ABSTRACT
This chapter contains stories that focus on the trade in some specific animal, vegetable, or occasionally mineral product: cocoa, cotton, tea, rubber, and so on. But just because these products occurred in nature does not mean that their usefulness was obvious, or even stable over time. Often that usefulness emerged only after other advantages had attracted people’s attention to an item; other times an item’s value had as much to do with stereotypes of the people or place associated with the item as with any properties of the item itself. Yet as these products became global commodities, they inevitably came to have a value and a meaning different from their role in a local ecosystem (if we can even speak of the “meaning” of such roles) and from the values and meanings they had had in a local social and cultural system. Our focus here is the ways in which these clashing meanings and values reshape both the natural and social worlds the commodity comes from and the ones it moves into.
