ABSTRACT
Following a study on the world flows of American products during early globalization, here the authors examine the reverse process. By analyzing the imperial political economy, the introduction, adaptation and rejection of new food products in America, as well as of other European, Asian and African goods, American Globalization, 1492–1850, addresses the history of consumerism and material culture in the New World, while also considering the perspective of the history of ecological globalization.
This book shows how these changes triggered the formation of mixed imagined communities as well as of local and regional markets that gradually became part of a global economy. But it also highlights how these forces produced a multifaceted landscape full of contrasts and recognizes the plurality of the actors involved in cultural transfers, in which trade, persuasion and violence were entwined. The result is a model of the rise of consumerism that is very different from the ones normally used to understand the European cases, as well as a more nuanced vision of the effects of ecological imperialism, which was, moreover, the base for the development of unsustainable capitalism still present today in Latin America.
Chapters 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 11, and 13 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|90 pages
The Political Economy of the Spanish Empire and the Introduction of Eurasian Goods in the New World
chapter 1|19 pages
Trans-Imperial, Transnational and Decentralized
chapter 3|22 pages
European Imperialism, War, Strategic Commodities and Ecological Limits
part II|121 pages
Food and Empire
chapter 6|23 pages
Gifts, Imitation, Violence and Social Change
part III|59 pages
America and the Eurasian Products in a Global Perspective
chapter 10|20 pages
Elites, Women and Chinese Porcelain in New Spain and in Andalusia, Circa 1600
chapter 11|21 pages
“That in the Reducciones Had Been Noise of Weapons …”
chapter 12|16 pages
Transatlantic Markets and the Consumption of Sevillian Art in the Viceroyalty of Peru
part |19 pages
Afterthoughts