While the pandemic has made visiting museums in-person impossible, virtual exhibitions curated by museums across the globe allow online visitors to access materials and information on a wide variety of commodities from the comfort of their homes. While planning to create our own exhibition on commodities, we looked to these virtual exhibitions to find inspiration. We studied commodities ranging in size from as small as stamps to as large as whales. In the United States, we virtually visited exhibits in the famous Smithsonian Institution and small exhibits produced by local historical societies (Colorado History and Kansas Historical Society).

 

Abroad, we traversed the world by looking at luxurious commodities like jade in Costa Rica and diamonds in Amsterdam, as well as more widely used commodities like sugar in the Museum of London Docklands and wool in the National Wool Museum in Geelong, Australia. While learning about commodities on an international span, we returned to commodities important to the United States. In New Bedford, we explored a nineteenth-century whaling voyage through the longest painting in North America, the Grand Panorama. In Washington D.C, the Smithsonian’s exhibits taught us about feathers, stamps, and guano. Exhibits on whaling, the fur trade, the feather trade, and guano, emphasized that the demand for commodities made from animal products drove many of these species to near extinction. In our virtual travels we covered a lot of time (from Roman antiquity to our present) and space (the globe), learning, among other things, that many of these commodity chains are linked to animal, human, and land exploitation. Each object carries their own unique history, a history that, even for the most glamorous commodities, includes a hidden, often violent side. While commodities united the world, their production, transportation, and consumption also contribute to the destruction of our world.