1. Ana María Otero-Cleves and writing about the Global from the Periphery: Interview with the Winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition
- Author:
- Ana María Otero-Cleves and Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz
- Publication Date:
- 09-2022
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- Ana María Otero-Cleves’s book manuscript examines how Colombian peasants, artisans, formerly enslaved people, bogas (river boatmen), market women, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities between the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth century (1850–1910). It is the first study to argue that the consumption of foreign goods was not solely, nor primarily, an upper-class phenomenon and that the tastes and demands of the country’s popular sectors changed nineteenth-century patterns of production abroad. The manuscript demonstrates that far from being indigenous, the material culture of broad sections of the country’s population was inextricably intertwined with global trends by the end of the nineteenth century. It shows that the appropriation of imported commodities by Colombian popular sectors was in great part due to foreign manufacturers’ willingness to alter or redesign their products to satisfy their demands. Thus, by following the preferences of the popular sectors for English textiles, American machetes, and French patent medicines, among many other foreign commodities, the book demonstrates how, in their capacity as free citizens, Latin American consumers became active agents in the construction of the nation’s marketplace as well as dynamic participants in the global circulation of modern commodities. By methodologically and narratively shifting from the periphery to the centre, the book offers an exciting and original perspective on global interconnectivity in the nineteenth century, where the taste of the popular sectors of apparently isolated countries, such as Colombia, played a key part. Historians, scholars, and students interested in the global history of consumption will find this seemingly marginal case study ideal for testing theories proposed by social scientists on global relationships and on the ability of “peripheral” subjects to transform global dynamics. By examining how popular consumers’ demands affected patterns of exchange and production in Europe and the United States, Otero-Cleves contests the presumption that Colombia’s global relationships in the nineteenth century were dictated solely by outsiders and, even more so, the country’s elites. Moreover, this case study forcefully challenges ongoing stereotypes about Latin America’s peripheral role in the world economy and its unquestionable “dependency” and, furthermore, the lack of agency in the marketplace of the popular classes. By showing how popular consumption was a key broker between political economy and citizenship in the mid-nineteenth century, the manuscript also engages with the burgeoning historiography on subaltern groups and popular politics in nineteenth-century Latin America. The manuscript shows how popular sectors participated in the market economy not only as part of the country’s labour force but as individuals engaged in the consumption and adoption of new needs and comforts; it also explores the extent to which their role as consumers shaped ideas and practices of citizenship in mid-nineteenth-century Colombia. The study not only suggests that citizenship was formed, contested, and recognised in fairs, streets, plazas, tiendas, and local markets but argues that men’s and women’s entry into the market economy and their pursuit of material betterment gave meaning to ideas of citizenship and fashioned practices of political recognition in the second half of the century.
- Topic:
- History, Citizenship, Economy, Commodities, and Historiography
- Political Geography:
- Colombia, South America, and Latin America