Plebeian Consumers

Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world. By studying how plebeian consumers altered global processes from below, Ana Maria Otero-Cleves challenges ongoing stereotypes about Latin America's peripheral role in the world economy through the nineteenth century, and its undisputed dependency on the Global North. By exploring Colombians' everyday practices of consumption, Otero-Cleves also invites historians to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between the political world and the economic world in nineteenth-century Latin America. She also sheds light on new methodologies and approaches for studying the material world of men and women who left little record of their own experiences.

Auteur

Ana María Otero-Cleves is Lecturer in the History of Latin America at the University of York. She was the winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition in 2022. This is her first book.

Texte du rabat

Plebeian Consumers details the key role played by Colombia's popular consumers in altering and challenging global patterns of exchange in the nineteenth century. The book will interest historians of Latin America, as well as scholars of capitalism and the history of consumption.

Contenu

Introduction: a global view on local consumption; 1. Consumers, citizens, and the republican project; 2. From ferias to tiendas: consumers and the import trade; 3. Zarazas, Bayetas, and Bogotanas: adapting Foreign textiles to popular consumers' demands; 4. Machetes, axes, and Foreign tools: demanding consumers, active citizens; 5. Books, hats, and 'Foreign' coats: the paradoxes of cosmopolitan consumption; 6. Soap, pills, and toiletries: domesticating foreign goods; Epilogue: a story of global capitalism from the periphery; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.