Commodities and Power: Tracking Europe's Relations With Asia in the Classroom

Abstract

From their high point in the early 2000s, commodity histories seem to be in decline. If the publishing world has retreated, it is also the case that teaching with commodities has never been more rewarding. For the past few years, I have been experimenting with different variants of a class that aims to use recent scholarship on a half dozen commodities not to track their long trajectories across time but rather to help students work through one of the great questions of global history: the changing relationship between Europe and Asia across the period from roughly 1500–1900. Looking at everyday commodities provides a more concrete way to consider this question, revealing how Asian or European consumers who never ventured far from home participated in a global shift with enormous consequences. In this brief historiographical essay, I explore a selection of works examining six different commodities—silver, spices, deerskins, porcelain, tea and opium—that provide a clear sense of shifting relations between Europe and Asia across the early modern period.