Silver to Cocaine

First and foremost, I must confess my love for collaborative works and compilations. Multiple authors with dynamic views coming together to produce works such as this speak to what I see as the future of our field. This work is one in a Duke University Press series called American Encounters that “aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States” with a primary focus on “the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meaning of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local” (pre-title page). Outright, “American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S international relations and area studies specialists” (pre-title page). In other words, the series and its works aim to advance the field through collaborative effort.

That is not to say I don’t see a place for monographs at all, but I do think that compilations like those now (most) offered by academic presses really bring what at times seems like a divisive field closer together. Judging by this work (Duke University) and many others (published by Cambridge, Princeton, Oxford, so on and so forth) that I have encountered throughout this program, I feel safe in saying that the trend appears rightfully popular. If nothing else, as this work demonstrates, they offer a broad range of information in a neatly concise manner (in a sense avoiding the “I’m going to beat you over the head with this regurgitated fact hammer chapter after chapter” often found in many single author works these days). Further, for courses like this, I think these works really offer a big bang for the buck.

As for From Silver to Cocaine’s content, I think Luke hit the nail on the head; and I find his questions intriguing. As Luke notes, the authors seek to readjust our placement of Latin America in the broader history of globalization; but, moreover, the work offers an argument for a ‘commodities chain’ approach for studying transnational history (2). The authors then, with varying degrees of success, focus not only on the beginning or end point of the chain, but on every link in between in order to better grasp effect and change. The wide breadth of topics presented in this work (no fewer than twelve commodities) demonstrates the adaptability of said methodology, and the fact that the authors were able to make a strong argument for a new understanding of Latin America in history illustrates the value of such an approach.

As per Luke’s question (which I hope I understood it to be similar to a question of my own), I think one way to at least clarify the issue would be to simplify the terms. In other words, ‘market’, at least for me, carries a weight of implications; chief among them complexity (I am simple by nature!). I think market can just be boiled down to the existence of demand. In other words, even if demand is light or nearly non-existent it is still there; and the nefarious or unfree methods of transfer would not necessarily strip commodity of its title. Again, I hope I understood that right!