Marie Louise Krogh in the* Journal of the History of Ideas Blog*:

The history of those commodities that populate everyday life is very often one of connections between seemingly disparate contexts. For most of us, it is commonplace knowledge that a large part of the goods we consume have traveled great distances and been manufactured, packed, and shipped by people unknown to us in places whose precise location we do not know either. Perhaps we could even say that being a consumer in a global market is to be aware of the existence of these intricate connections across our planet yet ignorant of their precise shape and form. The explicit study of commodity chains—the many steps that cut across geographical locations and national borders while linking sites of extraction or cultivation to sites of manufacture, commerce, and consumption—elucidates these connections and the contours of labor conditions and infrastructural demands, of value production and extraction and of their societal as well as environmental consequences (Bair 2009).

From a historian’s point of view, the additional appeal of centering those commodities that came to be known as “colonial goods,” has been that to “follow the thing,” as Ian Cook has phrased it, in these instances constitutively linking together the histories of imperial peripheries and centers, the lifeworld’s of colonial trade posts and plantations with those of shops, salons, and dinner tables in the metropole (Curry-Machado and Stubbs 2023). Unsurprisingly therefore, both scholarly and popular commodity histories are often narratively structured as stories of how the material ligaments of globalization came to envelope our planet.

More here.

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