Commoditization, Consumption and Interpretive Complexity: The Contingent Role of Cowries in the Early Modern World

Summary

 The commoditization of cowrie shells in the 17th and 18th centuries was central to the economics of the consumer revolution of the early modern world. Cowries drove the Africa trade that cemented economic relationships between rulers, investors, merchants, and planters in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. From their origins in the Pacific, to the markets of India, from Europe to West Africa, and from West Africa to the New World, cowries played a central role as both commodities and consumer goods in their own right. Using an object biography approach, I will use documentary evidence and shells excavated from archaeological sites to trace the complex web of global and local interactions that formed around the distribution of two species of Indo-Pacific snail shells, Monetaria moneta and Monetaria annulus.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Material Worlds: Archaeology, Consumption, and the Road to Modernity   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 77