The Price of Luxury

Like Kent, I, too, was put in mind of the Banana Cultures book often when reading Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America by Jennifer L. Anderson.  This book, like Soluri's, places the environmental impact associated with a commodity at the forefront of the story.  While the environment is the main player in the banana book, however, Anderson's book also elevates the people - those slaves in Jamaica and Honduras who felled the trees, the landowners who (too often carelessly) deforested the land for quick profit, and the craftsmen who worked the raw product into stunningly beautiful furniture.  These figures become the supporting actors alongside Mahogany's starring role.  (I write this sitting at a recently-purchased desk that mimics mahogany veneer with walnut inlay -- a lowbrow imposter.)  

I particularly enjoyed the lesson at the beginning of the book that people in England and Colonial America had to be taught how to understand and appreciate new goods, like mahogany furniture, in order to discern quality and judge good workmanship.  Cultural education like this that accompanies new material goods in any time period serves to separate one class from another.  (Today we tend to do the same thing with the ways we speak about, brandish, and perhaps disdain personal technology devices.) If exquisitely-crafted tables and bureaus can create class distinction, it shouldn't be surprising that Anderson contends they are also linked to nationalism and Empire.  She notes that the way the English and Americans thirsted for mahogany reflected the "growing sense of self-confidence and entitlement" that were the "rightful rewards of Empire."  Like Mintz's sugar, mahogany was an Imperial product.  Unlike sugar, mahogany was also an Imperial casualty. 

The most impressive information in Anderson's book came from her chapters on slavery and mahogany.  The relationships negotiated by landowners, overseers, and slaves or indentured servants is a truly complex and dynamic issue.  In this world of island or Honduran mahogany cutting and collection, slaves took on a multitude of roles.  They were forced into heavy labor some, but not all, of the time, and the close proximity of deep forest and Spanish lands (on which they were free if converted to Christianity) meant that owners had to woo them with positive inducements or threaten harsh discipline to keep them enslaved.  Some slaves petitioned against ownership by certain men and were then re-sold to other, apparently more acceptable, men.  Some slaves were manumitted in large numbers upon an owner's death, while others spent a lifetime in bondage.  Some slaves received specialized training as hunters of mahogany groves and used this skill to play off an owner's interests against that of his neighbors for personal gain.  I learned from this book that there was a status structure within slave communities, which I was not aware of.  For our class vote on a the final book, I was swayed by Marie's support of the book suggested by Nadine on slavery as a commodity.  As Marie noted, slavery is at the heart of many of the stories and commodities we've examined in class.  After reading this section of Mahogany though, I'm seeing that slavery is perhaps too intricate a story for just one text.