Book Talk| Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade, And Foreign Goods In Nineteenth-Cecntury Colombia

Join us for a book talk by historian Ana María Otero-Cleves (University of York) who will discuss her new work, Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade, and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. The book tells the story of how peasants, formerly enslaved people, market women, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world. By studying how popular consumers altered global processes from below, Otero-Cleves hopes to challenge ongoing stereotypes about Latin America’s peripheral role in the world economy through the nineteenth century, and its undisputed dependency on the Global North. Otero-Cleves also invites us to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between citizenship, popular consumption, and political economy in nineteenth-century Colombia, and sheds light on new methodologies and approaches for studying the material world of men and women who left little record of their own experiences.

 

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About the Presenter: Ana María Otero-Cleves is a Lecturer in the History of Latin America at the University of York (York, UK). She joined York in 2023, having previously held the position of Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Otero-Cleves specialises in the history of nineteenth-century Colombia and Latin America, with a particular interest in the history of consumption, global history, and legal culture. She is the author of Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Cambridge University Press, 2025), winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition (2022). Otero-Cleves is also an enthusiastic public historian and co-founder of the public history initiative Historias para lo que Viene (Histories for what’s to come).  Historias para lo que Viene is a collaborative project in which historians, public humanists, and communities affected by the Colombian armed conflict come together to aid the process of peacebuilding in Colombia, through public history workshops and other collective projects, including #ClasealaCalle. (@clasealacalle).