John Soluri
Empire’s Footprint: The Ecological
Dimensions of a Consumers’
Republic
I
n 1967, Field and Stream magdesire, and ideas about the “good
azine published a story entitled
life” (3). Social and cultural histori“Fishing in the Banana Repubans have challenged the idea that
lics.” Among the places singled out
mass consumption gave birth to a
for adventure sport fishing was Lake
corporate-controlled, homogeneous
Yojoa in Honduras—the banana repubconsumer society by demonstratlic par excellence—where anglers
ing how twentieth-century social
reportedly landed fifteen-pound
movements led by women, African
largemouth bass (1). Like many
Americans, and labor unions approfishing stories, this one concealed
priated discourses, symbols, and
as much as it revealed, including
spaces of consumption to win
the fact that the origins of Lake
political rights, gain greater access
Yojoa’s bass could be traced to the
to resources, and even promote
same source as the billions of
the conservation of endangered
bananas that routinely arrived in
species (4).
U.S. supermarkets: the United
However, historians have just
Fruit Company. The history of Lake
begun to explore the ecological
Yojoa’s bass began one evening in
dimensions of mass consumption,
United Fruit’s social club, where,
spurred in part by a concern that
Figure 1. Sweet, affordable, and widely available, the tropical banana became a
over drinks, a group of North staple of the American diet by the early twentieth century, as illustrated by this the United States contributes disAmerican employees took up a col- 1902 photo of a banana cart in New York City. In the United States, the availability proportionately to major environlection to stock the lake. In 1954–55, of the banana reflected the rise of the nation as a global industrial powerhouse. mental problems including the
they introduced some 1,800 large- South of the border, on the other hand, the fruit was grown in large plantations, loss of biodiversity and climate
mouth bass from Florida. The bass whose workers confronted pervasive inequality, political repression, and eco- change. Indeed, U.S. consumption
population, feasting on native fish, logical consequences common to many Latin American countries. (Courtesy of rates are staggering: in 2004, the
grew tremendously over the next Library of Congress)
United States consumed 20.7 million
ten years before declining abruptly
barrels of oil per day—more than
in the early 1970s (2).
the combined consumption of China, Russia, Japan, Germany, and
This tale of North American anglers in a poor Central American
India. The U.S. fleet of private cars surpassed the 200 million mark in
nation comes to us via Robert Stover, a Canadian-born plant pathologist
2000 and North Americans drive more miles than do the inhabitants
who devoted his career to controlling diseases of bananas. Both his
of other nations. The use of electricity in middle-class households
work and leisure activities allude to some of the ways in which the
increased more than thirty-fold over the course of the twentieth century.
ecological “footprint” of twentieth-century North American consumers
Finally, people in the United States eat a lot of meat (5).
extended beyond the nation’s borders: not only did United Fruit clear
These facts go a long way toward explaining how the United States,
forests, drain wetlands and expose tens of thousands of people to peswith less than five percent of the world’s population, consumed approxiticides, but its middle-class North American employees introduced exotic
mately twenty-seven percent of the world’s total primary energy supply in
species of fish into the ecosystem in their spare time (Figure 1).
2000. All of these inputs generate a great deal of output: the United States
Since Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption,”
emits approximately twenty percent of the world’s greenhouse gases (e.g.,
in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), scholars have debated the
carbon dioxide). In addition, the nation’s inhabitants generated 243 million
origins, meanings, and functions of consumption. Some have followed
tons of non-toxic trash in 2009. The twentieth-century United States was
Veblen in focusing on how consumption delineates lines of social class.
the most resource-intensive society in the world, a “consumers’ republic”—
Others, including Jackson Lears and Roland Marchand, have called
to borrow historian Liz Cohen’s phrase—whose ecological footprint grew
attention to the rise of mass advertising and its role in shaping taste,
to empire-like proportions over the course of the twentieth century.
OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 15–20
doi: 10.1093/oahmag/oar042
© The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
This economy-sized article cannot do justice to its super-sized
subject. Instead, I provide three historical examples in which U.S.
consumption patterns directly contributed to large-scale ecological
changes: the use of marine mammals as raw materials for lubrication,
illumination, and fashion in the nineteenth century; a dramatic
increase in the presence of tropical foods in U.S. diets in the early
twentieth century; and late-twentieth-century tourism. Taken together,
the examples are not intended to be representative of anything more
than the scope, scale, and diversity of major ecological changes
provoked by the consumption of a wide array of goods and services.
I hope that they will spark an interest on the part of readers to pursue
the subject further via research and/or teaching (6).
Creature Comforts
Mass consumption is almost always located in the twentieth century
(7). There is no denying the unprecedented economic expansion that
took place in the past century, but the global roots of U.S. consumption
patterns can be traced back to the earliest days of the republic when
whaling vessels linked the fledgling nation to far-flung places, people,
and resources (8). The largely New England–based whalers initially
hunted right whales in the North Atlantic, but by the 1780s they
sailed to the so-called “Southern Fishery,” where they hunted whales
along the coastlines of South America and Africa. Soon thereafter,
whalers began rounding the southernmost points of both continents
in search of prey (primarily right and sperm whales, but also gray,
bowhead, and humpback whales). Indeed, one of the striking findings
of recent research on U.S. whalers is the degree to which they crisscrossed the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. While some aspects of
whaling took place on a “preindustrial” scale and pace (e.g., small
crews that routinely spent months at sea), the geographical range of
operations was decidedly global.
In contrast to many of the indigenous cultures that they encountered on their journeys, New Englanders did not fancy whale meat.
Instead, they desired whales primarily for the oil that could be rendered
from their blubber and used for illumination and lubrication—two
basic items in nineteenth-century households and factories that those
of us born into a world of electric lights and motors generally take for
granted. Sperm whale oil burns brightly and relatively free of smoke but
its cost limited its use primarily to lighthouses and public buildings.
The less expensive oil of right whales found a market in home lighting
(Figure 2). Early industrialists prized sperm whale oil as a lubricant
because it is noncorrosive and retains its integrity at high temperatures. Sperm whales also yielded a rare and highly prized fatty
substance—ambergris—that perfume makers used to “fix” volatile
fragrances. An ironic use for a waste product extracted from sperm
whale intestines (9)!
The discovery of petroleum deposits in western Pennsylvania in
1860 resulted in whale oil being replaced by mineral oils such as
kerosene. The U.S. whaling industry entered a major decline in the
1860s, but not before contributing directly and indirectly to long-lasting
ecological changes in far-flung, seemingly disconnected places (10).
From a baseline population estimated around two million, nineteenthcentury whalers killed approximately one-quarter of a million sperm
whales. The results of a long-term study indicate that sperm whales in the
Atlantic did not suffer a long-term population decline due to nineteenthcentury whaling activities (11). This may be due partly to whalers’ preference for adult males that would have spared females and juveniles.
Right, gray, and humpback whales were less fortunate. In New Zealand
Figure 2. In this late nineteenth-century Currier & Ives hand-colored lithograph, American whalers in the
south Atlantic or “Southern Fishery” attack a right whale. So named because early whalers considered them the
“right” variety to hunt, they were prized by Americans for their relatively inexpensive oil, used in home lighting. Whalers profoundly shaped the global environment not only by decimating whale and other marine
mammal populations, but by introducing domesticated animals and the market economy in far-flung regions.
(Courtesy of Library of Congress)
16 OAH Magazine of History • October 2011
and coastal New England, hunting activities all but extirpated right
whales.
Whalers also had indirect impacts on the seas and islands that they
visited. They circulated geographical knowledge eagerly sought by
investors and states seeking territory and wealth, serving as a vanguard
of sorts for other forms of extractive economies. Moreover, North
American “whalers” were opportunistic: they hunted fur seals, sea
otters, and sea lions, and they traded for the pelts and feathers of
terrestrial critters including guanacos and rheas. These hunters of the
high seas also introduced domesticated animals like sheep and goats
on various islands to create a future food supply. Fur seal hunting took
on its own life. In a fascinating example of capitalist risk-taking, vessels
departed from New England without cargo, filling their holds with the
salted hides of otters and fur seals en route to China where sea captains
would exchange furs (sought by Chinese felt makers) for porcelain and
other manufactured goods desired in New England. One historian
estimates that 2.5 million sealskins entered Canton between 1792 and
1812 (12). By the 1830s, hunting decimated regional populations of sea
otters and fur seals in the southern hemisphere.
Tasting the Tropics
Between the 1870s and the 1920s, the U.S. population rose from
38.5 million people to more than 100 million (including more than
23 million arrivals from Europe). Improved public health measures,
including vaccinations, public water supplies, and sewage systems,
lowered mortality rates in fast-growing cities. A general rise in workers’
discretionary income enabled increases in per capita consumption of
foodstuffs and other goods. Business corporations capable of producing
and distributing goods at previously unattainable economies of scale
proliferated as capitalists invested in technologies, forced consolidations, and repressed labor movements. By 1910, “King Coal” was the
primary fuel that powered factories and locomotives that operated on a
rapidly expanding network of railroads.
This was the national context in which U.S. consumption rates of
tropical agricultural commodities skyrocketed. Between 1870 and
1920, total sugar consumption grew by seven times while annual
per capita consumption more than doubled from 35.3 pounds to
85.5 pounds. Between 1883 and 1900, per capita coffee consumption
jumped from 9 pounds to 13 pounds. But the ubiquity of bananas—a
highly perishable, unprocessed fruit—perhaps best captured the transformation of U.S. society into a consumers’ republic. By 1913, annual
per capita consumption of bananas exceeded 20 pounds, a rate only
surpassed by apples. The banana trade was largely responsible for the
success of United Fruit—a transnational corporation that made its
money producing, shipping, and retailing not a raw material like copper,
henequen, rubber, nitrates, or even sugar, but a consumer product that
became available throughout the calendar year at prices affordable to
most working people (Figure 3).
The banana, like the dry cereal products it so often accompanied on
North American breakfast tables, was an industrial food whose production, by the 1920s, was controlled by a handful of vertically integrated
companies that produced and promoted their product directly to
consumers in the form of billboards, magazines, and recipe booklets.
In some ways the banana was (and is) an ideal food for U.S. consumers:
inexpensive, ready-to-eat, always available, self-packaged, and “healthy.”
Moreover, bananas, along with coffee and sugar, penetrated deeply into
vernacular U.S. cultures via slang, music, literature, and advertising
images such as Miss Chiquita. United Fruit also literally brought North
Americans to the tropics via the same railroads and steamship lines
that whisked bananas to consumers. Long before Club Med came on the
scene, United Fruit’s Great White Fleet carried tourists on Caribbean
cruises (13).
Figure 3. Relying on the exploitation of both cheap labor and fertile soils in Latin
America, the United Fruit Company grew into a powerful transnational corporation that controlled most of the production, distribution, and sale of bananas in
the United States. Here, warehouse workers in the U.S. pack ripe bananas on
their way to American retailers. United Fruit not only brought a taste of the tropics to American consumers, but sparked bitter controversy, as it transformed
Latin American ecologies and labor relations. (Courtesy of Library of Congress)
Writers in popular magazines portrayed United Fruit as bringing
the modern world to backward, lazy tropical forests filled with venomous
snakes—“wastelands” converted to productive landscapes via the guiding
hand of no-nonsense Yankee businessmen and science. However, from
an ecological standpoint, the success of the export banana industry—
similar to the sugar and coffee trades—was rooted in the fleeting fertility
of forest soils. From Veracruz, Mexico to Santa Marta, Colombia,
lowland tropical rainforests gave way to bananas, cacao, rubber, sugar,
pasture, railroads, and company towns. In any given year, U.S. fruit
companies cultivated tens of thousands of acres and enjoyed access to
hundreds of thousands more. For the first half of the twentieth century,
access to fertile lands and low-wage migrant laborers kept production
costs down and profits high.
Throughout this period, U.S. consumers ate a single variety of
banana: the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” that had historically been
favored by shippers and wholesalers because of its ability to withstand
the rigors of transport. However, as early as 1910, banana growers
became alarmed about the spread of a fungal blight that damaged Gros
Michel plants and lowered yields. Scientists enlisted to solve the problem
concluded that the only long-term solution was to find a new variety of
banana resistant to the disease. However, when United Fruit tested
OAH Magazine of History • October 2011 17
new varieties, U.S.-based marketers balked over quality concerns.
Wary about losing their stranglehold on the U.S. market, United Fruit
executives clung to their cherished Gros Michel banana. While scientists struggled to find a way to control the disease, the company used its
considerable political power to gain access to more land, constantly
shifting its banana farms to stay one step ahead of the disease (14).
Beginning in the 1930s, banana plantations migrated from the
humid Caribbean of Central America and Colombia to the more arid
Pacific lowlands where irrigation became an essential input for export
production. By the late 1950s, Ecuador became the main supplier of
Gros Michel bananas to the United States. The everyday presence of
Gros Michel bananas in U.S. retail markets then, belied the ecological
instabilities associated with their mass production that fragmented
species-rich ecosystems and destabilized hundreds of thousands of
livelihoods in banana zones throughout Latin America. When United
Fruit finally converted to disease-resistant varieties in the 1960s, they
trademarked them “Chiquita Bananas” to appeal to consumers’ sense of
nostalgia for a bygone era (15).
The heightened emphasis on quality and yields resulted in a massive
increase in the application of fertilizers and pesticides, giving rise to a
new set of environmental and public health problems. For example, the
widespread use of DBCP, a chemical compound that boosted yields by
killing nematodes that damaged the roots of Cavendish plants, exposed
thousands of workers to a substance linked to human sterility and cancer.
The United States severely restricted the use of DBCP in 1977, but its
continued use on Central American banana plantations triggered mass
protests and class action lawsuits, some of which are still pending.
This brief history of bananas reveals how corporate control over
mass markets and perceptions of quality contributed to long-term ecological degradation in tropical Latin America, initially in the form of
deforestation and later in the form of pollution from agrochemical use.
However, as Liz Cohen has argued, post-war mass consumption in the
United States became increasingly segmented, not homogenized. For
example, counter-culture movements emerged in the 1960s that rejected
chemical-intensive agriculture and highly processed foods. By the end of
the twentieth century, organic foods, once a symbol of hippie communes,
transformed into one of the fastest growing sectors of the food economy
that was increasingly dominated by corporate agribusiness and federal
regulations (16). In addition, transnational nongovernmental organizations have created a fair trade market sector that seeks to promote smallscale, sustainable agriculture. The still small, but increasing presence of
fair trade and/or organic coffees, bananas, chocolate and sugar in U.S.
retail markets has opened up the possibility that changing ideas about
what constitutes healthy, high quality foods will once again lead to qualitative changes in tropical landscapes and livelihoods in Latin America
and beyond (17).
Between 1860 and 1930, U.S. consumption literally and figuratively went bananas. The sheer enormity of U.S. demand for tropical
products resulted in significant ecological degradation in a wide range
of tropical and subtropical ecosystems. After a half century of widespread deforestation, production intensified and degradation increasingly took the form of agrochemical pollution. However, U.S. mass
markets were not merely massive; at times they were highly selective as
in the case of the banana trade where a single variety defined quality
standards for more than fifty years. Over the course of the twentieth
century, quality standards in the United States shifted in response to
evolving foodways and contested consumer politics that in turn shaped
ecologies throughout the tropics.
Getting Away
Not only did tens of millions of Americans acquire a taste for the
tropics in the early twentieth century, they also gained a literal feel for
18 OAH Magazine of History • October 2011
the tropics in the form of rubber tires on bicycles and automobiles. By
the early 1920s, U.S. consumers were buying eighty-five percent of the
world’s automobiles and seventy-five percent of the global rubber supply (18). Rubber, not unlike coffee and bananas, was cultivated on
mixed scales of production in lowland tropical regions (Figure 4).
Henry Ford, seeking to apply his vision of mass production and social
order to the rubber industry, established the sprawling Fordlandia in
Amazonia (19). The project ended in failure partly because plant diseases took a toll on large-scale rubber monocultures. Fortunately for
U.S. motorists, the British had smuggled rubber plants to their Asian
colonies. The arrival of U.S. capital stimulated a boom in rubber tree
planting in Sumatra. In 1900, rubber trees occupied less than 1,000
acres; fifteen years later they covered more than 300,000 acres. By
1930, smallholders reportedly cleared an additional one million acres
for rubber production. The Firestone Tire Company also established
large rubber plantations in Liberia.
Automobiles required far more than rubber. The increased
consumption of gasoline following World War I spurred oil exploration
in many parts of the world. Historian Myrna Santiago argues that the
oil industry in Mexico created an “ecology of oil” that involved a series
of linked legal, social, and ecological transformations (20). By 1919
Figure 4. With an incision made into the bark of the para tree—here seen on a
plantation in the Republic of Cameroon—latex sap is gathered and then refined
into rubber. In 1928, automotive tycoon Henry Ford attempted and failed to
transform a Brazilian rainforest into a modern “jungle city”—Fordlandia— that
could mass produce the useful resource. The widespread adoption of the
automobile in the U.S. depended on the transformation of ecological and labor
systems around the world. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Mexico was the world’s second leading producer of petroleum but the
costs were high: frequent explosions, spills, and refinery fires created
hazardous conditions for workers and area residents. A similar set of
risky conditions prevailed in Venezuela’s rich oil fields which between
1926 and 1947 produced more oil than the entire Middle East (21).
Few consumer items have been more resource-intensive or polluting
than the mass-produced automobile. But environmental historians
have complicated the environmental legacy of cars by demonstrating
how they enabled large numbers of people to travel to parks and scenic
areas. As outdoor recreation became a popular pastime, wilderness
advocates like Aldo Leopold grew concerned about the threats posed by
cars and roads (22). In this sense, mass ownership of automobiles played
a contradictory role in U.S. environmental politics, giving rise to
wilderness advocates and outdoor enthusiasts even as the rubber and
oil needed to produce cars reduced biological diversity and created
pollution outside of the United States.
In addition to touring by automobile, North Americans increasingly
traveled abroad. Tourism started in Hawaii and Cuba as early as the
1920s (23). In 1927, the fledgling Pan American Airways initiated service from Florida to Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean (Figure 5). By
the 1930s, Pan Am offered flights from San Francisco to Hong Kong.
Company planes hopped across the Pacific Ocean, making stops in
Hawaii, Midway Island, Guam, and the Philippines. In order to create
safe conditions for sea landings, Pan Am hired crews to destroy coral
reefs in addition to erecting luxury hotels to meet the needs of its affluent
clientele (24). Following World War II, leisure air travel increased
because of overlapping cultural, economic, and technological changes.
Places like Cuba initially lured tourists interested in gambling, dancing,
and sex, but the Caribbean ultimately became a hub of mass tourism
because of environmental conditions: sun, sand, and warm (calm) seas
could be found during the harsh winter months of North America.
This is not to say that Caribbean vacation landscapes were entirely
natural: indeed, considerable ecological change took place in order to
build tourist infrastructure. Tourists’ interest in recreational beaches
has meant that the very ecological features that have drawn U.S. tourists—including coral reefs, mangroves, and coves—are degraded by
tourists’ daily activities. These range from scuba diving to defecating,
for which neither enforceable regulations nor adequate infrastructure
are in place. Historians have written few environmental histories of
leisure places outside of the United States, but this is likely to change
in light of the leading role played by tourism in driving economies and
environmental change throughout much of the world.
Gone Fishing: Consumption as Hook or Red Herring?
The three examples sketched above reveal how from the earliest days of
the republic to the present, U.S. citizen-consumers and institutions
have contributed to significant ecological change well beyond the
nation’s geopolitical borders. Of course, those very borders, along
with the population, economy, and relative military power of the
U.S. transformed dramatically over time. From an ecological standpoint, the most unsettling long-term trend is a fairly steady rise in total
consumption of resources. Even as production processes and many
consumer devices—with the notable exception of automobiles—
became more efficient during the twentieth century, overall rates of
consumption continued to climb. This essay has not tried to explain
why this is so, but rather has sought to demonstrate the value of transnational approaches to the history of consumption in the United States.
Teaching a subject as broad and multifaceted as consumption can
be daunting. I find that beginning with specific commodities—be it a
banana, an automobile, or tea—is an effective way to hook students.
The ready availability of old advertising images, jingles, and commercials on the Internet enables instructors to integrate the “retro” artifacts
Figure 5. Founded in 1927 as an air mail and passenger service, Pan Am
started with flights between Key West, Florida and Havana, Cuba. By
1941, Pan American World Airways’ “Flying Clipper Cruise” marketed a
two-week Latin American and Caribbean vacation to American consumers,
promising “12,000 wonder-filled miles” of sand, sun, and shore. Building
a tourist infrastructure throughout the region, complete with luxury
hotels and airstrips, had a substantial environmental impact. (Courtesy
of Wikimedia Commons)
OAH Magazine of History • October 2011 19
of mass culture into classroom activities. But a hook should not be
mistaken for an analytical framework. The very seductiveness of consumer cultures past and present can distract students from other
important dimensions of environmental history not the least of which
is the production of goods and services. Consumers and consumption
cannot be separated from workers and livelihood for very long. Moreover, the material resources themselves are important: as I have shown,
evaluating the environmental impacts of consumption depends on
ecological specificity—the kind of whale, banana, or sport fish all mattered a great deal. And then there are those dreadfully boring tax codes,
tariffs, trade agreements, and subsidies that have greatly influenced
patterns of consumption.
Therefore, consumption is probably best used to lead students into
the less glamorous worlds of working environments to encourage students to think about the relationship between production and consumption. This is not an easy task because language, class, culture, and
geography often separate sites of production and consumption. Furthermore, mass consumption has become a very powerful set of ideas
and practices around which people organize their daily lives and form
social relations. Imagining a world without mass consumption is both
disturbing and difficult. However, environmental histories that track
flows of people, ideas, energy, and commodities beyond the borders of
the United States offer the promise of recasting past worlds to imagine
new ones. T
18. Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological
Degradation of the Tropical World, concise rev. ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowan &
Littlefield, 2007), 127.
19. Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle
City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
20. Myrna Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican
Revolution, 1900–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
21. Miguel Tinker Salas, The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in
Venezuela. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
22. Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the
Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2004).
23. Christine Skwiot, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba
and Hawaii (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
24. <http://www.pbs.org/kcet/chasingthesun/companies/panam.html>.
John Soluri is associate professor and director of global studies in the history
department at Carnegie Mellon University. His book, Banana Cultures:
Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras
and the United States (University of Texas Press, 2005), examines the
relationship between the mass consumption of a tropical commodity in the
United States, and environmental and social change in Honduras during
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He teaches courses that offer
historical perspectives on the environment, energy, and food.
Endnotes
1. A. J. McClane, “Fishing in the Banana Republics.” Field and Stream,
December 1967, 86.
2. Robert H. Stover, “The Rise and Decline of Lake Yojoa,” in Bananeros in
Central America, ed. Clyde S. Stevens, (Fort Myers, Fla.: Press Printing
Company, 1989).
3. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America
(New York: Basic Books, 1995); and Roland Marchand, Advertising the
American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1986).
4. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in
Postwar America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
5. Energy Information Agency, <http://www.eia.doe.gov/totalenergy/>;
Vaclav Smil, Energy at the Crossroads (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 58; and
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, <http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/
nonhaz/municipal/index.htm>.
6. Latin America and the Caribbean are overrepresented for the simple reason
that they are the geographical areas that I research and teach.
7. John R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History
of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
2000).
8. Slave ships functioned similarly. See, Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas
Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic
World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
9. Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of
Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American
Whaling, 1816–1906 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
10. Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
11. < http :// www. pbs . org / wgbh / americanexperience / features / interview /
whaling-smith/>.
12. James Kirker, Adventurers to China: Americans in the Southern Oceans (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
13. John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental
Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2005), 41–103.
14. Steve Marquardt, “‘Green Havoc’: Panama Disease, Environmental Change,
and Labor Process in the Central American Banana Industry,” American
Historical Review 106 (February 2001): 49–80.
15. Soluri, Banana Cultures, 161–92.
16. Warren J. Belasco. Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the
Food Industry, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007).
17. Mark Moberg and Sarah Lyon, Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies
(New York: New York University Press, 2010).
20 OAH Magazine of History • October 2011
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