ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 looks at the interplay between promoting and restricting access to consumption, as well as at the attempts to promote new branches of trade made during the century. The debate about luxury and the economic possibilities offered by new goods inspired a series of reforms in the broader realm of public sociability. Bourbon reformism and the proliferation of medical and social texts regulating consumption had the aim and the effect of not only normativizing consumption but also fueling and promoting it. In this process, the role of the dominant classes, among whom a taste for colonial products like chocolate was widespread, became that of sponsoring these products and showing how they were to be consumed, obviously in their maximum splendor. New cultures of consumption were created on the basis of new practices that reflected a process of appropriation on the part of consumers, conditioned by geography, gender, social status and religious conviction.
