Colonial america and commodity history: the plurality of times of historical capitalism

AutorLeonardo Marques
CargoUniversidade Federal Fluminense, Instituto de História, Departamento de História, Niterói, RJ, Brazil
Páginas772-812
Esboços, Florianópolis, v. 28, n. 49, p. 772-791, set./dez. 2021.
ISSN 2175-7976 DOI https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2021.e85138
reply
772/897
COLONIAL AMERICA AND
COMMODITY HISTORY:
THE PLURALITY OF TIMES
OF HISTORICAL CAPITALISM
Leonardo Marquesa
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1276-2769

a Universidade Federal Fluminense, Instituto de História, Departamento de História, Niterói,
RJ, Brazil
histórias em contextos globais
DEBATE
Colapso ambiental e histórias do capitalismo
Esboços, Florianópolis, v. 28, n. 49, p. 772-791, set./dez. 2021.
ISSN 2175-7976 DOI https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2021.e85138 773/897
ABSTRACT
This rejoinder addresses many of the issues raised by the commentaries of Crislayne Alfagali, Jack
Bouchard, Mary Draper, Waldomiro Lourenço Jr, and Jason Moore regarding my article, “Commodity
Chains and the Global Environmental History of the Colonial Americas”. Like that article, this piece is

opportunity to further develop some arguments from my initial intervention, particularly the discussion
on methodological nationalism. Next, I survey the potentialities and limits of the history of commodities
to think about the history of capitalism. Finally, in the third and last section, I explore the debate on the
knowledge of Africans and Amerindians in the construction of the Atlantic world as a strategy to tie many
of the issues discussed throughout the text.
KEYWORDS
Colonial America; Commodity history; Plural times.
Esboços, Florianópolis, v. 28, n. 49, p. 772-791, set./dez. 2021.
ISSN 2175-7976 DOI https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7976.2021.e85138 774/897
Leonardo Marques
It is a great honor to have my own article discussed in such detail and with such
insights as can be seen in the debate section of the current issue of Esboços. My
initial contribution was written after an invitation to present a paper at the First
Symposium of Global History, hosted at the Federal University of Santa Catarina
               
arguments based on our initial discussion, beginning with the original title of my piece
(“Commodity Chains and the Global Environmental History of the Colonial Americas”).
The commodity chain approach is but one promising way to write commodity history,


“global environmental history” in turn was also not the best description of my interests,
            


and the place of nature in it based on a concept of plural time. Finally, I decided to
change “Colonial Americas”, plural, to “Colonial America”, singular. Thus instead of
circumventing the long dispute over the concept of America, as its plural form stimulates
us to do, I kept the concept in its original continental interpretation for reasons that I
believe will be clearer by the end of this essay.1
HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CAPITALISM, IN
CAPITALISM
Notwithstanding the many critiques of the works of Immanuel Wallerstein
over the last half century (some of them fair, others not), one of his most important
contributions was to seriously consider the relationship between capitalism and the
structures of knowledge of the modern world, including the social sciences. At the time
of his writing, that meant challenging the modernization theories that were hegemonic
in North American universities and that were part of the author’s own education.

considered himself to be only one of a long lineage of critics, incorporating fundamental
contributions from Latin American, Caribbean, and African social scientists; he was
nonetheless one of its harshest and most persistent critics, carefully considering
the usefulness of concepts such as “society,” which has in fact been widely used in

emerged in this process as part of his work as an Africanist during the 1960s and his
         
the nation state as their unit of analysis (and, consequently, of action), ignoring wider
processes - especially the capitalist world-economy and the interstate system that
supported it - that shaped and was shaped by those national realities.2
I begin with these considerations because one of the main aspects of my initial
contribution was indeed to suggest that historians have a lot to gain from a serious
dialogue with the world-systems perspective. The search for this dialogue comes from
1 On the concept of América cf. Moya (2011, p. 5).
2 For an overview of his trajectory and the world systems perspective, cf. Wallerstein (2000).

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