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POLITICAL ECONOMY/GLOBALIZATION From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000. Edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. 378. Figures. Notes. Index. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.
In the last essay of this volume, Paul Gootenberg argues that the "holistic view" of the commodity-chain approach, one that concentrates on "flows rather than objects or sites," is one that "helps us to overcome traditional divides between internal and external factors and between economic and noneconomic factors in Latin American history, binaries shared by neoclassical and dependency perspectives" (p. 322). Gootenberg's point is echoed, in diverse ways, throughout this twelve-essay volume, as noted by editors Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank. "Indeed, the approach adopted in this book aims to redress the balance which has been lost in the din of battle between dependency scholars and neoliberal research advocates" (p. 353). That balance, in their view, reveals that "[i]international demand for commodities did not imply that the Latin American economies and governments did not benefit...