Banana Cultures

The comparison between John Soluri’s Banana Cultures and “The Banana in US History” is an interesting one. While Soluri certainly uses a commodity chain styled approach, and even makes explicit reference to the concept in his final chapter, he also makes a criticism about commodity research in general. By focusing excessively on the political and economic elements of a commodity, Soluri accuses, the environmental effects of a commodity are left out of the picture. Considering how often the development of commodities leads to extensive environmental modification, I suspect he may have a significant point. This is likely especially true for agricultural commodities that totally alter the ecosystem (such as extensive banana plantations – or massive nopiaries for cochineal.)

Banana Cultures is a relatively balanced book in its topics, but it pays special attention to the physical processes involved in producing bananas for production, especially in the care for plants and the ongoing struggle against plant diseases. While the technical discussion did get a little dense at times, it was interesting to learn just how many effects the production of export-quality bananas had, not just on the workers but also on the environment around them. There was also a relatively large discussion regarding the methods by which the commodity was advertised to consumers, and how those consumers selected the product, which was interesting and relatively unique thus far among the books we have read. On the other hand, one question that was not really answered is how bananas became popular in the first place, something I know at least part of the class was wondering last week.

Banana Cultures

Banana Cultures by John Soluri is broader and more detailed research of consumption, culture and environment changes of banana.  The author successfully demonstrates the transformation in consumption in relation to environmental changes. John Soluri connected the environmental changes taking place in Honduras and its influences in Banana market. Similar to the chapter titled The Banana in U. S History From Silver to Cocaine, this book shows the importance of banana as fruit as well as the need of American companies to increase supply and demand in the markets.  I found very unique the fact that this book addresses some of obstacles and challenges facing banana productions such as diseases lack of farmland fertility, and negative effects of spraying both on the fruit and the farmers. 

            I am not completely discarding this book; I will leave it for now in my maybe group.  I find the author’s approach to the topics such as consumption, production, and supply and demand were too detailed, and in the process he used more and more information, which made it harder for me to follow the main ideas. However, I liked how the author includes the input of female farmers and their influences in banana agriculture.   Even though he discusses certain topic into details the female farmers was not one of his lengthy one. Overall the book is not too complicated, if you omit certain detailed chapters that can be frustrating.  And finally the book does fit our defections of commodity and commodity history.    

From Silver To Cocaine (mostly silver, sorry)

In the interest of full disclosure, I have not yet had the chance to finish reading my three chapters from this book (I will have them completed in time for class), so I will focus on the chapter about silver, which was at once both satisfying and frustrating.

The global flow of silver is such a vast topic, and the twenty pages devoted to it in this book is not nearly enough to discuss the entire topic. Because of that, the reader gets a taste of the various actors within the supply chain, from the producers to the consumers, but little more than that. We learn that it does not require huge numbers of people to mine, and that the Spanish utilized the mita system, but we don't learn much more than that. The mita system is not fully described and it should be. One of the things we don't learn is more detail on the overall impact of this labor system on the natives.

The discussion of the demand for silver is also frustrating in that while various reasons for the demand are mentioned, there is almost no detailed discussion of the reasons behind those motives. For example the Chinese government insists on the payment of taxes only in silver, but we aren't given a reason why. Finally, the roles of Japan and India are mentioned only briefly.

Ultimately, this book (pending my reading of other chapters) will definitely have a place in my final paper, but I think that each chapter might best serve as companions to longer texts/works about the same commodities. In particular, given the importance and longevity of silver in the global economy, I feel like there should be an additional source about this commodity.

The Economics of a Commodity

The Economics of Commodities

As a preface to this blog entry, I have not yet read each of the essays in From Silver to Cocaine (though I hope to by the time class comes around tomorrow). However, so far from the entries I have read as I jump around the book reading the entries in the no particular order other than interest level, the one thing I find consistent is the economic aspects of the commodities being discussed. When the class first started I began to feel as if I was thinking about the commodities we were looking at from too much of a narrow economic focus and recently have been trying to view each of our weekly subjects from a broader perspective, however the economic angle is clear in many of these separate histories. The economics behind the production and trade of the select commodities drives the histories, and I feel that you could really pursue this angle with any of the commodities we’ve read about. Despite the different aspects that fuels the craving for the product, and the desire level having an impact on the production and trade process, whether it be spiritual, rituals, religious, or class related, you can technically still boil it down to supply and demand. With no demand, there is no point of producing something, and with no supply, eventually the demand will die out or be refocused on another product. We see these theories put to the test in several of the essays in From Silver to Cocaine. Be it through governments making a product illicit, like cocaine, or the product no longer serving the utilitarian purpose it once did, such as cochineal meeting it’s demise at the hands of new technological advances in synthetics, the market availability can control the demand. The power to control the economy, whether it be through direct government companies controlling production and/or trade, laws regarding the legality of a product, tariffs and taxes over products due to their value, or stigmatizing a product in relation to the morality of society, is ultimately how the commodity chains are controlled and the commodities rise and fall in value. It is easy to become pigeonholed in the viewpoint of economic aspects being the end all and be all of commodity histories, and it is important to see the social aspects as a primary cause at times, but I think that the economics behind the commodity will always having a controlling interest in the historical narrative.

Commodity Chains

One of the most interesting elements of From Silver to Cocaine is the variation between different commodities in the power structure involved with them. It is fascinating how the different commodities discussed have wildly different groups making the decisions, from the cacao producers in Brazil to the United Banana Company. Overall, however, I am not sure what the distinguishing feature is separating the essays in this book and their focus on commodity chains from other commodity histories that cover the entire life of the commodity. One thing of note is that the essays focus much more on economics than many of the books we have read, a feature of the commodity chain application that places importance on the intermediate steps between a commodity’s initial production and the purchase of a finished good.

The chapter on cochineal makes for an interesting comparison with last week’s book. Whereas Perfect Red focused on presenting a narrative structure, the chapter in From Silver to Cocaine is more focused on the mechanics of the business. They largely seem to come to the same conclusion, though the essay is much more limited and misses some of the finer details that are presented in Perfect Red. One of the important overall elements in this book was a discussion of largely agricultural product production on an industrial scale – and why some products were produced on a large scale while others were never converted to large-scale plantation production. The most adamant element, however, and one that we’ve somewhat seen from other books either because it covered them or because it lacked such discussion, was a consideration of alternatives. Decisions are never made in a vacuum, and generally they involve alternative choices. Understanding the options that faced decision makers and the information they based their decisions on helps explain things like why Bahia became a major chocolate producer, or why Brazil never developed plantation style and scale rubber production. When commodity histories forget to discuss these alternatives, they turn into narratives of inevitability that make agency vanish and can lead to erroneous conclusions.

From Silver to Cocaine

From Silver to Cocaine

This book was a fresh of breath air after last week’s reading.  From Silver to Cocaine is an excellent book about commodity, the style and the language used is simple to make the reader grasp the main arguments of the writer. Similarly to last week, the raw materials are from the Americas and European markets are in demand for it.  The book discussed the commodity product and its unique importance.  Then moved to production and distribution in reference to supply and demand. Some chapter were well written than others for example the banana chapter, I liked the change in the production and consumption over time.  I founded very interesting how the book connected the WWI and WWII to the supply and demand chain.  From the cultural aspect it was fascinating to see how banana changed from product that was exclusively served in high-end hotels to becoming available almost on everyone’s breakfast table as a nutritional must.  All that happened without the banana loosing its qualities.  In the past books as soon the product becomes available to everyone it lost its power but that was not what happened to the banana.   In addition it was interesting to see through advertisement and making the fruit relevant by adding cereal to increase demand.

            This book is in for me as far as the final project, it even gave me some idea in how to approach it.   Overall the book is excellent, even though I found some confusion in the color chapters. 

Silver to Cocaine

I agree with Timothy on a lot of the reasons why he liked this book as a commodity history the most out of the other books we have read. One of my favorite chapters was the one by Mahony on "The Local and the Global: Internal and External Factors in the Development of Bahia's Cacao Sector." She makes an important point that a historian cannot simply have tunnel vision when it comes to one commodity in order to effectively write its history. Just the way that many historians are unable to look at just one nation and instead have to look at the nation in trasnational and global contexts, so too must a commodity historian look at the related commodities to more fully understand it. Thus the high price of wood in Brazil made colonists "reluctant to clearcut any district containing marketable hardwoods solely for the purpose of planting crops. This attitude tended to inhibit all economic growth based on agriculture."(181) Sugar wasn't grown because it required too much land to be cleared, whereas coffee and cacao, which were grown on trees, were favored. I think we brought up other commodities with some other of the books we read, such as what was the effect of sugar production/consumption in Mintz with the discovery of beet sugar and its growth. Another thought we had last week was what was the role of indigo or even the "commodity of the color blue" on red/cochineal. Looking at commodities in vacuums elides important aspects of its development, and I thought Mahony made an excellent argument in her article for not looking at commodity chains as isolated but rather part of a larger trade system as well as sharing steps with other commodity chains.

I would disagree with Timothy that the book focuses on the demand side that is driving these commodity chains. From my reading, I feel the majority of developments were on the supply side with production techniques, government regulations, and other external factors allowing production to go up. I think the majority of these articles avoid dealing with who is demanding the project other than a "faceless" consumer. Obviously the product is being consumed and bought by people, but we don't really see how demand may have forced producers to adapt to them. It seems to me that producer control of the product determined the subsequent demand rather than the other way around. I guess that also begs the important question - does demand or supply/production determine the historical trajectory of a commodity? Or to get away from the binary, what exactly is the relationship between producer and consumer in terms of "negotiating" the acquisition of this project through the market. For instance, the indigo chapter argues that it was grown in North America because it fit in well with the tobacco cycle as well as utilizing lands tobacco and rice couldn't be grown on. A lot of the arguments different chapters make is that industrialization and steam power enabled mechanization of certain parts of the production process which enabled production to go up, or the growth of railroads and other infrastructure reduced costs and transportation time. I think the most telling evidence of these chains is that the multiple visual pictures of commodity chains include every step along the production and supply part of the chain, but then barely deal with the consumer that is buying them. So on page 134, the end of the process just has two end points: grocers who sell to consumers and coffehouses who sell to consumers. I wonder if a full commodity chain needs to discuss what types of people buy the commodity and for what uses? All the commodity chains go in-depth into the production and supply chain with little discussion of the consumer.

McCreery says, "To a very considerable extent world markets, by defining what is acceptable as a commodity, largely determine how processing must occur. That is, the product has to meet certain standards of size, finish, and quality to become a commodity."(63) While in theory I agree with this, the works in this book argue more that the government and traders were determining the quality of the commodity. Governments made laws to become arbiters of quality on behalf of consumers. Did consumers want this protection? Did merchants? One thing all the commodity histories seem to have a problem doing is discussing the ways in which consumers might be influencing the market.

Commodity Chain

Overall, I view From Silver to Cocaine as excellent filler reading for the other books we have discussed thus far throughout our class. In providing a new way to look at the production and consumption of commodities, the commodity chain approach, the authors highlight some of the aspects of global trade that have been overlooked in our other readings. Therefore, I really enjoyed reading this book, and I appreciated the importance it placed on the agency of characters at every link in the chain. Whether it was the growers of coffee, the competitive shipping practices of tobacco, or the changing consumption patterns and legality of cocaine, the authors of this collection of essays assigned importance to each character or set of characters from beginning to end. Throughout our class, we have been critical of authors who did not assign enough agency to important players or left out sections of discussion, and this book does an excellent job of filling in the gaps of our understanding. While the commodity chain approach is a bit weak on the cultural and social importance placed on products by people, like Timothy stated in his blog post, I believe each of these essays could have been a great added discussion for the authors we have read to this point. If this outlook on global trade and commodity exchange was added to the Coes’ book for example, it may have given us a more complete look at chocolate by discussing not only the cultural impact of products (as they did way too much of), but also the economic importance and diversity of the commodity being examined. This book will definitely stay on my list as an important point of emphasis for the weaknesses in other commodity histories. While it is not complete itself, it does well when paired with other books, and I am interested to see how it fits in with our next book about bananas and other commodities in the near future.    

From Silver to Cocaine

From Silver to Cocaine, edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, is an expansive collection of essays regarding various commodity chains in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century. This synthesis is concerned with a myriad of concepts and themes, including:

• ·        Globalization – Both pre-modern and modern
• ·        Economic forces (supply and demand, labor mobilization, rise of multinational corporations, etc.)
• ·        Production and consumption; international cultivation of certain commodities
• ·        The taste/experience of the commodities themselves
• ·        Industrialization and agro-industry
• ·        Empire and colonialism
• ·        Exploitation and coercion (in regards to labor)
• ·        Latin American independence
• ·        State economic policies
• ·        Political competition and power; mercantile competition and power
• ·        The transient nature of commodities’ accessibility among the social classes
• ·        Environmental factors (in regards to production of certain commodities – Cacao in Brazil comes to mind)

The commodity chain approach taken by the authors in From Silver to Cocaine does an incredible job of paying attention to production and consumption, as well as supply and demand. I would argue that the authors view demand as the principal cause behind changes in patterns of consumption. However, they also attribute power to merchants and middlemen, giving them the ability to initiate or manage change. Through the commodity chain approach, it is clear that all participants in the life of a commodity possess agency, whether they are indigenous workers, merchants, consumers, powerful polities, or multinational corporations. This book, for me, represents the best aspects of what I have come to expect from commodity histories – the social life of the commodity and a social history of its producers, middlemen, and consumers, analyzed alongside political and economic circumstances. Although I believe strongly that a commodity chain approach would be my preferred methodology, I appreciated how some of the authors cautioned against its sole use. Mary Ann Mahony illustrates in her discussion of cacao in Brazil that commodity chains neglect alternative products, disregarding the motives of farmers and planters in selecting a commodity to produce. Bucheli and Read advocate in their chapter on bananas that analysis of politics and culture are necessary supplements to the commodity chain approach. I would agree with that assessment, as I believe in order to get the full picture of a commodity’s history a comprehensive analysis is needed. From Silver to Cocaine is a landmark work that defines for historians a valuable methodology in analyzing the life of commodities. I would absolutely keep this work on my syllabus.