Introduction

Summary

The introduction sets the stage for a comprehensive exploration of how plebeian consumption shaped global and local interactions in nineteenth-century Colombia, challenging conventional historical narratives and offering new insights into the dynamics of global capitalism and popular citizenship. It does so by providing insight into the existing historiography and its limitations and by highlighting the need to challenge dominant narratives that perpetuate the perception of Latin America and its consumers as passive participants in global transformations. The introduction also explores the methodological challenges of writing histories of consumption “from below” and the need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach drawing from cultural history and anthropology to analyze popular consumption practices. After a historical exploration of Colombia’s place within the global nineteenth century, the introduction concludes with a brief outline of the book’s chapters.

“Quibdó is the emporium of foreign merchandise for a great extent of very sparsely populated territory,” wrote John C. Trautwine, a Philadelphia-born engineer, in 1852.¹ Trautwine had reached “the much-talked-of Quibdó” after a hazardous month’s voyage from the Gulf of Urabá, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, up the Atrato River, and had little disposition to move about for two or three days after his arrival. But once he regained his strength, the North American resumed the task of leaving a record of his exploration for an interoceanic canal route across the Pacific lowlands of Colombia.² In his account, Trautwine included his verdict on the river town, its commerce, and its people. “Nearly every house is a shop, in which the systems of selling and bartering extend to every imaginable object that can be procured to sell or barter,” he declared. According to Trautwine, twenty to thirty tons of textile fabrics, groceries, crockery, and other foreign merchandise were sent monthly up the river from the old colonial port of Cartagena to Quibdó and the surrounding region. “The great bulk of the articles is of inferior quality, adapted to the necessities and primitive tastes of the poor and semi-civilized negroes and Indians, among whom it is distributed,” the North American claimed.³ To Trautwine’s amazement, imported manufactured goods were tailored to satisfy the needs and tastes of those whom he saw with prejudiced eyes.

Three years after Trautwine’s visit, a letter crossed the Atlantic with detailed information about the preferences of those whom he had deemed primitive. This was not the first time that the merchant José María Botero Arango was addressing his “estimados amigos” (dear friends) at Stiebel Brothers’ headquarters in London’s Crosby Square with suggestions on textile samples. In his July 1855 letter, the Antioqueño merchant told the company that dark and basic designs were little fancied by his customers. Because of this, Botero Arango, who traded in Santa Fe de Antioquia and Quibdó and would settle in Medellín in 1857, asked for new samples of “sufficient size to recognize their quality” as well as new designs because, in his own words, “they like variety here.”⁴ He was well aware that not just anything shipped would satisfy the country’s diverse population. Trautwine’s observation thus rang true. If merchants wished to sell their textiles, machetes, toiletries, and many other imported commodities in Quibdó and its surroundings, they needed to acknowledge local preferences and demands.

By 1890 the US consul in Barranquilla was still insisting on the need to follow such an unnegotiable premise. Johnson Nickeus, stationed in the main port in the Colombian Caribbean, knew that US merchants were still concerned over the little progress made in acquiring a more significant portion of the South American market. With determination, he set about to write a detailed report setting forth “in what respects the manufacturers of Europe excel [US manufacturers] in complying with the wants, tastes, and peculiarities of the people in preparing and decorating … merchandise and in packing it for transportation.”⁵

To this end, Nickeus wrote at length about the many goods that reached Barranquilla – flour, butter, rice, sugar, sardines, biscuits, crackers, furniture, hardware, machinery, musical instruments, paper and stationery, watches, and clocks. But it was his remarks on cotton textiles that were the most telling in regard to US manufacturers’ failures in Colombia. “Cotton goods are by far the most important of all merchandise in this country,” he noted, particularly cotton prints – “almost entirely imported from Manchester.” As many had done before him, the US consul insisted that locals preferred cotton textiles of very specific dimensions – “the width must be 22 to 23 inches and the pieces of 30 yards exactly.” By making prints “wider than consumers want them here, and in unsuitable lengths,” US manufacturers were getting nowhere in the Colombian market. In the meantime, Nickeus claimed, “the Manchester firms constantly furnish great varieties of designs from which importers here can select the most suitable to the taste of the market.”⁶ Predictably his report concluded with some general observations on Colombians’ preferences:

These people have peculiar notions, tastes, and customs, which are the growth of centuries. I am simply stating what has been told our merchants a thousand times by consuls and others, that it is useless to attempt to force on the people our tastes and peculiarities. Our merchants must manufacture goods to suit these people; their tastes must be studied and complied with. This is done in the most careful and minute way by all Europeans, and unless Americans do likewise England, France, and Germany will continue to get the lion’s share of the trade.⁷

Appearing somewhat irritated by the stubbornness of those who insisted on ignoring local preferences, Nickeus asked US merchants to “lay aside a little of your independence, send your salesmen with samples, … ascertain what these people want and give it to them.”⁸

Trautwine’s, Botero Arango’s, and Nickeus’s words, whether intentionally or not, offer small windows into the world of goods inhabited by Colombians in the mid-1800s, scattered testimonies of how peasants, colonos (settlers), day laborers, formerly enslaved people, bogas (river boatmen of African descent), and market women became active agents in the global circulation of modern goods. By piecing out multiple – yet dispersed – depictions of their material world and their intimate relationship with it, Plebeian Consumers studies how the material culture of broad sections of nineteenth-century Colombia’s population, far from being indigenous, was inextricably intertwined with complex and diverse global processes of production and exchange. It reveals how, in their capacity as free citizens, the country’s popular sectors became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in mid nineteenth-century Colombia and dynamic participants of a highly interconnected world.

This book unfolds as both a global and a local story. Methodologically and narratively it shifts “the periphery” to the center of the analysis to offer a new take on global interconnectivity in the nineteenth century, in which the taste of the popular sectors from apparently isolated countries such as Colombia played a key part.⁹ With this shift it hopes to open new lines of inquiry into the different ways that peripheral consumers altered global processes from below and critically highlight the multidirectionality, scales, and nuances of nineteenth-century global relationships by studying a wide spectrum of consumer practices and a broad range of everyday goods. To tell this global tale, Plebeian Consumers not only follows consumers’ preferences and demands but studies how their adoption of foreign goods was in large part due to how merchants and local intermediaries in Colombia conveyed consumers’ tastes to manufacturers across the Atlantic. In response to these efforts, as this study will show, British, French, and US retailers were ready to redesign and adapt their products for a predominantly plebeian population. Although on a global scale, Colombians might appear inconsequential to modern historians, they were cherished consumers to nineteenth-century manufacturers of global goods.

By studying global interconnectivity from the margins, I hope to contest Latin America’s place in nineteenth-century global history.¹⁰ Focusing on consumption – and not on the production of export commodities, as a good share of economic history has done so far – allows me to forcefully challenge ongoing stereotypes about the region’s peripheral role in the world economy and its unquestionable “dependency” on the Global North.¹¹ Furthermore, by examining how plebeian consumers affected patterns of production in Europe and the United States, I dispute the notion that Colombia’s global relationships in the nineteenth century were dictated entirely by outsiders and even more so, by the country’s elites. I do so while simultaneously confronting a historical narrative – itself first created in the nineteenth century – of Colombia as a country with self-sufficient regional markets, isolated from the outside world, and incapable of overcoming the fragmentation of its national market.¹²

Plebeian Consumers aims, therefore, to counterbalance these interpretations by depicting nineteenth-century consumers as part of a ceaselessly interdependent world. In this sense, it joins the works of historians who have more broadly questioned the perception, held until very recently, that the nineteenth century was when global exchanges – of objects, ideas, people, and technologies – lost strength and momentum.¹³ Indeed, interpretations of the nineteenth century as the moment when Latin American countries turned in on themselves remained ingrained well into the twentieth century. Most of these stressed internal nation-building processes and explored each country’s connection with the outside world in light of such processes.¹⁴ The result was a good share of works on nineteenth-century Latin America that predominantly explain internal processes of national formation as well as the place of foreign ideas and resources in said processes, thereby overlooking the impact of the region’s ordinary women and men on other geographical spaces in intellectual, political, and economic terms.

One could have hoped that the rise of global history would offer new interpretations of nineteenth-century Latin America by compensating for nation-state-based histories and repositioning the region’s relationship within global networks. However, as various Latin American scholars have recently noted, global history has not radically changed the region’s place in Western historiography, leaving Latin American history in general and nineteenth-century history in particular underrepresented.¹⁵ There are many reasons for this, one being that global history scholars have been primarily occupied with exploring the power dynamics between China, South Asia, and Europe, finding it challenging to place Latin America in their narratives. Such historiographical emphases have had major interpretative results, namely they have relegated Latin America once again to the “periphery” and have rendered its nineteenth-century historical actors as passive participants in global transformations. The same can be said of the global turn in the history of consumption. Although initially studies on consumption focused on the origins and expansion of the consumer society in Europe and North America,¹⁶ later scholars turned to new histories and geographies of consumption, which included excellent works on China and India and countries in Africa.¹⁷ This new focus did result in important studies in the last two decades on Latin America’s history of consumption, but very few of these studies centered on the nineteenth century.¹⁸

Historians of the Atlantic world, for their part, have challenged the peripheral nature of Latin America. Still, Atlanticists have been cautious in incorporating the nineteenth century into their histories, stopping at the 1820s, with the end of the Age of Revolutions.¹⁹ This has, once again, silenced various actors’ contributions to global processes in nineteenth-century Latin America. As historian James E. Sanders has stated, “ending studies of the Atlantic world in the early nineteenth century has worked to obscure the importance of … later political struggles and their Atlantic character, thereby emphasizing events and processes in the North Atlantic, while ignoring sites of democratic innovation such as Colombia.”²⁰ In a similar vein, Matthew Brown has called historians to spend more energy investigating the influence that Latin America had on the rest of the world in the mid nineteenth century, the moment when Latin America embraced and was embraced by the global, in culture as well as in commerce.²¹ Plebeian Consumers shares these concerns, and thus it stresses the dynamic and fluid global connections of Latin America’s popular sectors in the second half of the nineteenth century. This requires, as mentioned, not positing a priori that Colombia was a fragmented republic and Latin America was a dependent region, even while recognizing the many political and economic challenges that the country and region faced throughout the nineteenth century.

As much as Plebeian Consumers tells a global and connected story, it also tells a local tale of struggles for citizenship and political recognition in which plebeian consumption plays a key role. This is a different kind of story about popular actors than the one often told by the historiography so far. In the past two decades, historians of Latin America have broadly studied popular men and women to understand their role as political actors in the new republics, explore the obstacles they faced in acquiring land and protecting their property rights, recognize the trials that freedmen and freedwomen encountered after emancipation, and grasp the struggles for citizenship of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race inhabitants.²² These studies owe much to previous scholarship on Colombia’s nineteenth-century artisan republicanism, peasant movements, and republican politics and free elections, all of which have deepened our understanding of the country’s political culture during this period.²³

Altogether, this literature has reassessed the nineteenth century – a period once viewed as the heyday of caudillos, anarchic turmoil, and misrule – as an age of liberal experimentation and struggles for political recognition. By so doing, historians have challenged the teleological perspectives underlying the scholarship that had cast nineteenth-century Spanish America’s political volatility as a symptom of the “failed” modernization of its new polities. Scholars have also called for repositioning Latin America at the vanguard of republicanism in the modern Atlantic world²⁴ and invited historians to rethink the origins and meanings of republicanism through a critical analysis of the political practices of a diverse and wide variety of Latin America’s historical actors.²⁵ The latter embracing a multilayered view of citizenship in the nineteenth century that welcomes the idea that citizenship was exercised and fought over in multiple arenas, including the ballot box, the public sphere, and the battlefield.²⁶

This book adds to and critically addresses this new body of work by reconsidering popular groups and republican politics at this time through the lens of political economy and the everyday practices of economic life. By exploring how the popular sectors in mid nineteenth-century Colombia participated in the market economy not only as laborers but as individuals who adopted new commodities, Plebeian Consumers studies the extent to which their role as consumers shaped ideas and practices of citizenship. It argues that for those in power as well as for those seeking to be recognized as political subjects, citizenship was inevitably tied to their participation in the marketplace as consumers. The book shows that although the relationship between citizenship, consumption, and the marketplace took form in print, in lettered debates on political economy, and in the ruling elites’ scientific and institutional spaces, it was also being shaped and negotiated in the public square, the store, and the weekly market. Men and women joined spaces of exchange not only to participate in political debate – discussing politics in stores, fairs, seaports, and haciendas – but to self-fashion and be validated by their peers as worthy citizens – wearing their best clothes and machetes on market day.

Hence, this study contends that foreign goods became the means through which plebeian consumers in mid nineteenth-century Colombia recognized themselves and sought recognition from their peers as individuals vested with rights and dignity, with all the intricate questions raised by the gendered and racial character of citizenship. Accessing these acts of political recognition requires critically approaching the archive to search for the meanings that thousands of men and women gave to their world of goods.

I.1 Consumers and Their Fragmentary Archival Presence

Many of the peasants, day laborers, market women, and formerly enslaved people who form the core of this book did not leave paper trails. If there are traces of what plebeian consumers felt or desired, the sources that contain them likely have biases that distort their experiences. To ferret out the cultural, political, and social meanings of commodities from the traditional archive, I creatively resort to different methodologies and strategies. I mine the words of government authorities, merchants, and consuls for clues as to how everyday men and women made sense of and gave order to their world of goods. I try to account for the cultural, social, and emotional biases of those who created written records of peasants’, day laborers’, and market women’s material world. I turn to contemporary literature for representations of local consumer practices, reading against the author’s perspective to reach those being represented. And I critically explore commercial handbooks, travelers’ accounts, memoirs, local newspapers, conduct manuals, and government and business records for evidence of Colombians’ material life.

Reading against the archival grain allows me to find fragments of consumers’ lives in an invoice, a shipping order, a customs report, and a tariff law, among many other primary sources, and with these fragments imagine the multiple meanings that men and women gave to foreign goods.²⁷ Marginal annotations in commercial correspondence, official reports, and merchants’ ledgers, for instance, hold impressive value for piecing together plebeian consumers’ tastes, preferences, and practices. Thus, when confronting the archive, I place special weight on instances when travelers and statesmen, oftentimes reluctantly, register events or details that they did not expect. I constantly question what is being silenced by the sources and the archive itself.²⁸ I remain attentive to the many counternarratives that each representation engenders, the stories that are not foregrounded. Such attention proves to be particularly powerful for analyzing visual representations of Colombians’ material realities, such as watercolors, photographs, and drawings.

This exercise of imagination and interpretation²⁹ – that demands historians to go back to “their” sources, over and over again – is guided by explanatory models in both cultural history and anthropology for how to engage with material culture and consumption practices. At least four main principles drawn from these disciplines inform my method. The first is that objects and their exchange create and shape culture and thus inform human and social processes. In the last four decades, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have shown that consumption cannot be reduced to a given individual’s rational and cost-minimizing choices. If social scientists agree on anything regarding consumption, it is that it is a social and collective activity whose study must encompass much more than the choice of one commodity over another.³⁰ Consumption is, therefore, an act of negotiation, adaptation, resistance, and domestication rather than a straightforward imposition of goods on consumers by manufacturers, the state, or the market.

This perspective allows us to embrace a broad definition of the act of consuming, one that encompasses not only the acquisition of goods but also the meanings and practices of exchange: how objects are bought, how and why they are used and kept, whether they are inherited or disposed of, and in what spaces they are consumed and showcased. It also requires us to acknowledge that objects do not merely reflect culture but are the means by which it is created and transformed, and that commodities not only symbolize and communicate intangible ideas but build social relationships and alter social structures.³¹ From this point of view, consumers become active subjects in their world of goods and commodities, agents and sometimes allies in the construction of social, cultural, and political identities.³²

Naturally, there are many ways by which humans give meanings to objects. Historians must resort to different analytical strategies to uncover – at least partially or tentatively – the meanings of goods. To begin with, goods may come packed with specific associations and connotations through production, distribution, and advertising. Hence, by assessing both the structures of production and the roles of manufacturers, designers, and merchants in the consumption process, scholars can come closer to understanding their cultural value. However, the meanings of goods can always be renegotiated or made irrelevant through what people do with them, how they talk about them,³³ and how objects move through different contexts.³⁴ Consequently, I pay special attention to how commodities circulate and how men and women consume them.³⁵ I embrace the notion that objects’ trajectories – or “paths” – also shape their cultural meanings and their social and political value. Tracing an object’s trajectory allows historians to visualize why it acquires greater relevance in one place than another, why goods that become “necessities” for some become “luxuries” for others, and why some are meaningful and others meaningless objects. Such an approach also forces scholars to appreciate the politics undergirding an object’s circulation in a given space and time.

This leads me to the second principle that I derive from cultural history and anthropology approaches to materiality and consumption: value, broadly defined as the quality that renders a commodity desirable, is determined in multiple ways. In mid nineteenth-century Colombia, for instance, some people valued an object most when it remained beyond their reach; others valued goods that appeared “foreign” over actual imported commodities that looked less so. As Ann Smart Martin has rightly argued, an awareness of how worth was perceived allows historians to address how people used material goods to navigate change – particularly, in the case of Plebeian Consumers, social and political change.³⁶ We must also be aware of how such perceptions of worth were shaped by gender, race, and ethnicity.

Recognizing the multiplicity of meanings that men and women give to their material world takes me to the third principle guiding the book’s analysis: there is no such thing as a “correct” consumption of a given commodity.³⁷ Stating otherwise suggests that that culture is fixed. Quite to the contrary, culture is constantly changing.³⁸ Plebeian Consumers, therefore, embraces the idea that there is no such thing as an authentic appropriation of an object and as a consequence, strongly acknowledges that consumption across borders or social class does not inherently involve processes of resistance or emulation.³⁹

The final principle guiding the book’s methodology is that, when tracing the meanings of goods, we must reckon with their very materiality. Archaeologists, art historians, and historians of science have shown that objects have agency and, consequently, that things are not passive vessels in which meaning is placed. Objects can resist or exceed human intentions through their material propensities⁴⁰ – color, size, texture, weight, and design all affect how things might lend themselves to different cultural meanings and to what extent people can reappropriate objects or subvert their original purpose. By embracing the complexity of the relationship between subjects and objects, social scientists have shown that meanings arise from the coagency of people and things.⁴¹ Historians need to take the materiality of things seriously when determining their meanings, even if the objects in question no longer exist.

That these principles for dealing with material culture and consumption practices emphasize the ability of individuals to give multiple meanings to things should not be misread as a claim on the part of cultural history and anthropology scholars that consumers have unlimited options. Purchasing power is one of the most obvious restrictions, and in mid nineteenth-century Colombia it was certainly one of the most significant obstacles to acquiring foreign goods. Capitalists’ interests are also paramount in determining what reaches consumers. Social scientists have also shown how political and social forces restrict access to goods.⁴² Local regulations on commerce, import tariffs, and sumptuary laws are good examples, as are social norms that dictate patterns of “proper” and acceptable consumption practices – in gendered, racial, and class terms. In other words, the consumers’ field of play has its own historical limits and material restrictions; no consumer is entirely creative, just as no consumer is entirely passive. Historians of consumption, therefore, must deal with the ever-present tension between what a consumer wants to do and what her environment allows her to do.⁴³ In Plebeian Consumers, this means questioning the premise that Colombia’s popular sectors were always drawn to cheaper imported goods and willing to sacrifice quality over price. As this study will show, price was far from their only motivation for choosing one commodity over another. Even if their income was low and their saving capacity limited, women and men in mid-1800s Colombia purchased foreign goods for multiple and sometimes conflicting reasons, including subsistence, prestige, utility, quality, status, and, no less critical, political recognition.

Finally, Plebeian Consumers also recognizes that in mid nineteenth-century Colombia consumers’ motives were multilayered and their tastes were heterogeneous. As I will show, consumers’ tastes and preferences differed throughout the country, as did the meanings of the goods, and it would be wrong to assume that all “peasants” or “laborers” – themselves not homogeneous categories – favored the same goods regardless of their environment, activities, and access to foreign markets. Plebeian Consumers embraces such differences. However, because I primarily explore the different ways that commodities were received, transformed, or rejected by everyday men and women in mid nineteenth-century Colombia, the book will give precedence to commodities’ trajectories and their reception rather than regional tastes and desires.

I.2 Colombia in the Global Nineteenth Century

Plebeian Consumers takes as its focus the period between the 1850s and the 1910s, a time of unprecedented transformation in the transatlantic circulation of goods, capital, ideas, and people. The new Atlantic world increased its relative importance on the global scale compared to the early modern period. A demographic revolution allowed for a massive flow of fifty-one million European peasants and proletarians to the Americas, transforming social and political connections between both continents and augmenting their respective proportions of the globe’s population. The Industrial Revolution created a strong demand for North and South American raw materials (cotton, wool, hides, guano, nitrates, and rubber) and, by promoting urbanization in northwest Europe, expanded consumer demand for commodities such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, and cacao.

In Europe, industrial cities grew and urban centers multiplied, turning English, French, German, and Italian manufacturers into conspicuous exporters of new commodities for consumers across the Atlantic. Britain, France and the United States – who by the 1800s accounted for less than one-tenth of the world’s manufacturing – raised for “almost one-half of the world's output by the end of the century.”⁴⁴ All these changes were accompanied by a revolution in technology that enabled a dynamic flow of commodities between both sides of the Atlantic. Steamships increasingly replaced sailing vessels, changing the pace of marine transportation in a manner essential for massive transatlantic trade. Railroads facilitated the inland transportation of goods and merchandise from both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts: textiles reached Liverpool from throughout Britain and were shipped to the Colombian Caribbean, and tons of grain arrived from the countryside to the port of Buenos Aires and were dispatched to feed the men and women across the Atlantic.

Still, the expansion of transatlantic commerce would not have been possible without a significant political commitment to economic liberalism and free trade. In England, the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 set the tone for what was to come. Whereas protective tariffs survived there, they did so amid an enthusiastic strengthening of property rights, the privatization of the commons, the lifting of mercantilist restrictions on trade, and the commercialization of agriculture. In Latin America, many countries embraced economic liberalism, which remained the dominant paradigm in the region between 1850 and 1890.⁴⁵ Reforms similar to those that occurred in England were carried out in almost all Latin American countries during that period, removing or substantially reducing the primary institutional constraints on free trade inherited from the colonial era. In most cases, the reform process began by eliminating state monopolies, a vast range of domestic taxes and duties, and colonial property rights, before moving on to privatizing public lands and attracting foreign capital and labor.⁴⁶

Colombia was no exception to this trend (Figure I.1). As the republic turned thirty years old, tobacco and gold production was liberalized. The resultant surge of tobacco production in the Magdalena Valley and gold production in the three provinces of what would later comprise the state of Antioquia put at the country’s disposal enough natural products to exchange for foreign goods and enough resources to improve navigation through the Magdalena River. Consequently, ships started to arrive in Colombian ports more frequently by midcentury, bringing every type of commodity. Cotton textiles, hardware, books, musical instruments, weapons, beer, and sugar reached the Caribbean port of Cartagena, and the customhouse of Buenaventura welcomed hats, sugar mills, machetes, ponchos, soaps, and printing presses via the Pacific.

Figure I.1 United States of Colombia, 1863.

Map created by Yoly Velandria.

This economic expansion coincided with an expansion, no matter how incomplete and contentious, of the franchise and popular political participation in the public sphere took new forms. As historian James E. Sanders has demonstrated, mid nineteenth-century Colombia saw the emergence of what he terms “a new postcolonial or national form of bargaining … whose most salient features were that it was less personalistic, more public, more programmatic, and, most important, republican.”⁴⁷ Although popular demands grew from local needs, in the mid-1800s those participating in political negotiations started to concern themselves perceptibly with the needs and rights of an abstract “we.” Liberal and conservative ruling elites knew they had to negotiate with various sectors to hold onto power. Political candidates had to work the electorate, and short-lived alliances between popular groups and local elites formed while they shared common goals.

Hence, the middle of the century marks a profound transformation in fights over subalterns’ political participation in both Colombia and the Atlantic world more broadly. In the former, the liberal project was challenged by a section of the ruling elites from the mid-1870s to the early 1880s, particularly in the political sphere.⁴⁸ However, as I will show, the constitutional and legal changes of the 1880s, which definitively contracted political spaces, did not drastically curb plebeian consumption practices, just as they did not deeply curb foreign merchants’ efforts to conquer new markets. The commercial dynamics in both hemispheres will only radically change with the first decade of the twentieth century and the prelude to World War I. This explains why I have chosen to extend the book’s focus to the 1910s. I do so, however, while recognizing the different rhythms of the political, social, and cultural processes that I explore across the period.

All these processes form the background for Plebeian Consumers. Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. I argue that for those in power and those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood here not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity.⁴⁹ By so doing, I show that in nineteenth-century Colombia, as Malcolm Deas pointed out, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.⁵⁰

Before I address the connections between plebeian consumption and citizenship on the ground, I must explore the complex dynamics of Colombia’s post-1850 import trade, the subject of Chapter 2. This chapter traces how foreign objects – textiles, machetes, toiletries, food, and chinaware, among many other goods – circulated throughout the national geography: the routes they traveled and the places they visited. The chapter also explores the many places in which peasants, bogas, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders came to exchange and give meaning to them.

The third and fourth chapters study the political, cultural, and economic impact of foreign textiles and agricultural tools, respectively. Using the recorded experiences of foreign merchants and local shopkeepers, literature, and visual sources, Chapter 3 delves into how the tastes and preferences of Colombia’s popular consumers influenced the production of textiles abroad. It shows how their demands for specific colors, designs, and shapes were communicated through a chain of intermediaries to manufacturers in the United States and England, who risked having their merchandise returned and losing customers if they failed to comply. The chapter emphasizes that the terms of trade were influenced not only by US and European interests but also by the preferences of everyday Colombian men and women who actively shaped the republic’s marketplace. Chapter 4 explores another instance of popular demands regarding the quality of goods imported to Colombia. As I go on to show in this chapter the consumption of imported machetes and other agricultural tools might provide the clearest demonstration of plebeian consumers’ active and demanding attitude toward foreign merchandise. Foreign machetes also helped to strengthen and consolidate the identity of Colombian popular groups, along with their claim to citizenship and their sense of belonging to the body politic.

Chapter 5 turns to elite consumption of foreign luxury goods. This detour from the book’s narrative of popular consumption is necessary in order to question the historiography that has equated “foreign goods” with “luxury goods.” I look at how nineteenth-century Colombian elites incorporated European luxury consumer goods – clocks, books, umbrellas, clothing, and musical instruments – into practices of social distinction and cultural expression in a reaction against ordinary people’s way of life. In this way, the chapter highlights that, when it came to their own consumption, the category of “foreign commodities” in nineteenth-century Colombia was flexible for the members of the upper classes, with particular political and social ramifications.

The consumption of some foreign items, as Chapter 5 shows, was closely linked in Colombian society with ideas and ideals of “propriety” and “decency.” I further explore this linkage in Chapter 6 by turning to the consumption of patent medicines and toiletries and their impact on the Colombian market. By following their distribution, we can understand the mechanisms and strategies employed by foreign manufacturers to infiltrate the market and gain widespread attention. This chapter shows how producers of patent medicines were the first to introduce modern advertising techniques to Colombians. As a result of such advertising, popular sectors were gradually incorporated into the world of foreign nostrums and toiletries, embracing the ideas that these commodities promoted and enforced. Yet in spite of this, as the chapter goes on to demonstrate, Colombian men and women still domesticated these goods and transformed their uses and their meanings in interesting and often unpredictable ways.

Plebeian Consumers ends by critically assessing how successful the ruling elites were in their republican project of turning peasants, and day laborers into modern citizens through consumption and economic integration. This critique proceeds by emphasizing the tensions between plebeian and elite attitudes toward consumption and citizenship by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. I also invite global historians and historians of Latin America to ask new questions about capitalism and globalization “in the margins” by studying consumption from below. This, so as to interrogate the entrenched narratives of underdevelopment and dependency that still permeate our historical interpretations about Latin America today.