The study of commodities and consumption has become popular among economic historians of Latin America, as the heterogeneous national experiences of the “export boom” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have become much more evident than they appeared to “dependency” writers in the 1970s. Arnold Bauer, Benjamin Orlove, Fernando Rocchi, and others have looked at changing dietary patterns, the “allure of the foreign,” the growth of shopping, and branding and advertising in Latin America itself, whereas Steven Topik has taken the lead in investigating the complexities of commodity exports and commodity chains in Topik and Wells (eds.), The Second Conquest of Latin America, 1998, and Topik, Marichal, and Frank (eds.), From Silver to Cocaine, 2006.

Global Markets Transformed is an altogether more ambitious attempt to synthesize knowledge about production, the growth and transformation of markets, and the evolution of commodity chains for foodstuffs across the world during the period of globalization before 1914 and the disruptions of world war and depression that followed. Here, Topik and Wells see continuities rather than retreat from globalization, arguing that the infrastructure established before 1914 remained, even if protection, exchange controls, and greater state intervention became more common. There are many other interesting lines of argument in the book, but the authors emphasize in particular what they call the “Great Divergence” between the wealthy and the poor, stressing growing disparities not only between countries but also, just as important, within countries. Elites in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, or Shanghai, for example, could enjoy Western standards of consumption and levels of life expectancy due to the wealth generated by exports, while conditions for rural workers, especially, often worsened. Settler economies, in which European immigrants marginalized indigenous populations and took advantage of the availability of fertile land and imported capital to produce export commodities, performed particularly well, not least because they avoided the destruction caused by wars in Europe.

The first two chapters of the book essentially set the scene for the long third chapter, analyzing different agricultural commodities, that occupies more than half the text. In the first chapter, Topik and Wells propose several arguments: the importance of national institutions and environments, as well as individual commodities, in determining the impact of exports; the ways in which cartels and oligopolies undermined liberal market forces, especially in the developed countries, often provoking state intervention to overcome market failure; and the extent of human suffering and environmental degradation that occurred during the boom. The second chapter explores the infrastructure for trade that developed on the back of technological change and capital investment. After a brief, rather cursory, explanation of the growing dominance of the gold standard before 1914, the authors focus on improvements in transport and communications, and the forward and backward linkages they engendered. We therefore read of the critical changes that occurred in shipping and railways, with an aside explaining the importance of these sectors for the development of the steel industry, before passing on to motor vehicles, airplanes (important in this era really only for air mail and military purposes), telegraphs, cable, and radio, followed by consideration of their linkages to copper, aluminium, rubber, and oil exports. What is missing here is an explicit analysis of the importance of information flows and commercial intelligence in reducing transaction costs; better transport, warehousing, and insurance in reducing risk and uncertainty; and, especially, how merchant firms, discount houses, and international banks worked together to finance the commodity trades. After all, in August 1914 both the Germans and British found, to their alarm, that much of Germany’s overseas trade was financed by sterling bills of exchange drawn on and discounted by London firms.

The core chapter uses English-language secondary literature to survey the demand for, and production of, several important agricultural commodities: wheat, rice, hard fibers (jute, manila, henequen, and sisal), sugar, and stimulants (coffee, tea, and cacao). Lack of space, presumably, precluded discussion of tobacco and palm oil (West Africa’s major agricultural export before cacao). However, the analysis of the whole chain of transactions for each commodity—how it was structured, how it changed, and where power lay within it—is a little uneven. Topik and Wells provide considerable detail on the widely varied land/labor arrangements that existed at the production end of the chains, stressing the importance of local environments and institutions, the recruitment of labor, the role played by the state, and the agency of producers. They are also well informed about consumption and the impact of technological change, branding, and marketing, emphasizing how products that were essentially luxuries and status markers in the early nineteenth century had become popular necessities in the developed world by 1914. Drawing, presumably, on Topik’s extensive knowledge of the subject, the authors explore the changing dynamics of the entire Brazilian coffee chain in depth. Elsewhere, however, the authors hardly mention intermediaries, most noticeably in the case of wheat, where the reader learns nothing of the great grain traders such as Bunge y Born, Cargill, or Louis Dreyfus. This lack of attention to the important trading firms contrasts with the more assured analysis of the branding and marketing of final products such as flour, coffee, or chocolate. One cannot help thinking, on the basis of the evidence here, that one result of technological change, price competition, and U.S. marketing methods was that the ordinary consumer frequently ended up with inferior products—adulterated flour, refined white sugar, Maxwell House coffee and Nescafé, tea bags filled with sweepings, and the sort of chocolate (Hershey, Cadbury) that British and North American consumers happily purchase but real connoisseurs, such as the Swiss and Germans, disdain.

Not surprisingly, in such a wide-ranging analysis, the authors’ sense of chronology and geography can occasionally slip. Commercial production of penicillin was not viable until 1943–1944 (cf. p. 14), and the electronics industry is surely largely a post-World War II phenomenon, not to be confused with the earlier manufacture of household electrical equipment (pp. 26, 35, 93). It is also difficult to envisage a “prosperous cattle economy” (emphasis added) impeding the expansion of cereals in nineteenth-century Argentina (p. 137); before the early 1900s, when exports of frozen beef commenced, the major bovine products were hides and jerked beef, and, for a time, tenant grain production and the improvement of pasture required for pedigreed cattle were symbiotic activities. In terms of geography, an informed editor might have noticed that Rhodesia’s copper mines are now in Zambia, not Zimbabwe (p. 98), and Java is nowhere near the South Pacific (p. 190).

Overall, this is a complex and multilayered book, undertaking the difficult task of synthesizing a massive secondary literature on the world as a whole with considerable success. It provides a wealth of detail on the complexities of changing agro-industrial export production from the world beyond the United States and western Europe, stressing the individuality of each country’s experience. It is also informative about markets and the meanings of consumption, branding and marketing, and the growing concentration of power and resources with large firms in the United States and Europe. My main misgiving—ironically, for a book that argues for the importance of understanding commodity chains—is that the principal intermediaries in many of the chains, and the ways in which they did business, are often less visible than producers, workers, food manufacturers, and consumers.