Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 1 (2004), p. 118

It is often hard to grasp the history of simple, everyday things: difficult to imagine that the readily-available consumables of modern life the world over have their own important and revealing history. How many stop to ponder the history of sweetness when they add sugar to their range of drinks and foodstuffs? Scholars of material consumption of course have taken a different approach, concentrating not merely on the explosion of material acquisitiveness from the seventeenth century onwards, but teasing historical meaning from the most commonplace of daily artefacts. In the process, what has emerged is the story of a rapid and massive global expansion of production and consumption, drawing distant colonial settlements into an ever firmer economic and social dependency, first on the European, later the North American economic and political heartlands. Today, the process is clear and unavoidable. A generation ago, it was much less obvious. In the interim a host of scholars from a range of disciplines have provided the data and arguments from which we can take a measured viewed. Few had the intellectual sweep and imaginative grasp of Sidney Mintz in his wonderful book Sweetness and power, a book which has – properly – come to exercise great influence over the field. Clarence-Smith’s latest contribution, on cocoa and chocolate, will be seen as another sophisticated study in the field, but arguing outwards from a specific example.

It is a major study of an important commodity and product, and a book which derives from the author’s distinctive intellectual grasp across a range of disciplines. It is not an easy read, arguing its case through a thicket of secondary and primary materials, but what emerges is one of the most important volumes in the field. Indeed the book’s importance greatly transcends the focus of its study. In effect Clarence-Smith has produced both a definitive statement on the subject, and a major argument for all students of commodity production and material consumption.

The author begins with an incisive argument about the commodity chain, before moving backwards to the historical origins of cocoa and chocolate in meso America. A study of the fiscal and taxation relationship to the historical development of the global chocolate industry leads the author to a detailed account of the technical development of chocolate production itself. Here, as elsewhere, Clarence-Smith moves with intellectual ease between the specifics of his study and the broader issues which lie in the background, seeking at every turn to draw the reader’s attention to the overarching theoretical issues and questions. The book is shaped by the author’s own grappling with major questions, and the reader moves with him, from the specifics of each chapter, back to the broader intellectual canvas. When he steps into the historical geography of land and production, the author seems to get into his literary stride, providing a sweep and grasp of global patterns. Attimes, what he writes seems straightforward and obvious – but that is merely testimony to Clarence- Smith’s ability to make sense, for others, of a complex and bewildering global literature. Much the same applies to his analysis of the labour systems, free and unfree, used to cultivate cocoa/chocolate. As with sugar and tea, behind the pleasures (and necessities) of a global market there lay a rapaciousness towards land and labour which caused ecological damage and human distress on a massive scale. The author’s conclusions are pithy – but (to this reviewer at least) bleak. The world-wide pleasurable addiction to chocolate products, along with other tropical products, pose serious harm to the earth’s natural habitats and resources. But who so much thinks of that, mid-morning, when millions take their break by eating or drinking chocolate?