile and even medieval ideas about
luxury consumption and had to modernize their commercial relations. This was espe-
cially the case for the three leading import nations, England, Holland, and France, all of
whom had to learn the importance of reexporting their goods to other European nations
and had to develop sophisticated credit mechanisms to deal with long-distance trade. It
also meant that governments had to reorganize their tax systems to allow Asian and
American goods to be reexported. This trade became more intense over time, and by the
end of the eighteenth century it accounted for a significant share of international trade
for these key states.
This is the important story that the distinguished historian Marcello Carmagnani
has to tell. In this broad-ranging survey, he covers everything from changing seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century thought about the political economy related to con-
sumption and growth, to the dynamics of the individual trades. This is world history at its

Published by Duke University Press

 Hispanic American Historical Review

Book Reviews / International and Comparative 385

best, weaving together intellectual, cultural, and economic history in a fast-paced review
of these developments. It was these so-called luxury trades that he argues had the most
impact on changing social and even class dynamics in the Old World. All these goods first
were consumed by the elite, and only as these European economies evolved into more
complex and coherent markets did these goods begin to reach the middle and lower
classes and move from luxury items to general consumer goods.
Carmagnani first provides a detailed review, in three dense chapters, of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century economic thought and the rise of the so-called ‘‘commercial or
political economy school’’ of modern economic theorists and philosophers who stressed
that all consumption promoted growth and that there was no real distinction between
goods consumed or produced as being better or worse for economic growth. In this they
rejected the ideas of the Physiocrats and other early modern theorists who placed pri-
macy on agricultural production or held that imported luxury goods should be restricted
by the state through sumptuary laws because their production and consumption were
detrimental to growth. This was one part of a complex debate about liberty, property, and
prosperity that formed an important element of Enlightenment thought. This revolu-
tion in economic thought was also a response, he suggests, to the increasing consumption
of Asian and American products, from Indian cotton textiles to coffee, tea, sugar,
chocolate, and tobacco, and the need to fit this new commerce into a coherent economic
model of positive development.
While Asian and American products were known in Europe from the sixteenth
century, it was only in the seventeenth century that Chinese tea, American and Asian
coffee and sugar, and American tobacco and chocolate began to appear in large quantities
on the European market. How to define these so-called ‘‘new drugs’’ produced a new
European literature on whether they were harmful or had real health benefits. Car-
magnani provides a fascinating review of this seventeenth-century ‘‘scientific’’ literature
in all the major European languages. It is clear from the volume of the positive literature
that cultural and intellectual ideas about these products quickly followed popular con-
sumption and moved toward accepting these products as basic necessities of life rather
than as luxuries. In turn, as the major imperial states of the late seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries realized the profits to be made from their importation and reexportation
to other nations, the intellectual opposition disappeared as well. These new products also
generated a whole new set of European industries to process and use or replicate these
exotic products. Carmagnani also shows how crucial these new non-European products
were for Europe’s relations with other regions. Thus Indian finished cottons and
American tobacco (primarily Bahian) also became fundamental goods in the European
trade with Africa.
Although Carmagnani properly concentrates on England, France, and the Neth-
erlands, it would have been useful to have more detail on the role of Iberian empires. It
would also have been interesting to compare the relative impacts of these luxury items
with the European adoption of basic American food crops (e.g., the potato). But these are
minor complaints for an otherwise extraordinary survey that will rank as required
reading along with the classic studies of Alfred Crosby. Readers will find much to

Published by Duke University Press

 Hispanic American Historical Review

386 HAHR / May

contemplate about how the commercial expansion of Europe into Asia and America
generated so profound a change in Europe itself, let alone its impact on the non-
European world.

herbert s. klein, Columbia University / Stanford University

doi 10.1215/00182168-2874872

The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic
Discourse of Empire. By elise bartosik-vélez. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2014. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 201 pp. Cloth, $35.00.

Christopher Columbus has been a key cultural icon both in the United States and in
Latin America. That the Admiral of the Ocean Sea befitted the ideologies that eulogized
Spain’s empire is no enigma; that he turned into a fitting symbol for nationalist discourses
is indeed baffling. Why and how this came about is what Elise Bartosik-Vélez explores in
this book.
The author begins by tracing how Columbus became connected to the idea of
empire. In this regard, Bartosik-Vélez claims that since the beginnings of his liaison with
the Spanish crown, Columbus portrayed his deeds ‘‘as fundamental to Spain’s drive to
universal Christian empire’’ (p. 16). This self-promotion was intertwined with religious
and political traditions that linked ancient and medieval conceptions about empire with
the spread of Christianity, the Crusades, and the Spanish Reconquista. Chroniclers of the
conquest like Bartolomé de Las Casas and Peter Martyr were essential in establishing
these connections. They portrayed Columbus as a sort of Aeneas, the Trojan warrior who
allegedly was Rome’s forefather. Thanks to this rendering, Columbus was conceived as a
founder of cities and empire and, hence, as a bringer of civilization. Because of this
implied resemblance, Columbus was incorporated into the translatio imperii (transfer of
empire) doctrine. For centuries to come, Columbus retained the aura of civilizing
champion.
He was, though, heterogeneously adopted by American colonials. In British North
America, Columbus was an emblem of individualism and liberty, as well as an icon of
‘‘entrepreneurship, and scientific progress’’ (p. 67). As such, he was ‘‘represented as a
founder of the nation’’ (p. 67). Later on, stripped of monarchical stains, Columbus was
incorporated into the cultural and political discourses of the United States. After 1776,
his figure was pivotal in the emergence ‘‘of the American idea of empire’’ (quoted on
p. 70). In the new republic, Bartosik-Vélez argues, the notion of empire was purged of its
monarchical undertones; it basically came to denote a vast territory ruled by a political
system that safeguarded liberty, prosperity, science, and virtue. In other words, the US
republican empire-to-be—expressed by Manifest Destiny—was what the decadent
British Empire—not to mention the rotten Spanish one—was not. By this quirky
ideological construction, Columbus became part and parcel of the US national dis-
course. He embodied the reconciliation of ‘‘imperium and libertas’’ (p. 81), which sup-
posedly distinguished the United States as a nation.

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