"Marx's dancing table"

Melville's lap top * a piece of mahogany

In 2004, Jennifer L. Anderson wrote an article that was published in the Early American Studies Journal : Nature’s Currency. Almost ten years later, Anderson wins the Emmy Award for her research in Traces of the Trade . A great addition to any course in Commodities history would be the film. The praise has continued because she won the Nevins award for Mahogany. 

Unlike the rum in the West Indies, mahogany became scarce. Like the rum trade however, diverse histories shape Aderson’s narrative. The basics of limited resources are all too apparent in this book.  As Kirsten acknowledges the evil of modernity is two fold, slavery and environmental consequences. Anderson makes this quite clear by declaring that mahogany is  “dual history, that of wild living organisms and of cultural artifacts” (15).

Anderson accentuates these themes by her description of  “Marx’s dancing table, mahogany was transubstantiated through human effort into objects” (15). The history of this towering timber shifts throughout Anderson’s account came at a high price (17) in human and botanical life. Another lesson in the sacred made profane. 

            The complexity of the history of mahogany is one of destruction (76), objectification (33) and capitalism through trade entrenched in human exchange and consumption. The middle chapters of the book relate and chronicle the political and economic circumstances of this botanical giant.

            Plantations of timber are found alongside other luxury botanical crops such as sugar cane, tobacco and chocolate. Anderson, unlike many of the other books we have read delves into the agribusiness of sustainability. Which is the beginning of the end of her story. As she bridges the knowledge and science into the technology that dominates and destroys nature, (Chapter 7 and 8), I saw nature as the winner and the loser. We cannot control nature, however, we can destroy it, slowly.

As Nadine hints, mahogany like many commodities in the emergence of modernity feature a slave-based commodity web. From exploration to exploitation, Enlightenment became the master of limited resources and political upheavals as the Atlantic Basin continued to be a site of trade that exemplifies ideologies of race and class despite the possible power of democracy (280).

Mahogany is a keeper.

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* Melville (306) penned one of my favorite books, Billy Budd writing at a mahogany desk in western Massachusetts.