ABSTRACT
It might be argued that modern European empires were as much fashioned as forged—that as social fields, they arose as much from the circulation of stylized objects as from brute force or bureaucratic fiat. The banality of imperialism—of the mundanities that made it ineffably real—has seldom been given its due by colonial historians, although most would probably agree that cultural revolutions must root themselves in rather humble ground. Even the most formal of economic structures may be shown to arise from ordinary transactions. Marx understood this well; after all, he vested his mature account of capitalism in the unobtrusive career of the commodity, that “very queer thing” (Marx 1967, 1:71) whose seemingly trivial production, exchange, and consumption built the contours of a whole social world.
