As part of a recent effort to tell the histories of Colombia otherwise, Ana María Otero-Cleves has written an essential book. Plebeian Consumers makes the case that Colombia was not just a producer of export commodities in the nineteenth century but a vital actor in the global political economy of consumption. She does so by looking at how popular groups—peasants, settlers, day laborers, formerly enslaved peoples, bogas (river boat men of African descent), market women, and many others—intimately participated in the global circulation of modern commodities. Otero-Cleves shows in detail how, inspired by republicanism, these popular groups consumed goods—including cotton cloth, machetes, patent medicines, and books—in an effort to reshape overseas business practices by foreign merchants and simultaneously make claims to citizenship. Otero-Cleves invites readers to connect local and global histories to move away from dominant narratives that assign a peripheral role to Latin America in histories of the world economy and challenge the supposedly unquestionable dependency on the Global North.
By reading against the grain, Otero-Cleves mines a multiplicity of archives and an eclectic array of sources to unpack what it meant to be a plebeian consumer and how popular groups at once negotiated the conditions of consumption and attached meanings to goods. She also shows how these groups both resisted and embraced the uses of commodities and domesticated the value objects could embody in a process of global circulation. Plebeian Consumers thus offers a multilayered local history of the relationship between the meanings of citizenship as a question of political recognition and the practices of consumption as matter of marketplace participation. During the second half of the nineteenth century, both elites and popular groups shared a political project that was inspired by republicanism and through which consumption and claims to citizenship became intimately connected. Yet, this shared project, argues Otero-Cleves, hardly achieved a consensus precisely because what it meant to be a consumer/citizen was highly contested.
Otero-Cleves offers a crisp introduction, six tightly argued chapters, and a provocative epilogue to tell the stories of this disputed reality—a class struggle, really—over what it meant to live in a capitalist society. This struggle materialized in a marketplace defined by global connections, local trade, and commodity consumption. By embracing economic liberalism, elites mobilized consumption as a vehicle to “civilize” el pueblo into capitalist subjects who could potentially contribute to the moral and material progress of the nation. For plebeian groups who were inspired by popular liberalism, consumption became a critical activity to reshape their collective identity as consumers and producers of commodities and not only as laborers. As part of a global marketplace, popular groups reclaimed citizenship belonging at the local level.
These arguments raise some interrelated questions for discussion. Otero-Cleves shows in detail how Colombia, far from being a fragmented land or isolated republic, as it is typically depicted in the historiography, emerged as an active shaper of the content and form of a global trade. Indeed, Colombia plays no marginal or peripheral role. Yet, one wonders why the author continues to replicate the very language she wants to question, as suggested, for example, by the title of the epilogue: “A story of Global Capitalism from the Periphery” (211). Why are different historical actors in Colombia described as “local” or “peripheral,” whereas that which is outside Colombia is defined as “global”? How might one question the very hierarchical distinction between core and periphery by looking at the meanings of consumption and historicizing how certain products were seen as foreign/global commodities while others were depicted as national/local goods? This is a question stimulated by the very methodology Otero-Cleves uses in her book. Here, I would speculate we could have a historical explanation of how the global unequal distribution of resources gets “justified.”
In the epilogue, Otero-Cleves provocatively concludes: “Plebeian Consumers… is [not] a tale of capitalism’s ‘inherent’ ability to dominate everything… [Instead] [b]y questioning capitalism from the periphery the book offers a story where the market economy neither eliminated human agency nor granted people absolute freedom—even where the world economy was openly asymmetric” (215). What does it mean that a multiplicity of popular groups offered—through the struggles over consumption as citizenship and citizenship as a practice of consumption—a significant degree of legitimacy to a capitalism defined by a global market economy? If we emphasize the role of plebeian groups not only as laborers but also as consumers, as Otero-Cleves invites us to do, what does it mean that the marketplace appears as an “ever-present alternative” (221) to shape republican citizenship and even provide inspiration for social change on a global scale? And, perhaps more importantly, does this mean that the social foundations of capitalism and its multiple forms of exploitation during the nineteenth century materialized in the contours of a marketplace and its practices of consumption?
These questions are provoked by a profoundly insightful book. Ana María Otero-Cleves has written a major piece of scholarship that all academics—undergraduate, graduate, and professors—will be wise to read to learn how consumption has historically become the foundational marker of capitalist democracies across the globe.
