"When I drink, I think; and when I think, I drink": The Delights of Consumption in the Early Modern Atlantic World

If people liked to believe (and many of us presumably still do) that drinking and thinking went together, this coupling of a commodity with its imagined virtues points to what two quite dissimilar books have as a common thread. Marcy Norton's study deals primarily with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish Atlantic, David Hancock's primarily with the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. Norton's book is relatively short; Hancock's is quite long. Norton's work is mostly cultural history, Hancock's business history; although both pay attention to economics. Norton's book could be read as a series of essays, many of which make exciting excursions onto distinct plots of historiographic turf; Hancock's book is a systematically organized dissection of the Madeira wine complex propelled by a vigorously advanced thesis about how the trade developed. They share, however, a commitment to telling the story of early modern Atlantic commodities in terms of the meanings people attached to those goods, an approach that downplays, if it doesn't ignore, supply-and-demand, prices, and the constraints of geography and climate. Both also bring together food history with the study of the "consumer revolution," reflected in the prizes they have won: Hancock's of the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in the Best Book of European Wine category and Norton's of the Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award.²

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures is built around the insight that tobacco and chocolate, "discovered" by the Spanish early in their sixteenth-century Caribbean exploration, did not become consumer goods at home until the seventeenth century. Rather than their addictiveness or their use-value quickly attracting Spanish consumers, tobacco and chocolate initially were understood by Europeans in terms that the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica created; and their subsequent place in Spanish culture was defined by syncretic adaptation that left a Mesoamerican imprint, even when not fully recognized as such, on Spanish use and meanings. This was a slow, century-long process, one in which the periphery of empire culturally reshaped the core (thus challenging how we interpret European domination of the Americas).

In her first chapter, Norton begins by arguing that she can draw evidence from both the Nahuatl and Maya speakers of Mesoamerica as they shared food practices and used cacao as a common currency. Then, making imaginative use of sixteenth-century manuscript illustrations, Norton explores the way the Mexica (that is, Nahuatl speakers whom historians occasionally call Aztecs) experienced "the sacred and the social" through the use of tobacco and chocolate. Both served to define social relationships and also to bring humans closer to the divine, and both were central to virtually all the important rituals of the Mexica. These substances "provoked multiple sensory responses" (pp. 42-43)—olfactory, gustatory, visual, tactile, and kinesthetic—that brought immense pleasure to or altered consciousness of the person drinking, chewing, or smoking. One or both were used to assist in childbirth, to install new rulers, to assure bravery, to cement marriage alliances, and (chocolate, reddened with achiote) as a surrogate for blood in rituals of sacrifice.

From the outset, the Spanish recorded, without fully understanding, the importance of chocolate and tobacco to the Mexica. Moreover, they tried both—as means, Norton suggests, to establishing a cultural "middle ground" that facilitated difficult diplomatic and commercial interactions. With fragmentary evidence, but with a subtle reading of documentary accounts, Norton concludes that the Spanish could occasionally put aside what they were culturally prepared "to see" and, in order to survive, "see the reality": that is, to try tobacco and...