Today Latin America is experiencing a commodity export boom, a ‘super-cycle’ in the jargon of some observers, that makes many an economic historian of the region feel like they are experiencing a case of déjà-vu. This is particularly true of those historians who study what Steven Topik, one of the editors of this collection, some years ago (along with Allen Wells, a contributor to the volume) referred to as Latin America's ‘second conquest’, i.e. the period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Latin American economies were inserted into the global economy through their exports of primary commodities. Some things have changed: Brazil and Argentina continue to export coffee and meat, but it is soya beans and hydrocarbons that really matter these days. The ‘conquerors’ of this ‘third conquest’ are also different: true, the US and Britain are still around, but there are a number of new kids on the block, including China which imports much of the soya, copper and iron ore produced in the region (soy exports to China from Brazil and Argentina increased tenfold from US$360 million to US$3.6 billion between 1999 and 2004). Up to eleven percent of Chinese FDI is now tied up in the region, with other countries also playing an increasingly important role, in particular Spain, the country responsible, with Portugal, of course, of the ‘first conquest’ and the first commodity export boom – a boom in which China, as the final destination of much of the silver extracted by the Spanish in Mexico and the Andes, also played a key role.

The timeliness of this volume should therefore be evident. Surprisingly, no reference is made in the book to its relevance to current developments in Latin America's political economy. This may be unfortunate from one point of view but perfectly understandable and commendable from another. Media-conscious research councils, cash-strapped academic publishers and governments anxious to justify ‘blue-sky’ academic research to taxpayers may disagree, but serious historians know that conjunctural political or economic concerns are usually poor guides to good research agendas. The editors and contributors to this volume have an unglamorous but important research agenda: to further complicate the ways in which historians of Latin America, for some time now, have approached the study of commodities. They do so by ‘globalising’ the analysis of commodities because they believe, correctly, that the nation-state is an inadequate, or insufficient, unit of analysis for commodities. Indeed, what makes this collection stand out with respect to previous studies of Latin America's commodity-driven insertion into the global economy is the sustained attention it offers to how such an insertion was shaped by developments occurring throughout the ‘commodity chain’ connecting producers in Latin America and consumers elsewhere (and not just, as is sometimes assumed, in the industrial ‘core’ countries). By viewing Latin America's commodity history as part of a broader history of global interconnection, the volume also opens up new vistas on the complex interplay of economic, social, political, cultural and environmental factors in shaping the history of the region.

In short, the editors and contributors have done a fantastic service to Latin American historians by showing convincingly how commodities are ‘good to think’ about Latin America and about Latin America's interaction with the global economy. The chapters can be usefully read like biographies tracing the global ‘social life’ of silver, indigo, cochineal, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cacao, bananas, guano and nitrates, rubber, henequen and cocaine. Although the introduction and conclusion help to establish a series of connecting themes, the chapters are inevitably different in many respects. These differences reflect, beyond the distinct histories of each commodity, each contributor's particular research interests, favoured methodological approach, and theoretical proclivities. As a consequence, some chapters give more weight to the production end of the commodity chain, while others focus more on the consumption side of the story. Similarly, some chapters are more ‘economic’, others more ‘social’, and yet others, more ‘cultural’ or more ‘environmental’ in their general approach, in the sense that they pay attention to these themes and are informed by the respective methodological and theoretical perspectives specific to those historical sub-disciplines. But the character of the chapters is also to some extent dictated by the literature upon which they build. Some, such as those on coffee and sugar, draw on an immense and still expanding body of scholarship that connects various countries in the region. Others, such as those on guano, nitrates and henequen, draw on a significantly smaller scholarly literature, focused on a small group of countries, that has not much been revised of late. Others still, such as the chapters on bananas and cocaine, draw on recent and groundbreaking archival research.

Despite these differences, or perhaps because of them, the volume constitutes a uniquely useful tool with which to explore the interplay of the global history of commodities and a whole range of themes central to the history of Latin America from a comparative perspective. Some of these themes have been around for a while and connect to older debates that were central to dependency approaches or the informal imperialism debate. Others, particularly those that arise from approaches informed by cultural and environmental history, are new and point to further opportunities for research. To the credit of the editors and contributors, the volume does not offer any facile conclusions about the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ of Latin America's commodity history, but it does not shy away either from pointing to the various ways in which commodity production produced conditions of exploitation. Similarly, although several chapters point to the important ‘agency’ of Latin American commodity producers engaged in asymmetric relations of power with foreign economic or political actors, the volume eschews simplistic stories of heroic ‘resistance’ to globalising forces. The editors conclude by reminding readers of a number of other commodities that shaped the history of Latin America's insertion into the global economy: wheat, wool, hides, meat, tin, copper and petroleum. If they decide to publish a revised and expanded volume incorporating these commodities, may I suggest that they make a small concession to the present conjuncture and that they opt for a new title: From Silver to Soya.