Microhistories of Capitalism and Global Goods in Mid-19th-Century Colombia

Histories of capitalism painted a picture of the nineteenth century as the moment in time when the North Atlantic experienced a rapid shift from agrarian economies to industrialized ones. Characterized by a firm belief in free trade— the story went— the century witnessed Europe’s urgent need to widen its markets at all costs. In this narrative, Latin America emerged as a passive receptor of these wider-ranging economic transformations, and above all, as a key provider of raw materials to satisfy the needs of the Global North. Economic historians of Latin America, for their part, by emphasizing production over consumption, directed attention toward the export of raw materials from the region and away from the import of goods into Latin America. In the meantime, plebeian consumers — peasants, formerly enslaved people, and market women —were mentioned merely in passing and more often than not as passive or accidental consumers.

This paper aims to counterbalance these interpretations by depicting nineteenth-century consumers as part of a ceaselessly interdependent world. It studies how, in their capacity as free citizens, popular consumers became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in mid-nineteenth-century Colombia and dynamic and critical participants of the world economy. I will do so by reconstructing the life of María Flóres, a formerly enslaved woman, from a fragmented archive —an entry in a store ledger in Northwestern Colombia of her purchase of English textiles after the abolition of slavery. Focusing on her choice to participate in the marketplace as a free woman, this microhistory traces María’s search for economic and political autonomy in a vibrant republican setting. By insisting on this human scale, the paper challenges the categories with which historians have interpreted María’s world thus far and her place in the history of the consumption of global commodities.