History Essay URGENT
alisong
Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics
MARCY NORTON
When the Spanish and Portuguese arrived in the Americas, the inhabitants there made a cacao liquor whicb was diluted in bot water seasoned with pepper and other spices . . . all these ingredients gave this mixture a brutish quality and a very savage taste . .. The Spanish, more industrious than the Savages, procured to correct the bad flavor of this liquor, adding to this cacao paste different fra- grances of the East and many spices of this country [Spain]. Of all these in- gredients we have maintained only the sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon.'
W R I T T E N AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, this account of the E u r o p e a n assimilation of chocolate is one of the earliest versions of the myth that suffuses modern scholarship: the notion that because Spaniards found the Indian form of chocolate unappetizing, they "procured to correct the bad flavor" by eliminating strange New World spices and adding sugar. Contrary to popular and scholarly opin- ion, the reason for chocolate's success with Europeans was not that they eould insert it into existing flavor complexes and discursive categories, masking indigenous fla- vors with sugar and Mesoamerican symbolism with medical excuses. The Spanish did not alter chocolate to fit the predilections of their palate. Instead, Europeans un- wittingly developed a taste for Indian chocolate, and they sought to re-create the indigenous chocolate experience in America and in Europe. Europeans in the New World and then the Old World somatized native aesthetic values. The migration of the chocolate habit led to the cross-cultural transmission of tastes (an appetite for spices such as vanilla and pepper, the color red, and a foamy froth). Over time, the composition of chocolate did evolve, but this was a gradual process of change linked to the technological and economic challenges posed by long-distance trade rather than a radical rupture in the aesthetic preferences of chocolate consumers.-
Farts of this article were presented at the International Seminar on Atlantic History at Harvard Uni- versity (199H), the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University (2001), the Klugc Center at the Library of Congress (2Ü03). and the Mid-Atlantic Association of Renaissanee Scholars (2003). I ben- efited greatly from participants' questions and responses. I wish to express my gratitude to James Amelang, Johanna Bockman, Rosemary Joyce, Rita Norton, Ethan Pollock, Adam Smyth, Gillian Weiss, and Andrew Zimmerman, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers at the AHR, for reading various drafts and offering helpful comments. 1 also wish to acknowledge my debt to Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe's groundbreaking chocolate scholarship.
' Antonio Lavedán, Tratado de los usos, abusos, propiedades y virtudes del tabaco, café, té y chocolate (1796; facs. ed., Madrid, 1991), 214.
^ "Cacao" refers to tbe seed kernels of the fleshy pods of the cacao tree {Theobrama cacao). "Choc- olate" refers to consumable substances in which a primary ingredient is eacao; before 1800, it almost always refers to a beverage.
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When and how do societies assimilate foreign things? In the eontext of early modern globalization, this question has been taken up by scholars working in three historiographie traditions—histories of imperial expansion and colonialism, con- sumerism, and food. Although there has been surprisingly little dialogue across these fields, their approaches can be eategorized in similar ways: they tend toward bio- logieal and economic essentialism, on the one hand, and toward cultural function- alism, on the other. By revisiting the reasons that Europeans came to develop a taste for chocolate, it becomes clear that both essentialist and functionalist models of taste are inadequate. The first Europeans who learned to like chocolate were neither ful- filling physiological destiny nor embodying a socially desirable ethos.
Among the many advanees in studies of colonialism and imperialism is the rec- ognition that colonialism is no longer only something done to someone else; struggles and endeavors in the periphery ehanged the society and culture, as well as the econ- omy, ofthe métropole.^ Traditionally, historians interested in the material exchanges between métropole and periphery have considered "goods" as a static category. Alfred Crosby's landmark study The Columbian Exchange takes for granted the uni- versal character of migrating things. Crosby shows how Europeans eventually in- corporated potatoes, maize, tomatoes, and other New World crops into their food- ways, while American soil became a hospitable site for sugar plantations and wheat farming; and how pathogens crossed oeeans and precipitated démographie eatas- trophe.^ This literature largely ignores the question oí why Europeans adopted cer- tain goods from colonies, taking for granted the cheap sustenanee of maize and potatoes, the luxurious tastiness of chocolate, and the insidious addictiveness of to- bacco. Environmental histories sueh as this do not consider the Ameriean or Eu- ropean social context, whieh largely determined what and how novel New World flora and fauna were appropriated.^
Another set of scholars have taken the opposite tack in studying European adop- tion of colonial goods, or, conversely, indigenous appropriation of metropolitan goods. In Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pa-
-' Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, "Between Metropole and Colony." in Cooper and Stoler. eds.. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), L Phenomena once viewed as exclusively internalist European developments—scientific innovations, nationalist iden- tities. Enlightenment epistemologies. and modern anthropology, among others—-have now been linked to dynamic relations between European centers and colonial peripberies. See Londa Scbiebinger, "Fo- rum Introduction: Tbe European Coloniai Science Complex." Isis 96 (2005): 52-55; Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlcn. eds.. Merchants and Marvels: Commerce. Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York. 2002); Londa Schicbingcr and Claudia Swan, eds.. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia. Pa., 2005); Jorge Cañizares Ésguerra. How to Write the History ofthe New World (Stanford, Calif., 2001 ); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. (London, 1991), 56-57; Linda Colley. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); Colley. Captives: Britain. Empire, and the World. 1600- 1850 (New York, 2002); Andrew Zimmerman. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago. 2001); Antonio Barycnx, Experiencing Nature (Austin. Tex.. 2006). These arguments find tbeir place alongside an older, but renewed and vibrant, debate concerning tbe role of European expansion in the development of modern capitalism: see below.
*' Alfred Crosby. The Columbian Exchange: The Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (West- port, Conn.. 1972). Works in tbis tradition include Elinor G. K. Melville./I Plague of Sheep: Environ- mental Consequetices ofthe Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge, 1994). and Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Eates of Human Societies (New York, 1997).
•"' Crosby's environmental determinism is even more in evidence in tbe sequel Ecological Imperi- alism: The Biological Expansion of Europe. 90Ü-/900 (Cambridge, 1986), esp. I45-17Ü.
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cific, a study of how Westerners and Pacific Islanders have used each other's material artifacts, Nicholas Thomas contends that "objects are not what they were made to be but what they have become" and rejects "stabiiiz[ing] the identity of a thing in its fixed and founded material form."'' For Thomas, Europeans' collections of stone tools, feather dresses, carved bowls, weapons, and other museum-worthy artifacts "performed the . . .operationof standing for a voyage and the work of science."Such an argument parallels that made by J. H. Elliott in his seminal study of how and when Europeans "assimilated" the New World discoveries into their intellectual frame- works. He found that Renaissance naturalists and ethnographers could see New World goods only through the grid inherited from classical models exemplified in the work of Aristotle, Galen, and Dioscorides^
Culinary historians have similarly argued that existing food and drug paradigms go a long way toward explaining when and how Europeans incorporated unknown foodstuffs or drugs into their diets and apothecaries. According to culinary historian Alan Davidson, the reason some New World consumables met with more success than others was Europeans' "ability to fit them into the European scheme of things, to make analogies between them and familiar foodstuffs." This logic informs similar studies which argue that New World turkeys and beans caught on quickly because Europeans recognized them as kin to familiar fowl and legumes; or that maize suc- ceeded in places such as northern Italy where people already relished pulmentum (polenta) made from millet or barley. In contrast, it is argued—problematically— that potatoes and tomatoes were initially treated with suspicion because of their similarity to poisonous belladonna.^ A similar framework has explained Europe's embrace of tobacco: its purported therapeutic effects matched the European ob- session with the quest for a universal panacea.**
'' Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange. Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge. Mass., 1991). 4, 184, 125-126, 143, 153. Similarly, Marshall Sahlins developed the idea of "commodity indigenization" to argue that non-Western cultures did not passively accept European goods but incorporated them on their own terms, in ways that were consistent with their cultures; Sahlins. "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of "the World-System,' " Proceedings ofthe British Academy 74 (1988): 1-51. Jordan Goodman uses Sahlins's model lu help account for tobacco's success in Europe; Goodman, Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London. 1994), 41-42.
^ J. H. Elliott. The Old World and the New. 1492-I650 (Cambridge, 1970), 8, 15. Other works in this tradition include Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1984); Anthony Pagden. The Fall of Natural Man {Cambridge, 1982); Stephen Greenblatt, Man-elous Possessions: The Wonder ofthe New World (Chicago, 1991 ); and Claudia Swan, "Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Early Modern Dutch Trade." in Schiebinger and Swan. Colonial Botany.
** Alan Davidson, "Europeans' Wary Encounter with Potatoes, Tomatoes, and Other New World Foods," in Nelson Eoster and Linda S. Cordell, eds., Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World (Tucson, Ariz., 1992), 3. Ken Albala writes that "the key" to explaining a food's acceptance "ap- pears to be whether the new food was considered analogous to something already standard in the diet or could be substituted in a recipe with comparable results"; Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 233-238. The idea of "analogousness" is often an important mechanism for the absorption of new goods and is one that I discuss below in accounting for changes in chocolate's com- position, but it does not apply in the initial phase of European assimilation of chocolate. Both volumes suggest that more research is needed on the diffusion of tomatoes and potatoes, for the notion that there was considerable resistance to them rests on literary sources, whereas evidence from the inventories of a Sevilian hospital show their regular use by the late sixteenth century; Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price of Revolution in Spain. ¡50J-1650 (New York, 1965). The hospital inventories record regular purchases with no speeial explanation; see, for instance. Archivo de la Diputación de Sevilla, Hospital Cinco Llagas, lib. 110, 1591-1595.
^ Among others, see Sarah Augusta Dickson, Panacea or Precious Bane: Tobacco in Sixteenth Cen-
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The "cultural-functionalist" model is also apparent in theoretically informed his- tories of consumption. The work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is both illustrative and influential. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu actively disputed Platonic and Kantian traditions (whose heirs are biological de- terminists) that accept a natural and universal capacity to discern the inherently beautiful or excellent. Instead, he sought to show the contingent and contextual basis of aesthetic determinations. His thesis is that "taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed." Bourdieu argued that seemingly subjective pleasures accord with social hierarchies.!*^ The particular form that the human capacity to discriminate between sights, sounds, touch, and flavor (alias taste) takes at a given historical moment, he affirmed, serves the interests of those in power.
Echoing the findings of sociologists from Thorstein Veblen to Bourdieu, cultural historians, by and large, have eschewed biological or economic determinism and instead theorize taste as socially constructed. The cultural-functionalist model of taste is apparent in what is perhaps the most innovative and important study to date on the intermingled history of colonialism and consumerism, Sidney Mintz's Sweet- ness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Its central thesis is that the seemingly unquenchable desire for sugar in the modern world is not simply the out- come of the tongue's biologically based affinity for sweetness, but rather the his- torical result of a conjuncture of factors. As Mintz traces sugar's transformation from a medicinal additive to a luxury good among the upper classes, he argues that sugar "embodied the social position of the wealthy and powerful." He points to "sugar's usefulness as a mark of rank—to validate one's social position. To elevate others, or to define them as inferior." Sugar use traveled down to other classes in large part because their members accepted the meanings of their social superiors: "those who controlled the society held a commanding position not only in regard to the avail- ability of sugar, but also in regard to at least some of the meanings that sugar prod- ucts acquired . . . the simultaneous control of both the foods themselves and the meanings they are made to connote can be a means of a pacific domination."" For Mintz, like Bourdieu, class hegemony is based on a trickle-down interpretation of the diffusion of taste.
Some scholars have faulted the "emulation" model for assuming an "identity between this 'trickle-down' phenomenon and imitative behavior." An astute critic, Colin Campbell, points out that "the fact that a merchant or shop-keeper was now
tuty Literature (New York, 1954): Goodman, Tobacco in History, 41-44. I offer another interpretation of tobacco's transculturation—similar to the one offered here for chocolate—in Marcy Norton. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate, ¡492-1700 (Ithaca, N.Y., forthcoming), expanded from my dissertation, "New World of Goods: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in thé Spanish Empire, 1492-1700" (University of California. Berkeley, 2000).
^^'^'\eTTc^ouTÚ'\G\i, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste.Xxam.K\c\\aTÚ'H\ct{C?íxn- bridge, Mass., 1984). 6. 3; Loïc Wacquant, "Taste," in T. B. Bottomore and W. Outhwaite, eds.. The Btackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought (Oxford. 1992). 662.
'̂ Sidney W. M'miz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Susar in Modern History (New York 19851 140, 139, 153, 166-167. ' ' '
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