Table Of ContentTransatlantic Trade and Global
Cultural Transfers Since 1492
Access to new plants and consumer goods such as sugar, tobacco, and chocolate
from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards would massively change
the way people lived, especially in how and what they consumed. While global
markets were consequently formed and provided access to these new commodities
that increasingly became important in the ‘Old World’, especially with regard to
the establishment early modern consumer societies. This book brings together
specialists from a range of historical fields to analyse the establishment of
these commodity chains from the Americas to Europe, as well as their cultural
implications.
Martina Kaller is Professor for Global History in the Department of History at
the University of Vienna.
Frank Jacob is Professor for Global History at Nord University.
Routledge Studies in Modern History
The Communist International, Anti-Imperialism and
Racial Equality in British Dominions
Oleksa Drachewych
Reason, Religion, and the Australian Polity
A Secular State?
Stephen A. Chavura, John Gascoigne and Ian Tregenza
Civic Nationalisms in Global Perspective
Edited by Jasper Trautsch
Radical Antiapartheid Internationalism and Exile
The Life of Elizabeth Mafeking
Holly Y. McGee
Castro and Franco
The Backstage of Cold War Diplomacy
Haruko Hosoda
Model Workers in China, 1949-1965
Constructing A New Citizen
James Farley
Making Sense of Mining History
Themes and Agendas
Edited by Stefan Berger and Peter Alexander
Transatlantic Trade and Global Cultural Transfers Since 1492
More than Commodities
Edited by Martina Kaller and Frank Jacob
For a full list of titles, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/history/series/
MODHIST
Transatlantic Trade and
Global Cultural
Transfers Since 1492
More than Commodities
Edited by Martina Kaller
and Frank Jacob
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Martina Kaller and Frank Jacob;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Martina Kaller and Frank Jacob to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-38515-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42730-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Introduction: commodity trade, globalization,
and the making of the Atlantic World 1
FRANK JACOB AND MARTINA KALLER
SECTION I
Changing food habits 13
1 Chasing chocolate: transfers, transformations,
and continuities in the history of cacao 15
JOHN S. HENDERSON AND KATHRYN M. HUDSON
2 Flavors and colors: the chili pepper in Europe 30
ESTHER KATZ
3 The Jazz Age, Neapolitans, and primitivism: futurist
cuisine at the Exposition coloniale internationale (1931) 54
MARIANA AGUIRRE
SECTION II
New consumer societies 71
4 Tobacco: a transatlantic commodity and its cultural
impact in the early modern world 73
FRANK JACOB
5 Coca leaf transfers to Europe: effects on the consumption
of coca in North-western Argentina 106
RICARDO ABDUCA
vi Contents
SECTION III
Knowledge and representation 127
6 Peyote and ololiuhqui in the medical texts of New Spain and
their circulation in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries 129
ANGÉLICA MORALES-SARABIA
7 The pride of Lippitzbach: multiple spaces of knowledge
and meanings of the Amazon water lily, from the
Amazon Basin to Carinthia (Austria) 150
MARIANNE KLEMUN
8 When the tomato was purely ornamental: considering
New World foods in 17th-century Berlin 172
MOLLY TAYLOR-POLESKEY
9 Unlocking platinum: early European struggles
with a colonial metal 189
NOAH BENNINGA
Index 208
Notes on contributors
Ricardo G. Abduca is a social anthropologist based in Argentina. He received
his PhD from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and currently works in Patago-
nia (Universidad Nacional de Río Negro; IIDyPCA, Bariloche). He conducted
fieldworks in North-Western Argentina, Bolivian Potosí plateau, Buenos Aires’
slums and Pilcomayo Chaco region.
Mariana Aguirre is a Research Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas-UNAM. She received her PhD from Brown University in 2008 and
has received grants from the Fulbright and Mellon Foundations to support
her research. Aguirre’s main research focus is Italian modernism, especially
aspects related to avant-gardism, primitivism, and Fascism.
Noah Benninga is a postdoctoral fellow at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center
for German History, at the Hebrew University. He received his PhD from
Hebrew University in 2016 for his dissertation on the Material Culture of Pris-
oners in Auschwitz and has taught Holocaust history at the Hebrew University
and the Western Galilee College. He currently teaches at the Schechter Insti-
tute for Jewish Studies and the Ono Academic College.
John S. Henderson is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He
received his PhD from Yale University in 1975. Henderson’s teaching and
research focuses on complex societies, especially in Mesoamerica.
Kathryn M. Hudson is a Graduate Student in the Department of Linguistics at
the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
Frank Jacob is Professor of Global History at Nord Universitet, Norway. He
received his PhD in Japanese Studies from Friedrich-Alexander-University
Erlangen, Germany in 2012. Jacob’s main research foci are tobacco history
and modern Japanese history.
Martina Kaller is Professor of Global History and Global Studies at the Univer-
sity of Vienna; and President of the International Congress of Americanists
(ICA). She was Guest Professor at Sorbonne and Sciences Po in Paris, Stan-
ford University, and the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. Kaller’s
research focuses on global food history, among other topics.
viii Notes on contributors
Esther Katz, PhD, is a French anthropologist, senior scientist at the French Insti-
tute of Research for Development (IRD), in the joint research unit PALOC
“Local Heritage and Governance” IRD/MNHN, based at the National Museum
of Natural History (MNHN) in Paris. She is a member of the editorial board of
the journal Anthropology of Food. Her main research topics deal with anthro-
pology of food, ethnobiology/ethnoclimatology and cultural identity. She has
been doing fieldwork in Mexico since 1983 and in Brazil since 2007. She has
also carried out fieldworks in the Congo and Indonesia and, on short periods,
in Central and South America, Laos and Europe. She is presently involved in
projects on food heritage, agrobiodiversity and climate change.
Marianne Klemun is Associate Professor at the University of Vienna. There she
received her PhD in 1992. She is coordinator of the research group “Arbeits-
gruppe Wissenschaftsgeschichte” at the Department. She is Secretary General
of the INHIGEO (International Commission of the History of Geology). Her
main field of interest is history of sciences (practices, botany and geology),
spaces of knowledge in its cultural context.
Angélica Morales-Sarabia is Researcher of the History of Science Programme
at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Science and Humanities at the
UNAM. She also teaches History of Mexico. Her research focuses on Natural
History, Materia Medica and History of Botany.
Molly Taylor-Poleskey is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at
Middle Tennesse State University. She received her PhD from Stanford Uni-
versity in 2016. Her scholarly interests include cultural exchange, material cul-
ture, and the history of everyday life in early modern Europe.
Introduction
Commodity trade, globalization, and
the making of the Atlantic World
Frank Jacob and Martina Kaller
The so-called “Columbian exchange,” as British scholar John R. Fisher correctly
remarks, is not only “the transfer between the European and American continents
of animals, seeds, plants and diseases . . . not common to them before 1492”
but also, of course, “constitute[s] a fascinating, complex and important field of
study.”1 It was the starting point for the active globalization of trade networks
that would eventually lead to the establishment of a capitalist “world system,”
as American historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein calls it.2 The “trans-
formation of the world,”3 which German global historian Jürgen Osterhammel
refers to for the time period of the “long” 19th century,4 would probably not have
been possible without the intensification of Atlantic trade relations in the centuries
before. Yet it was not only the economic value of the new territories and the com-
modities found within their borders that changed the world.
In the decades following Christopher Columbus’ (1451–1506) initial explora-
tions, many new “American products” were “successfully introduced to Euro-
pean agriculture in the colonial period, and, accordingly, significantly affected
both the European diet and even social behaviour,”5 although not all of them,
including plants like tomatoes,6 potatoes,7 maize8 and beans,9 would immediately
be significant commodities within transatlantic trade relations. Nevertheless, as
US historian Roy Bin Wong correctly remarks, “[t]he world of production before
1800 was overwhelmingly agrarian.”10 It is consequently not surprising that the
increasing interest in the Atlantic as a specific geographic and economic space
of study stimulated the production of numerous commodity histories, something
US scholar Bruce Robbins describes as “a suddenly ubiquitous genre of popular
nonfiction.”11 He also highlights that the “titles [of the named popular historical
works] suggest that all these commodities, even the humblest, have the power
to get continents discovered, dynasties toppled, [or even] mountains moved.”12
While popular historical writings about the commodity trade and its impact on
and within the Atlantic World have become commodities themselves, it cannot be
omitted that commodities like sugar, tobacco, chocolate, etc., played an important
role in shaping not only the Atlantic, but the whole world.13 Works like Sidney W.
Mintz’s Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985)14
highlight the interconnectedness of the Atlantic World and show that the new hab-
its of the Old World would tremendously impact on the socio-economic shaping
