Based on 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 Plebeian 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 terms of trade were never solely determined by US or European interests; the preferences of everyday Colombian men and women actively shaped the republic’s marketplace.

Brazil accompanied global mid-century changes with its own great transformation in 1850: three landmark laws on the slave trade, land, and commerce that in theory aligned state-building with market forces. Yet, if premised on colonization as a substitute for slavery, the country’s transformation was in fact a circuitous one, as abolitionists’, planters’ and the government’s own efforts pointed in different directions. As the illegal slave trade endured after 1850, Brazilian abolitionists organized a new association to promote model colonies built from the ground up, but their efforts paled in comparison to the private colonization undertaken by wealthy Paraíba Valley planters. Historians assume that this coffee-growing elite held sway over the Brazilian state, but their colonization approaches suggest otherwise. The imperial government was more interested in promoting myriad new colonization endeavors across the Empire, including in the northeastern provinces, and using colonization for its own geopolitical needs. Conflicting uses of colonization laid bare not only the failure of government-directed initiatives to appease divergent regional interests, but also the ways in which colonization complicated rather than facilitated a purported transition toward free labor and an alignment of state and market interests.