ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

Commodity trade, globalization, and the making of the Atlantic World

section Section I|57 pages

Changing food habits

chapter 1|15 pages

Chasing chocolate

Transfers, transformations, and continuities in the history of cacao

chapter 2|24 pages

Flavors and colors

The chili pepper in Europe

chapter 3|16 pages

The Jazz Age, Neapolitans, and primitivism

Futurist cuisine at the Exposition coloniale internationale (1931)

section Section II|56 pages

New consumer societies

chapter 4|33 pages

Tobacco

A transatlantic commodity and its cultural impact in the early modern world

chapter 5|21 pages

Coca leaf transfers to Europe

Effects on the consumption of coca in North-western Argentina

section Section III|81 pages

Knowledge and representation

chapter 7|22 pages

The pride of Lippitzbach

Multiple spaces of knowledge and meanings of the Amazon water lily, from the Amazon Basin to Carinthia (Austria)

chapter 8|17 pages

When the tomato was purely ornamental

Considering New World foods in 17th-century Berlin 1

chapter 9|19 pages

Unlocking platinum

Early European struggles with a colonial metal