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Commodities, especially agricultural exports, have played a profoundly important role in the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. We will use the histories of some of these commodities as a lens through which to examine Latin American and Caribbean societies, politics, and environments. We will focus mainly on the period 1880-1940, a time during which local and regional histories were entangled with commodity booms.

After an introductory week on key concepts and methodologies, we examine a series of case studies which use specific commodities to understand the interaction of local communities and environments with larger economic, social and political processes. We will study how the large-scale production and export of commodities changed the livelihoods of communities, the landscapes and environments in which they were produced, as well as their ramifications for regional politics. We will pay particular attention to labour, including racialised hierarchies and enslaved labour (such as workers in the Cuban sugar industry or coffee farmers in Brazil and Mexico); the role of British and U.S. companies and 鈥渘eo-imperialism鈥� (such as the United Fruit Company, or oil companies); as well as the ecological and environmental transformations which the increasingly large-scale and industrialised production of commodities brought with it (for instance the environmental consequences of banana production in Central America or rubber and logwood in the Amazon). We further explore the role of science and engineering in producing and transporting commodities (for instance the construction of the Panama Canal).

The module proceeds thematically and roughly chronologically to cover nineteenth- and twentieth-century case studies. Students will gain a historical perspective on the links between economic, social and environmental issues. They will also be introduced to current historiographical debates, thinking about the place of Latin America and the Caribbean within global history, the methodology of commodity histories, and the challenges of connecting local, regional and global histories.