The items in a modern grocery store seem to have appeared there ready-made, as items without a history. They might have been grown or produced in different places and on different days, but an individual banana, bag of potato chips, or two-litre bottle of soda appears largely the same as any other. And yet the presence of these commodities on grocery store shelves depends on elaborate systems of local and global connection. Commodity history is fundamentally about exposing the often-invisible nature and dynamics of these kinds of connections. Global history is often about much the same thing.

Yet there is a challenge. How does one make sense of the various forces and connections that enable a global system to operate? How does one tell a coherent story about diverse, but related, places and phenomena? Within global history, this has often been addressed by examining unusually well-travelled people, whose lives materially connect places separated by an ocean, a continent, or both. Protagonists are often sailors, missionaries, or globe-trotting bureaucrats. This explains the popularity and dominance in global history of early modern histories – where the key agents are maritime actors and the focus on imperial interactions – and twentieth-century studies of global NGOs, whether the League of Nations, United Nations, or Ford Foundation.

What results is a powerful, but incomplete, view of connection. The narrative device of the highly mobile actor or ubiquitous NGO tends to present these entities as the principal motors of global change. This can make it hard to understand how immobile actors, or those with only a fragmentary view of the broader system, participate in global processes. Further, it becomes difficult to conceptualize the millions of tiny interactions that constitute global systems, whether between wealthy and poor, ruler and ruled, or consumer and producer.

This review article argues that commodity history as a genre has thoroughly explored connections of just this type. Such an emphasis reveals the operation of power between distant places of production and consumption, or inequality between the two. The story of cocaine, discussed below, was as much about Andean peasants as New York bankers or Miami traffickers. And yet the clandestine nature of the drug trade meant that few of these actors ever came into direct contact. How, then, do we characterize or explore relationships within global systems of this type? The answer can be found in commodity history.

However, at the same moment that the rapid rise of global history has given this issue new urgency, the study of commodities has entered decline. As commodity history’s insights about connection, power, and material life have sharpened, the field’s coherence has frayed. This article traces the recent arc of commodity history with a particular emphasis on the field’s treatment of connection. John Soluri’s Banana cultures will highlight how commodity histories have explored the relationship between sites of production and places of consumption. Paul Gootenberg’s Andean cocaine will reveal the contingency of global connections and the process through which goods are deemed legal or illegal. Greg Cushman’s Guano and the opening of the Pacific world will demonstrate the potential of commodity history to explain connection on a global scale. Tim LeCain’s recent book, The matter of history, will be explored as a work both indebted to commodity history but also critical of the field. Finally, the article will briefly consider the challenges that commodity history faces – positing that global history faces similar ones – before suggesting that Anna Tsing’s The mushroom at the end of the world points a way forward.

Though long a topic of popular interest, commodity history as a field is deeply indebted to Sidney Mintz’s 1985 book, Sweetness and power. Mintz argued that the story of sugar was fundamentally about power, imperialism, and exploitation; slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean made life bearable for factory workers in Britain. With a clear illustration of the field’s power, commodity histories appeared of everything from tobacco to caffeine to salt. Works such as Judith Carney’s Black rice radically re-examined straightforward assumptions about goods central to human history – in Carney’s case positing that American rice production, once thought to be a simple tale of an Asian plant in the Americas, depended on African botanical expertise. Mark Kurlansky soon brought commodity history to popular audiences – and new heights of overstatement – with books like Cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world. Despite differences in tone and focus, all of these books share the same core approach: using a particular good as a window into vastly larger social and historical processes.Footnote ¹

John Soluri’s Banana cultures is in many ways a classic commodity history, using the story of the banana to understand the links between consumer taste, labor inequality, and environmental change. More specifically, Soluri explores the connection between Latin American environments and North American consumer tastes that began in the late nineteenth century and stretch into the present. Banana plants are ‘at once biological organisms and cultural artifacts – products of both evolutionary contingencies and human agency’ (p. 5). Consumers remade banana biology, though this was as much a matter of perception as taste; brown bananas might taste good, but they did not sell. Consumers wanted a yellow, unbruised banana.

Soluri shows how global connections reshape local spaces. The worldwide circulation of bananas, coupled with the narrow range of varieties grown, facilitated the emergence and spread of the costly agricultural disease Sigatoka in the 1930s. The disease causes spots to appear on banana plant leaves; these lesions ultimately restrict photosynthesis and ruin fruit yields. When large banana producers in Honduras could not develop a banana that was both disease resistant and tasty, they embraced a radical strategy: growers would clear a plot of virgin jungle and farm it until disease appeared, then move elsewhere. This left behind scattered patches of abandoned plantation land, later worked by struggling small-scale banana producers. Global circulation and consumer taste gave rise to a plant disease that would reshape landscapes, labour regimes, and economies.

Soluri also highlights the tension between the diverse conditions in which bananas are produced and their final state as a monolithic commodity. In response to Sigatoka, Honduran producers eventually embraced capital-intensive fungicide spraying, effectively bankrupting small producers who could not afford the practice. In Jamaica, where banana production was dominated by small farmers who could not afford spraying, growers instead embraced agricultural practices like the use of shade plants to fend off the disease. Despite these divergent systems of production, bananas from each country were indistinguishable in the store before the rise of branding. As a global commodity, bananas were and are simultaneously heterogeneous and homogeneous.

These types of global connections, and the power relationships embedded in them, become even more interesting when we examine an illegal commodity. Paul Gootenberg’s Andean cocaine traces the arc of cocaine from a modernizing good (in the eyes of development-minded Peruvian elites) to drug-war target. Central to his story is the commodity’s dual existence: raw coca is a mild stimulant chewed by Andean peasants, whereas processed cocaine is a potent narcotic, initially a revolutionary anaesthetic and later prized as a party drug. Gootenberg traces the interests, hopes, and struggles animating these divergent histories.

Power plays an important role in shaping connections here. According to Gootenberg, the history of cocaine should be considered alongside that of more traditional commodities, whether cotton, tobacco, or timber. Yet because historical developments placed it into the category of illicit drug, coca/cocaine has been left out of this story. Gootenberg further argues that power was more balanced between sites of production and consumption than one might think. Peruvian scientists, lawmakers, and farmers were as influential as the powerful pharmaceutical companies in Germany and the United States that once bought partially processed coca paste in vast quantities. Doctors and industry once made a legitimate medical market for cocaine as much as American drug warriors made an underground market for the same substance. Even though powerful interests in the United States were behind the movement to brand cocaine as an illegal drug, Andean interests were able to make the now illicit industry thrive. The contingency of these markets, and how the creation of cocaine as an illicit good has had profound political, economic, and social effects in the Andes, is a key insight of Gootenberg’s book and one only possible through the commodity history lens.

A more recent book, Greg Cushman’s Guano and the opening of the Pacific world, reveals the power of commodity history to explain global processes and relationships. Cushman’s work, awarded the American Historical Association’s Jerry Bentley prize for global history, traces how bird excrement on a set of islands off the South American coast became vital to nineteenth-century agriculture. High in nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, guano was a vital fertilizer. According to Cushman, one of the keys to the power of Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century was what he calls ‘neo-ecological imperialism’, the ability of these places to import nutrients and resources from peripheral locations in order to maintain their own ecological systems.

This is fundamentally an insight about connection: the agro-environments of developed economies depend on ongoing exploitation of distant environments. For Cushman, these linkages have been largely invisible, because past approaches could not grasp the scale or nature of these processes. He explains that his book has ‘endeavored to uncover the existence of historical forces acting on a scale invisible to histories developed under more traditional constraints, and to demonstrate the relevance of remote territories, obscure people, and little-known organisms to some of the most important trends of the modern age’ (p. 341). Millions of small connections – individual sacks of fertilizer – aggregate into a massive structural relationship between intensive agriculture in one place and relentless resource extraction far away.

A comparison between Cushman’s book and the books reviewed above – Soluri’s Banana cultures and Gootenberg’s Andean cocaine – reveals how commodity history has changed over the past ten years. Soluri and Gootenberg both push the boundaries of commodity history by complicating straightforward assumptions about markets, environments, and the relationship between production and consumption. But with a focus on a single good, and largely a coherent story, they remain firmly in the commodity history camp. Guano and the Pacific world begins with just such an approach, but abandons it as Cushman addresses even broader questions. At one point a book ostensibly about guano begins to discuss soap and, later, the atom bomb. The approach reveals how a commodity – guano – helped produce a Pacific world that ultimately requires an even broader frame to fully understand. But this expanded focus also makes the central message of the book harder and harder to follow. Pacific environments and global systems of power remain connected in the latter stages of the book, but Cushman’s fascinating point about neo-ecological imperialism gets a bit lost. This tendency in Cushman’s book is symptomatic of commodity history’s development more broadly: as questions have grown bigger and analyses more powerful, commodity history as a field has lost its sharp analytic focus.

Timothy LeCain’s The matter of history examines the historical significance of nonhuman objects, from cattle to copper to silk. The book is an exposition of LeCain’s neo-materialist theory that ‘human thought and culture are intimately embedded in their bodies and the material environment’ and that the material environment has ‘creative powers and [an] independent nature’ (p. 16). He concludes, ‘to the degree that humans are indeed somewhat unique creatures … it is in significant part because a creative material world has made us so’ (p. 16). This take is decidedly post-human. We are far less powerful than we imagine and perhaps less human than we think: from our gut flora to the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, and the smartphones we carry, material objects are constitutive of our selves.

LeCain develops his analysis through wildly different, but structurally similar, historical contexts. He examines the destruction wrought by copper mining on American ranching and finds parallels with the struggles of silkworm farmers in the face of expanding Japanese copper production. He finds a long-term cultural convergence around the use of copper and coal. This not only reshapes our material culture but, in a direct sense, remakes who we are. LeCain argues that ‘when societies … adopt very similar technological environments, these often push them to think and act in similar ways’ (p. 294). If who we are is rooted in our material world, then this convergence comes at a cost: ‘when our mountains, silkworms, and cows die, some essential part of who we are as human beings dies with them’ (p. 305).

This analysis builds to the final portion of the book, a critique of the term ‘anthropocene.’ LeCain likes that the term recognizes the negative impact of humans on the planet, but worries that it implies a kind of mastery over the environment, opening the door for dangerous faith in last-minute technological solutions to our climate crisis. LeCain prefers the term ‘carbocene’, for its emphasis on the actual force driving the world. He wants us to recognize that ‘the earth is not in human hands so much as humans are in the earth’s hands – and that these hands are not necessarily benevolent’ (p. 315). Our only solution is humility about who we are and how we can shape the world around us. The matter of history is a book rich in philosophical and historical insight, the kind of book that one finds less and less as presses and authors search for broader audiences; the first third of the text is an extended exposition of LeCain’s neo-materialist theory and a dense critique of philosophical and historical writing on the nature–culture binary, which is exactly the kind of long essay you would imagine an editor trying to cut.

Despite being influenced by commodity history – LeCain simply takes the idea that objects make our world to its extreme – his book nevertheless amounts to a critique of the field. Commodity histories are anthropocentric. Commodities are, after all, objects that we use to make meaning in our lives. Soluri, Gootenberg, and Cushman all deal with this issue in nuanced ways, but humans remain in the driver’s seat. But if who we are is not merely shaped by the material world, but in fundamental ways constituted by it, perhaps we need to write commodity histories that are both more ‘material’ in terms of the forces shaping them, but also less exclusively about production and more about how commodities are used day to day. Further, in assuming human mastery of the nonhuman world, perhaps we overemphasize points of direct (human) connection, leading us to miss deeper convergences and parallels. LeCain’s emphasis on structural similarities serves as a counterweight to this trend; when copper becomes a meaningful actor, nineteenth-century Japan and the nineteenth-century United States, which had few direct human connections, become part of one broader story. These critiques point to a broader challenge facing commodity history: if our sense of self is embedded in a broader (and more powerful) material world, what can we hold on to analytically as we develop a narrative? How does one tell a story without a centre or even a stable set of actors? Finally, is it even possible to tell a coherent, but not unitary, story? If Cushman’s book illustrates the fraying of commodity history, LeCain’s book questions the field’s fundamental assumptions.

The work of anthropologist Anna Tsing provides some insight into how scholars can address these challenges. Her path-breaking book, The mushroom at the end of the world, explores the story of matsutake, a wild mushroom that only grows in ‘human-disturbed’ temperate forests, such as abandoned ‘peasant woodlands’ in Japan or second-growth forests in northern California. Known for its pungent smell and delicate flavour, matsutake is prized as a luxury item in Japan. In the United States, matsutake pickers reside in remote forest camps, living a marginal existence, but one they celebrate as free and autonomous. From the often-blighted landscapes in which these mushroom grow to the precarious existence of its harvesters, Tsing argues that matsutake’s story is the key to understanding the conditions of modern capitalism.

Through an emphasis on ‘translation’, Tsing’s book uses an approach that allows us to understand what makes the complexity and diversity of global connection possible. Translation is the process by which objects with local meanings and implications are exchanged with other actors with a different set of contexts, values, and interests.Footnote ² In the initial moment of exchange between foragers and matsutake buyers, for instance, the careful investigation, weighing, and study of the mushrooms becomes a vital moment of translation between pickers’ values and beliefs about the matsutake market and the interests of middlemen, who emphasize individual grading and evaluation as a means of securing the best prices. These buyers face a new set of problems when they connect with wholesalers at ports in Vancouver and elsewhere who stress aggregate weight and bulk buying to maximize speed and scale. Practices such as visual evaluation or weighing provide mechanisms by which actors’ differing values become comparable.

Translation makes ‘wildly diverse forms of work and nature’ (p. 43) legible to capital. By focusing on moments of translation, one can reveal the persistence of heterogeneity in relationships that people once thought predicated on homogenizing tendencies. We see the mechanisms by which diverse sets of values and interests produce a global market. The practical insight is that we should look for these moments of translation, what makes them function, and the relationship of the various participants to this process, and use them as a crucial window into the relationship between individual lives and a broader global system. Further, the emphasis on processes of translation, rather than specific actors, allows for a more diffuse set of actors and forces, perhaps mitigating the anthropocentrism inherent in many commodity histories.

Tsing’s emphasis on processes of translation and the fragmentary also gives a better understanding of how global systems shape local contexts and lives. She explores the perspective of Oregon mushroom pickers about matsutake production and its distant consumption. In order to explain disappointing prices, American pickers circulate spurious theories about forced harvesting by the Chinese army. These theories and the limited worldview of individual pickers point to the operation of power in the matsutake market. Tsing explains, ‘every buyer and bulker longed to sell directly to Japan – but none had any idea how’ (p. 58).

This approach deepens our understanding of connection in precisely the ways that global historians (as well as historians of commodities) are hoping to understand. Mushroom foragers in northern California and those in northern China or Sweden are somehow connected, but the how and why is often difficult to follow. There is a coherent, but not unitary, story. By focusing on translation, and how relationships link pieces of the commodity chain, Tsing avoids the totalizing tendencies of many works on commodities. Analysing processes of translation, as well as the inability of some actors to transcend them, balances global forces and local meanings.

The works reviewed here reveal that, despite a decline in commodity history in recent years, the field’s approach has much to contribute to historical conversations about connection. By focusing on individual objects, and how they are produced and exchanged along a supply chain, these works show how actors with diverse values and in distant places produce a global system. While LeCain’s neo-materialist theory and the difficulty of writing a coherent, but not unitary, global history reveal ongoing theoretical and methodological challenges for commodity history, Anna Tsing’s emphasis on moments of translation and the fragmentary provides insights on how to address them. At its best, commodity history can amount to a kind of social history of things, which both reveals the power embedded in economic systems and aggregates the millions of small-scale relationships across space that make for global connection.