Plebeian Consumers: Capitalism and Global Commodities in Mid-19th-Century Colombia

Consumer entanglements in nineteenth-century Latin America are crucial to writing the region into the history of capitalism. Until quite recently, historians of nineteenth-century Latin America, and Colombia in particular, had focus on how the region joined the world market as a supplier of foodstuffs and raw materials for Europe. Since Latin America’s global relationships have often been inequitable, scholars concentrated on exploitative processes of the region’s production for foreign markets and trade imbalances and gave priority to export-centred frameworks of analysis. By so doing, scholars have been little critical about how imports and their consumption impacted Latin America and how their consumption transformed global patters of production across the Atlantic. Hence, through a detailed exploration of plebeian men’s and women’s consumption, adoption, and domesticatication of foreign manufactured goods, I wish to dispute the notion that Colombian consumers were passive actors in the global economy and therefore, inconsequential for the history of global capitalism. This so as to offer new insights on how recognizing nineteenth-century consumers as part of a relentlessly interdependent world can contribute to a better understanding of the region’s role in the global history of capitalism from the vantage point of what I come to them Latin American “plebeian consumers.”