This volume assembles a collection of essays about some of Latin America’s export staples, from the very first colonial commodities, like silver and tobacco, to more recent ‘industrial’ products like henequen and cocaine. A few are missing, like gold, grains and cattle products, and twentieth-century staples like oil and copper get passed over. But otherwise this book is very comprehensive and illuminating about the patterns of Latin American ties to the world market.

What unites the various case studies (silver, indigo, cochineal, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cacao, bananas, nitrates and guano, rubber, henequen, and cocaine) is the application of a heuristic device called ‘commodity chains’. An explicit alternative to ‘dependency’ approaches, which for all their merits carried too much normative baggage and sought to explain too many variations in development, the commodity chain approach is more of a ‘middle range’ concept which brings into focus the links that connect local production of exportables with local consumption, with a strong emphasis on the intermediating processes of commercialization and marketing. The advantages of the approach are several: it does not reduce the experience of participating in the market place to either supply or demand forces, to production or consumption – but seeks to pull both sides together relationally. Second, it suggests ways in which local factors enjoy or are denied some autonomy to control patterns of developments. Third, it does not drive a wedge between economic and non-economic variables, so that conditions of production can be seen in broader social contexts, and the flux of world consumption can be seen as the effects of general cultural shifts in tastes and technologies. The approach is meant to be ‘flexible’ (p. 14). But in so doing, it also gives up some harder explanatory claims that dependency and neo-classical approaches avow. The result is a book that is impressively sweeping. But some readers may wonder whether the stories provide insight into the conditions for sustained development in Latin America.

Two themes do stand out very clearly. First, Latin American economies grew more complex around their commodities, but without losing some of their underlying characteristics. From the start, with sugar, tobacco and especially silver, we can chart the ways in which exports yielded to local transformations through the various linkages thrown up by exports. But so too were the mediating processes which provided the links to world consumption – Iberian merchant capital, state regulators, and rival trading houses – expanding and thickening the links between consumers and producers. By the late nineteenth century, circuits of exchange had become remarkably complex and ductile, and often unmoored from the original state agents that sired the export sectors (especially at the local level in the creation of factor markets for labour and land). But at the same time, the basic personality of the commercial systems of these commodities remained strikingly continuous. It was really only with the late-nineteenth-century case studies of the industrial commodities (rubber, bananas, henequen, and cocaine) that we see multi-national corporations swallowing the linkages within their operations. What this suggests is that the late nineteenth century represented a major shift in the organization of the chains themselves.

The second theme is that most exports were not the bulwarks of sustained development. This is not necessarily a new insight. But it is striking to recall, especially in light of some naïve claims about globalization. Of the twelve case studies explored in this book, only one commodity, coffee, had the linkages that could be captured by local agents in sufficient degree to spawn regional development on a sustained basis. The examples from dyestuffs and cacao are equivocal on this matter. Otherwise, readers are treated to (1) booms and busts (nitrates, rubber, henequen), (2) commodities whose very nature disposed them more to fiscal bonanzas (silver, tobacco, guano) than capital growth in the region, or (3) enclaves (sugar, bananas, cocaine). The inability to get sustained development was only partly due to external constraints; often local factors were decisive. But the general pattern is fairly clear – even if this book shies away from generalized conclusions.

Historians interested in classical themes from a fresh perspective will find this volume very suggestive. It will re-open discussions about Latin America and the world economy over the longue durée. It also reveals to historians of the world economy the divergent patterns of local and regional growth without condemning them to a static place as ‘underdeveloped’ ‘peripheries’ of decisive and determining action occurring elsewhere.