This is the third session of the seminar "The New Histories of Capitalism in Latin America." It will be focus on environmental history and the history of commodities within the history of capitalism.

This session examines how environmental history and commodity history have reconfigured the study of capitalism in the region. Earlier Marxist inspired economic histories emphasized primitive accumulation, plunder, and peasant subsistence. Building on that tradition, recent scholarship on agricultural life and natural resources has drawn on the cultural turn and on debates around the Anthropocene to unsettle rigid distinctions between society and nature that long structured histories of capital. In parallel, commodity histories that emerged from the boom in economic and social history linked production and consumption, material processes and cultural meanings. New approaches extend these methodologies while reengaging structural analysis, situating ecological transformation and commodity circulation within broader regimes of accumulation.

The papers in this session explore these questions through distinct empirical settings that foreground environmental change, Indigenous and enslaved labor, and the making of global markets. Adrian Lerner’s paper examines how the idea of Amazonian “emptiness” enabled successive regimes of investment, extraction, and territorial control since Independence. By treating Amazonia as a long term, transnational unit of analysis, he traces how perceptions of demographic and economic voids structured capitalist projects while reshaping both rainforest ecologies and Indigenous societies.

Rohan Chatterjee’s contribution focuses on the late twentieth century Peruvian Andes, challenging narratives of peasant agriculture’s presumed decline. He shows how semi subsistence household farming expanded and intensified during the period of the so called Great Acceleration, producing far reaching ecological transformations in a region with a relatively minor carbon footprint and compelling a reconsideration of who and what drove recent environmental change.

Christian Robles-Baez traces the emergence of coffee as a global mass commodity through the early nineteenth century Brazil U.S. trade. Emphasizing enslaved and Indigenous labor, environmental knowledge, and logistical infrastructures often dismissed as primitive, he highlights the contingent, supply led dynamics through which large scale trade and commodity diffusion became defining features of modern capitalism.

By placing ecological processes, forms of labor, and commodity circulation at the center of analysis, this session underscores how environmental and