Chocolate as a true commodity

Throughout the discourse on luxury items that changed the face of European commerce, chocolate is often ignored largely in favor of coffee or tobacco as a New World good that revolutionized the eating habits and in turn buying habits of early modern Europeans. In their seminal work, The True History of Chocolate, Sophie and Michael Coe, offer several “histories” that each argue a theory as to why chocolate, as Joseph put it, should be “the commodity itself at the center of the narrative" and how it became that way. Histories must start somewhere and almost every single candy manufacturer’s website, blog about chocolate and general informational pieces about the history of chocolate state that cacao beans were first introduced to Spain by Hernan Cortes in 1528 with his visit to Emperor Charles V. Some even give credit to Columbus for sending back cacao beans in his first shipment to King Ferdinand sometime between 1502 and 1504. According to Sophie Coe, there isn’t any documented evidence for cacao being sent to Spain until 1585 when the manifest on commercial shipment lists cacao on the inventory.[1]  As historian John West argues, the early history of cacao and chocolate culture is obscure, in part because conquistadors and Catholic missionaries in Latin America destroyed records wholesale in their haste to eradicate native religious and social systems.[2] So how does the historian figure out which path is the correct path? The correct answer in my opinion is the one that has proof of documentation.  It's true that Columbus and Cortes were both introduced to chocolate when they arrived, but does the documentation support the theory? As the Coe’s argue “To trace chocolate’s progress through the establishments of Europe’s elite has been no easy task. This was the era of religious wars, when the Continent was engulfed in a fierce struggle between Protestants and Catholics, between the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and when the map of Europe often looked more like a series of battlegrounds.”[3]

The Coe’s book becomes even more valid when we decipher it through the lens of Sidney Mintz’s book. Cultural historians have avoided biological or economic determinism and instead suggested taste as socially constructed and we saw this in Mintz’s book. His main idea is that the unquenchable desire for sugar in the modern world is not simply the outcome of the tongue’s biologically based affinity for sweetness, but rather the historical result of a conjuncture of factors. As Mintz traces sugar’s transformation from a medicinal additive to a luxury good among the upper classes, he argues that sugar “embodied the social position of the wealthy and powerful.” He points to “sugar’s usefulness as a mark of rank—to validate one’s social position, to elevate others or to define them as inferior.” “Sugars began as luxuries, and such embodied the social position of the wealthy and powerful.” Sugar use traveled down to other classes in large part because their members accepted the meanings of their social superiors: “those who controlled the society held a commanding position not only in regard to the availability of sugar, but also in regard to at least some of the meanings that sugar products acquired . . . the simultaneous control of both the foods themselves and the meanings they are made to connote can be a means of a pacific domination.” For historians like Mintz class hegemony is based on a trickle-down interpretation of the diffusion of taste.[4] The Coe's also suggest this as part of understanding how chocolate traveled from the New World to the Old and became an item that both royalty and the masses enjoyed. Being the product of two anthropologists, this book places a lot of emphasis on the cultural, ritual, and social significance of chocolate both among the nobility and the commoners in both the Old and New World. 

James mentions that researching whether chocolate faced the same regulations as sugar would be of interest and I thought I should mention historian Katherine Loveman's article The Introduction of Chocolate into England, Retailers, Researchers and Consumers, 1640-1730 and Marcy Norton's article Conquests of Chocolate and bring to attention how much research they have done on the trade statistics of chocolate. I do not know specifically how it compares to sugar, but you can see how the changes in trade regulation allowed the masses to be introduced to chocolate. Who decided that and why? This ties back to Mintz’s book where he alludes to some sort of agent in charge of the change, but stops short of spelling it out.

-Nadine (aka Tea Gal)

---

[1] Coe, Sophie and Michael. The True History of Chocolate. Loc. 1848 of 4885 (Kindle Edition)

[2] West, John A. "A Brief History and Botany of Cacao." Print. Rpt. in Chilies to Chocolate: Food the

Americas Gave the World. Ed. Nelson Foster and Linda S. Cordell. Pp. 105

[3] Coe. Loc. 1945 of 4885 (Kindle Edition)

[4] Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power. Pp. 139-167