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Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. By marcy norton. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008. 352 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
Among the defining ambitions of Atlantic history is to elaborate the ways that various exchanges between the Old and New Worlds were reciprocal in character-a goal that is fully realized throughout Marcy Norton's outstanding new book. Hers is a history of commodities, but in the fullest sense of the term; that is, the exchanges she describes are often more cultural in nature than they are economic. Norton deftly demonstrates that tobacco and chocolate quickly came to serve as "a bridge between material and symbolic levels of experience" for early modern Europeans (p. 9), mirroring the role they had long played in Mesoamerican cultures. Beginning her study with the initial encounters of the Spanish with indigenous Americans during the early sixteenth century, she mines a variety of texts to show how the conquistadores shared in the "material grammar" of tobacco-smoking rituals that "signaled peace" (p. 50); similarly, they also first "tasted chocolate in the context of diplomacy" (p. 51). Europeans' precarious status in the Americas often made such "role-playing" necessary for establishing good relations with natives, even as their "mimesis" subtly undermined imperial civilizing ideologies (p. 48). At the same time, Norton traces the creative adjustments that native peoples made in order to retain a prominent place for tobacco and chocolate in their besieged societies as the Spanish consolidated their power over Central and South America.
Most of her book, however, is devoted to the reception of these "new" commodities among the Spanish. The fourth chapter examines the changes they helped engender among migrants to the New World, the criollos (creoles) whose embrace of tobacco and chocolate...