Reading Schivelbusch on the Commodification of Everyday Substances
I ran into this book a few years back when I was trying to understand why certain luxury goods became normalized across cultures faster than others. The premise is straightforward. He looks at coffee, chocolate, tea, tobacco, and spices and traces how they moved from exotic curiosities to everyday staples and what that shift reveals about power, labor, and social structures. It is not a cooking book. It is not a recipe collection. It is a historical analysis with an economic angle. The book is divided into sections that each focus on a different substance. The structure is chronological within those sections. He starts with spices like pepper and cinnamon, moves through stimulants like coffee and tea, then touches on intoxicants. What makes it useful for research is how he keeps coming back to the same mechanism: desire is manufactured, then supply chains are built to satisfy it, and then the substance becomes culturally invisible because it is everywhere. I found the spice section particularly useful when I was looking at how trade routes shaped colonial policy. Schivelbusch does not spend much time on flavor profiles. He spends time on pricing, on who controlled the routes, and on how European powers reorganized entire economies around these commodities. The tobacco chapter covers a similar pattern but with a different outcome because tobacco was grown domestically in colonies rather than imported through a single chokepoint like the spice islands.
One thing beginners often miss is that Schivelbusch is not arguing that these substances caused specific historical events in a direct causal way. He is showing correlation between the availability of certain goods and shifts in social behavior, work patterns, and political economy. The coffee house, for instance, becomes a space where bourgeois public opinion forms, but that is not his main point. His main point is that the infrastructure needed to deliver coffee at scale required colonial enterprises that changed governance models in places like Britain and France. Here is a practical problem I encountered when using this book as a reference. The citations are sparse. Schivelbusch wrote this originally in German and the English translation does not include the full bibliography in a way that is easy to track down. If you need to verify a specific claim about, say, the volume of tobacco imports in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, you will have to go to the primary sources he references indirectly. I found that works by Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude fill that gap for the Dutch case. For the colonial sugar and spice trades, the Cambridge Economic History of Europe volumes are more reliable for raw data. The book has limitations. It covers mostly Europe and its colonies. There is almost nothing on how these substances were consumed in Asia or Africa before European intervention, which is a significant blind spot. If you want a more global treatment of coffee or tea, you should pair this with works by Mark Pendergrast or Peter Sanden for coffee and with Emma Tarlo or Sarah Rose for tea. Schivelbusch is good at the European reception side. He is thin on the production side outside of the colonial framework he already uses.
Another issue is that some of the arguments feel dated. The book came out in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties depending on the section. Recent scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade and its connection to sugar and coffee consumption has updated a lot of what he glosses over. I would not use this as a primary source for anything involving labor conditions. It treats labor as background noise rather than as a central variable. That is a fair criticism to keep in mind if you are building a research paper or a presentation around his claims. If you are looking to download or access the book, it is still in print through several academic publishers and major booksellers. The original German edition is titled Die Schmeck des Paradieses. You may find cheaper used copies of that edition online. The English translation is published by Pantheon Books and is available in paperback and hardcover. Some university libraries carry it in their history and food studies collections. The most practical takeaway from reading this book is the framework itself. When you encounter any commodity that seems to have become ordinary, ask three questions: who controlled the supply, what social function did it serve once it arrived, and what labor system made it affordable. That pattern repeats across every chapter. It works for coffee in the eighteenth century. It works for sugar in the nineteenth. It works for chocolate in the twentieth. You can apply the same lens to modern commodities without much adjustment.
Get the Full Details
