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.