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Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste. By David Hancock. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 680. Cloth, $50.00.)
Reviewed by Cathy Maison
David Hancock's enthusiasm for the world of Madeira wine began many years ago when he somewhat fortuitously discovered a massive cache of export records in the small Portuguese town of Funchal, on the island for which the wine is named. But if the narrative begins there, it quickly encompasses much more. Hancock weaves an intricate and fascinating portrait of the economy and culture of a luxury drink that made its mark on almost every corner of the Atlantic world from 1650 to 1815. He reconstructs the "commodity chain" of Madeira from vineyards to production, into Atlantic commerce, through warehouses and retail shops, through the technologies and material culture of wine, and onto consumers' tables - from grape to glass. As Hancock takes the reader from the island, into the Atlantic, and through North American port cities into the frontier, he marshals mountains of detail to explain how making, distributing, and consuming Madeira not only contributed to altering the organizational structures of trade and retailing before the Industrial Revolution but also shaped practices of elite sociability. And he argues that a host of incessantly enterprising producers, distributors, agents, storekeepers, artisans, and consumers were able to create these changes far more effectively than the chief policymakers of empires.
Hancock starts with the island's landowners and agriculturalists, who, by the 1660s, had already made a transition from sugar-cane cultivation (which was shifting into the New World) to viticulture, but his larger interest is in explaining the networks of Madeira commerce and consumption, what he calls the "conversations" of trans-Atlantic peoples. Madeira might have been a fairly inconsequential commodity had two very consequential patterns not emerged. One of these involved the multinational character of the island's exporting community and its distinctive efforts to build commercial networks not in the hub-and- spoke manner historians typically reconstruct, but in a decentralized and opportunistic commerce. As Hancock deftly charts, Madeira wine was at first exported primarily by Portuguese island residents and sold to ship captains who stopped off at the island on their way to other Atlantic ports. Over the eighteenth century,...