What is Atlantic history?

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In “Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World,” Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Benjamin Breen outline the state of the field of Atlantic history. They caution both against a “national Atlantic” (596) framework that isolates British, Dutch, French, Spanish, or Portuguese spheres without considering their mutual entanglement and influence, as well as against a unidirectional model of a “creolization” (601), where hybridity merely describes the Europeanization of African or American peoples. The scholarship of a “hybrid Atlantic world” that Cañizares-Esguerra and Breen promote is instead “characterized by its boundary crossing, dynamism, and ability to incorporate sources, ideas, and methodologies from a wide array of backgrounds” (604). Our readings for this semester were by scholars at the forefront of this push toward understanding the early modern Atlantic as complex and global in its hybridity. 

 

What is a commodity?

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"The singular and the commodity are opposites," writes Igor Kopytoff in "The Cultural Biography of Things" (86). What, then, is a commodity? Kopytoff's positions exchange as the central act that turns any object —by nature singular, unique— into a commodity. It is an act of equating the value of two essentially unlike things. As such, we must look at commoditization as “a process of becoming rather than an all-or-nothing state of being” (70). After this moment of exchange, a commodity becomes singularized through the personal and cultural values attached to it through its use, changing across societies. This movement between singular and commodity structures human relationships on every scale from the personal to the economic to the political. In changing hands, a commodity itself evolves. It impacts the producer, seller, buyer, user and, by extension, shapes the communities in which they live. Yet how do we understand the significance of a commodity? What is its biography? Kopytoff argues that any object, much like a person, has not one biography, but many —an economic biography is not the same as a technical biography is not the same as a social biography. The biography we choose to write determines our understanding of a commodity’s value. This semester, we have looked at various kinds of biography to understand how they shape our historical understanding of a commodity chain.

 

What is a commodity chain?

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Commodity chains have long been core-periphery models that have ignored the complexity of global markets and trade. In From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American commodity chains and the building of the world economy, 1500-2000, authors Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank argue that a commodity chain is “defined as the production of tradeable goods from their inception through their elaboration and transport to their final destination in the hands of consumers —as a basic instrument of analysis that can complement the more traditional country or regional studies” (14). This approach helps us look at commodity chains through every stage from production, to transportation, to its final end. It allows us to use the commodity chain as a conceptual framework for analysis of a commodity. For a commodity like cotton, we tracked cotton from planters, pickers, and carders to mill workers, merchants, and consumers, using cotton as a way to understand the early modern world through the interrelations of producers and consumers within the early stages of global capitalism.