Empire, Political Economy, and the Diffusion of Chocolate in the Atlantic World [Hardcover]

Chocolate is one of the most visible examples of how a deeply exotic consumer product penetrating our daily lives fascinated Europeans during the Early Modern period. Today, over fifty percent of the four million tons of cocoa produced globally come from Sub-Saharan Africa. Ecuadorian cocoa, on the other hand, is considered premium quality. Yet the fact that Ecuadorian cocoa is preferred by today's artisanal chocolate makers is one of historys ironic turns. During the eighteenth century, production and exports of Ecuadorian cocoa dramatically expanded due to its fast growth rate, high yield and low price, though certainly not due to its qualities of taste. This book analyzes the transition of chocolate from an exotic curiosity to an Atlantic commodity. It shows how local, inter-regional, and Atlantic markets interacted with one another and with imperial political economies. It explains how these interactions, intertwined with the resilience of local artisanal production, promoted the partial democratization of chocolate consumption as well as economic growth.

Introduction  1. Reorganizing Interregional and Atlantic Trade (1710s  1770s)  2. Civilizing Chocolate: Cultural Appropriation and Imperial Political Economy (1690s  1790s)  3. From Cocoa to Chocolate: The Making of a Spanish Artisanal Industry (1720s  1770s)  4. Bourbon Reformism, Public Debate and New Forms of Sociability (1730s  1790s)  5. Social Geography of Chocolates Spread in Spain (1690s  1790s)  6. Epilogue: Resilience and Boomerang Effects (1770s  1790s)This book follows the red thread of cocoa / chocolate through geographically dispersed social and economic networks within the Spanish empire to investigate the mechanisms of its diffusion, as well as its role in promoting both democratization of consumption and economic growth in the 18th century.Irene Fattacciu is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of La Tuscia, Itallãy