Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America by Jennifer L. Anderson (review)

Mahogany is a historical study that is as fine-grained and intricate as the finished furniture that Anderson describes so beautifully in this fascinating exploration of a new world extractive industry. Focused on the rise and fall of the mahogany trade over the course of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, Anderson's book reveals the damaging human and ecological costs of this sought-after timber commodity. Using a series of biographical portraits and local studies, Anderson demonstrates how the market for this wood was created, adapted, and sustained by a wide range of individuals whose stories are shaped by everything from their ingenuity and imprudence to their resilience and sheer insistence on survival. It is their stories that allow Anderson to offer a nuanced exploration of capitalism, depicting it not only as a system shaped and sustained by vast structures and discourses, such as slavery, Enlightenment thinking, and imperial competition, but also by a system that was defined by unpredictable human responses. Her work thus fits into the broader conversation scholars have been having over slavery and capitalism, as well as providing a timely reminder of the costs of consumerism in both the eighteenth century and our own.

Anderson begins by setting out the ways in which mahogany became a desirable consumer good as the eighteenth century got under way. Initially side-stepping entrenched debates over whether the consumer revolution was triggered by supply or demand, Anderson instead constructs an argument around the ways in which new social and economic patterns made tropical commodities more available. It was this, combined with knowledge exchange, changes in English trade policy, and finally the sheer beauty of mahogany itself, that gave rise to a new lust for the luster of this tropical wood. Although this privileging of the consumer might have signaled the importance Anderson gives to demand in the story of mahogany trade's precipitous growth, this is in fact not the case. Instead, Anderson tells the story of the consumers to dispense with them. For Anderson, it is the actions of merchants, colonial settlers, adventurers, craftsmen, botanists, and, above all, slaves who powered the rise of this trade in timber.

Thus, after this first chapter, Anderson turns her attention to the heart of her story: the histories of Jamaica, Honduras, Cuba, and Haiti. These tropical regions, and their interlocking history with New England, Britain, and beyond, is where Anderson demonstrates how the mahogany trade took shape. Although consumer demand is never ignored, this is largely a story of the consumer revolution told without the usual recourse to the narrowly defined habitats of consumers. This approach is refreshing. So many histories of eighteenth-century consumerism are anchored in discussions of fashion and style, told through histories of urban print culture and domestic interiors. However, Anderson's explanation of how the shape of consumer demand changed is anchored in the world of labor, technology, and, most originally, ecology. Indeed, as Anderson summarizes toward the end of the book, the way in which consumers assessed the relative value of different types of mahogany from around the Atlantic World depended on "changing environmental and economic conditions" determined well beyond the borders of fashionable society (286). The implied conclusion is that readers should look to the frontiers of the Atlantic World as well as the drawing rooms of metropolitan centers to understand the factors that fashioned taste formation.

The theme of frontiers is never far from the center of the book. In her exploration of the labor it took to source, fell, and transport these enormous logs from the rainforest to the ship's cargo hold, Anderson once again returns to the idea of the frontier, this time to help readers understand how slavery functioned at the center of the Caribbean. In one of the best chapters, on the woodcutting economy of the Bay of Honduras, Anderson lays out the ways in which white Baymen...