Virginia Dejohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)
Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)
Rather than examine animals and its effect on both colonizers and colonists, Norton prefers to choose two products, namely tobacco and chocolate and attempts to compare how Spanish were totally different from Native Americans in treating and understanding them. According to her, before the Spanish expansion in Mesoamerica, tobacco and chocolate were sacred products there. She points out, “tobacco and chocolate worked in the service of defining and articulating social relationships, so they connected, mediated, and explicated the relationship between humanity and divinity.”[1] To support her statement, Norton explains that “the reconstruction of a Mexica merchant’s celebration illustrates with splendid precision the way that formalized rites imputed social and sacred qualities to tobacco and chocolate, and the way, reciprocally, the sensory experience created by tobacco and chocolate contributed to the concretization of an abstract understanding of the universe, as it did to a social ethos that emphasized caste stratification, kin solidarity, and gender differentiation.”[2] After the Columbia exchange, tobacco and chocolate were transmitted to the old world. However, unlike the people who lived in the new world who thought them were sacred, Europeans in the old world treated them as secular products.
However, since Nicolas Monardes, a well-established physician and prosperous trader of transatlantic commodities in Seville, who published his book — Segunda parte del libro, de las cosas que traen de nuestras Indias occidentales que sirven al uso de la medicina Do se trata del tabaco, y de la sassafras (The second part of the book of the things brought from our Occidental Indies, which are used as medicine: in which Tobacco and Sassafras are discussed) in 1571, tobacco was gradually imported to the old world from the New world. In helping Europeans to recognize the importance of tobacco was useful as medicine, as the first humanist-trained university doctor to systematically consider American material medica, a dramatic reversal of the hostility humanist-inclined botanists and physicians had shown to New World substances until that point, Nicolas Monardes played a significant role in spreading tobacco in Europe.[3] Just as Monardes imported Amerindian knowledge about tobacco into European idiom, so did Hernandez for chocolate. Then in the 17th and 18th century, as chocolate and tobacco were spread in the old world, they were commercialized across the Atlantic world. Unlike those Mesoamericans who treated tobacco and chocolate as sacred products which were endowed divinity, Spanish and other Europeans in the old world treated them as secular products.
Following Crosby and Diamonds, both Norton and Anderson contribute a lot to the historical studies of the Columbia exchange. However, their purposes are totally different. Anderson is an ambitious historian and attempts to challenge traditional cannons in interpreting early American history, while Norton just wants to follow Crosby and fill the gap of the Columbia exchange by choosing chocolate and tobacco as case studies. Paying more attention to the cultural difference between Native American and European colonists in North America, to some degree, Anderson could help us to understand early American history in a new way. In reinterpreting early American history, Anderson attempts to make a new historical synthesis to challenge traditional historical writings of early American history. She thinks the Pequot War, the King Philip’s War and other wars, as well as the American westward were all caused by this cultural difference and they need to be reinterpreted. It is so provocative that, I think, her statements are not so convincing. Of course, we have to admit that Native Americans and colonial Americans were totally different in treating animals, livestock and husbandry. However, we still have to admit that the significance of nation, religion, economy and other factors which have been explored by historians are still helpful for us to understand early American history.
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