ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the trade in some specific animal, vegetable, or occasionally mineral product namely: cocoa, cotton, tea, and rubber. Both the natural properties of the crops and the societies in which they were cultivated imposed limits. Consuming societies struggled against these limits—sometimes through commercial or military offensives, sometimes through attempts to transplant the crops, and from the late nineteenth century on, through attempts to synthesize substitutes—but with mixed success. The standardization of crops, in which a few out of hundreds of varieties of wheat or rice are selected, is also part of modern development, since only interchangeable products can be traded sight unseen, and it, too, reduces biodiversity. The Europeans brought a new religion and language; they introduced an exotic crop and foreign laborers; and they imposed the concept of commodity production for a foreign market. The fact that a formerly ignored area like California now had tremendous purchasing power also created a revolution in transportation.
