Book Review of Las islas del lujo: Productos exoticos, nuevos consumos y cultura economica europea, 1650–1800. By marcello carmagnani

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gender and sexuality in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. Ochoa’s intellectual and political commitment is to queer theory, the starting point of which is the criticism of heteronormativity, although she engages also with mass media and colonial studies. As I have already pointed out, Ochoa analyzes the complex process of ‘‘the production of Miss Venezuela as a primary site for the discursive construction of national femininity’’ (p. 7). Therefore, we can conclude that Miss Venezuela is as important at a global scale as is oil production in national identity formation. From the author’s perspective, the transformation of bodies reveals both a certain kind of national femininity and the history of Venezuela itself. She writes about the present and the past in problematic terms because it is complex to debate about Venezuelan democracy, about which there has been an extensive political debate. It is important also to analyze the role played by Hugo Cha´vez in national and regional politics. As a matter of fact, the book has an open ending because Venezuela, as a democracy and a melodrama, can be explained in multiple ways.

mirta zaida lobato, University of Buenos Aires / University of Cologne doi 10.1215/00182168-2874863

International and Comparative Las islas del lujo: Productos exo´ticos, nuevos consumos y cultura econo´mica europea, 1650–1800. By marcello carmagnani. Translated by vito ciao and esther llorente isidro. Ambos Mundos. Mexico City: El Colegio de Me´xico; Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2012. Maps. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 307 pp. Paper, e30.00. The importation of Asian and American luxury goods had a profound impact on European society from the seventeenth century onward. Indian cottons and tea, Asian and American coffee, sugar and American tobacco all were introduced as elite luxury goods and slowly became mass consumption items. For this to occur, the major European overseas traders had to change basic mercantile and even medieval ideas about luxury consumption and had to modernize their commercial relations. This was especially the case for the three leading import nations, England, Holland, and France, all of whom had to learn the importance of reexporting their goods to other European nations and had to develop sophisticated credit mechanisms to deal with long-distance trade. It also meant that governments had to reorganize their tax systems to allow Asian and American goods to be reexported. This trade became more intense over time, and by the end of the eighteenth century it accounted for a significant share of international trade for these key states. This is the important story that the distinguished historian Marcello Carmagnani has to tell. In this broad-ranging survey, he covers everything from changing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought about the political economy related to consumption and growth, to the dynamics of the individual trades. This is world history at its

Published by Duke University Press

Hispanic American Historical Review

Book Reviews / International and Comparative

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best, weaving together intellectual, cultural, and economic history in a fast-paced review of these developments. It was these so-called luxury trades that he argues had the most impact on changing social and even class dynamics in the Old World. All these goods first were consumed by the elite, and only as these European economies evolved into more complex and coherent markets did these goods begin to reach the middle and lower classes and move from luxury items to general consumer goods. Carmagnani first provides a detailed review, in three dense chapters, of seventeenthand eighteenth-century economic thought and the rise of the so-called ‘‘commercial or political economy school’’ of modern economic theorists and philosophers who stressed that all consumption promoted growth and that there was no real distinction between goods consumed or produced as being better or worse for economic growth. In this they rejected the ideas of the Physiocrats and other early modern theorists who placed primacy on agricultural production or held that imported luxury goods should be restricted by the state through sumptuary laws because their production and consumption were detrimental to growth. This was one part of a complex debate about liberty, property, and prosperity that formed an important element of Enlightenment thought. This revolution in economic thought was also a response, he suggests, to the increasing consumption of Asian and American products, from Indian cotton textiles to coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate, and tobacco, and the need to fit this new commerce into a coherent economic model of positive development. While Asian and American products were known in Europe from the sixteenth century, it was only in the seventeenth century that Chinese tea, American and Asian coffee and sugar, and American tobacco and chocolate began to appear in large quantities on the European market. How to define these so-called ‘‘new drugs’’ produced a new European literature on whether they were harmful or had real health benefits. Carmagnani provides a fascinating review of this seventeenth-century ‘‘scientific’’ literature in all the major European languages. It is clear from the volume of the positive literature that cultural and intellectual ideas about these products quickly followed popular consumption and moved toward accepting these products as basic necessities of life rather than as luxuries. In turn, as the major imperial states of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries realized the profits to be made from their importation and reexportation to other nations, the intellectual opposition disappeared as well. These new products also generated a whole new set of European industries to process and use or replicate these exotic products. Carmagnani also shows how crucial these new non-European products were for Europe’s relations with other regions. Thus Indian finished cottons and American tobacco (primarily Bahian) also became fundamental goods in the European trade with Africa. Although Carmagnani properly concentrates on England, France, and the Netherlands, it would have been useful to have more detail on the role of Iberian empires. It would also have been interesting to compare the relative impacts of these luxury items with the European adoption of basic American food crops (e.g., the potato). But these are minor complaints for an otherwise extraordinary survey that will rank as required reading along with the classic studies of Alfred Crosby. Readers will find much to

Published by Duke University Press

Hispanic American Historical Review

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HAHR / May

contemplate about how the commercial expansion of Europe into Asia and America generated so profound a change in Europe itself, let alone its impact on the nonEuropean world.

herbert s. klein, Columbia University / Stanford University doi 10.1215/00182168-2874872

The Legacy of Christopher Columbus in the Americas: New Nations and a Transatlantic Discourse of Empire. By elise bartosik-ve´lez. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 201 pp. Cloth, $35.00. Christopher Columbus has been a key cultural icon both in the United States and in Latin America. That the Admiral of the Ocean Sea befitted the ideologies that eulogized Spain’s empire is no enigma; that he turned into a fitting symbol for nationalist discourses is indeed baffling. Why and how this came about is what Elise Bartosik-Ve´lez explores in this book. The author begins by tracing how Columbus became connected to the idea of empire. In this regard, Bartosik-Ve´lez claims that since the beginnings of his liaison with the Spanish crown, Columbus portrayed his deeds ‘‘as fundamental to Spain’s drive to universal Christian empire’’ (p. 16). This self-promotion was intertwined with religious and political traditions that linked ancient and medieval conceptions about empire with the spread of Christianity, the Crusades, and the Spanish Reconquista. Chroniclers of the conquest like Bartolome´ de Las Casas and Peter Martyr were essential in establishing these connections. They portrayed Columbus as a sort of Aeneas, the Trojan warrior who allegedly was Rome’s forefather. Thanks to this rendering, Columbus was conceived as a founder of cities and empire and, hence, as a bringer of civilization. Because of this implied resemblance, Columbus was incorporated into the translatio imperii (transfer of empire) doctrine. For centuries to come, Columbus retained the aura of civilizing champion. He was, though, heterogeneously adopted by American colonials. In British North America, Columbus was an emblem of individualism and liberty, as well as an icon of ‘‘entrepreneurship, and scientific progress’’ (p. 67). As such, he was ‘‘represented as a founder of the nation’’ (p. 67). Later on, stripped of monarchical stains, Columbus was incorporated into the cultural and political discourses of the United States. After 1776, his figure was pivotal in the emergence ‘‘of the American idea of empire’’ (quoted on p. 70). In the new republic, Bartosik-Ve´lez argues, the notion of empire was purged of its monarchical undertones; it basically came to denote a vast territory ruled by a political system that safeguarded liberty, prosperity, science, and virtue. In other words, the US republican empire-to-be—expressed by Manifest Destiny—was what the decadent British Empire—not to mention the rotten Spanish one—was not. By this quirky ideological construction, Columbus became part and parcel of the US national discourse. He embodied the reconciliation of ‘‘imperium and libertas’’ (p. 81), which supposedly distinguished the United States as a nation.

Published by Duke University Press