Plebeian Consumers

Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Ana María Otero-Cleves

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009435567
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

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 María 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 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