Introduction

Chocolate is one of the most visible examples of how a deeply exotic consumer product penetrating our daily lives fascinated Europeans during the Early Modern period. The introduction analyzes how the historiography about consuming patterns in the Early Modern Atlantic world have dealt with the assimilation of exotic goods to put forward the main issues dealt with in the book. It also introduces the main contents and overall reasoning of the book’s chapters, which progress from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century exploring the actors and processes that shaped chocolate’s trajectory while seeking to unpack their interactions.