From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500– 2000, Edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, 2006, Duke University Press, 377 pages, $23.95 paperback
This collection, aimed at tracing the history of Latin America’s engagement with the global economy, consists of 12 essays, each treating the history of a single commodity produced in the region. Chronologically arranged, the essays cover 500 years of trade, demonstrating that globalization is nothing new, or at least that its roots run deep.
The authors break with the usual national case study approach, tracing instead the history proper of commodities—including silver, chocolate, tobacco, coffee, henequen, and coca/cocaine—because, the editors argue, economic activity transcends nations and can’t be properly analyzed if boxed in by political administrations and borders.
The book clearly analyzes the link between the global consumption pattern of each commodity reviewed and the evolution of production methods. The contributors here are historians, not economists, so they view “chain” as a conceptual tool, not a theory to be proved or disproved. This reflects a disciplinary orientation as well as a move away from the grand claims of dependency or world systems theory, which the chain concept allows for by highlighting the complex webs of both commodities and their attendant meanings in both Latin America and elsewhere.
Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival by Daniel Jaffee, 2007, University of California Press, 346 pages, $21.95 paperback
Both a protest slogan and a label to be found in boutique coffee shops, “fair trade” has become in the last decade an important, if still marginal, experiment in reforming international markets. The fair trade concept first emerged in Europe about 20 years ago; today there are now more than 40 fair trade products from at least 1,500 retail companies.
Through various mechanisms—guaranteed prices and advance credit to producers, democratically run cooperatives, long-term contracts, environmental sustainability, public accountablility, safe work conditions—fair trade attempts, paradoxically, it seems, to undo economic injustices through the very market that generates them.
Coffee was the original fair trade product and it remains the largest, though only 1% of the coffee on the market is labeled as such. In this study, the first of its kind, Daniel Jaffee sets out to assess the impact fair trade has had on the lives of Mexican coffee farmers, systematically comparing them with their “free trade” counterparts. Having spent two years in the Sierra Juárez mountains of Oaxaca state, Jaffee seeks to go beyond “impact stories” of advocacy publicity and journalism, teasing out the complexity of his subject’s lives, many of which have indeed been positively affected by fair trade.
Unraveling the Garment Industry: Transnational Organizing and Women’s Work by Ethel C. Brooks, 2007, University of Minnesota Press, 304 pages, $22.50 paperback
The garment industry, as this study of anti-sweatshop campaigns notes, has figured heavily in recent scholarship on the new international division of labor, and has been seen as a quintessential industry of the globalized era: hypermobile, flexible, involving both the production of goods and images. It is also notable for the role women play in every tier, as producers and consumers, retailers and models. With the rise of global manufacturing, global labor protest also emerges as a linked process.
In this contribution to a growing literature on transnational social protest, Ethel Brooks examines three campaigns from the 1990s organized largely by NGOs and other civil society advocates: against the sweatshop in El Salvador producing for the Gap; child labor in Bangladesh (production for Wal-Mart and JCPenny); and sweatshops in New York City producing for Kathy Lee Gifford.
Brooks is concerned with the efficacy and politics of consumption-based protest, which employs boycotts and publicity as primary tactics, as opposed to shop-floor organizing. Where are the workers in all this? she asks. How are they and their interests represented? Brooks’s work will be of interest both to students of social movement politics as well as anyone interested in the question of agency and power in transnational coalitions.
