Drug commodities , and opium in particular, infuse a range of literary texts. From the poetry of Coleridge and the confessions of Thomas de Quincey through to novels by Dickens, Conan Doyle and Wilde, the intoxicant transformed the Victorian geographical and literary imagination. This chapter begins with an overview of the manifold connections between British literature and opium, before turning to the way writers have imagined opium’s global geographies as a travelling commodity, from Northern India to the Pearl River in China. It considers representations of the two British military campaigns known as the Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60) both in Britain and in later historical novels by Amitav Ghosh . Global opium fictions, it suggests, illuminate the ‘imperial intimacies’ linking its domestic consumption to experiences of the violence of commodity exchange across China, India and their diasporas.

The early modern period witnessed an expansion of global trade that accelerated the movement of people, goods, and technologies, as well as cultural practices, languages, tastes, and ideas. This chapter examines the representation of commodities in the period by focussing on an illustrative example, coffee in early modern England, and the various literary forms to which it gave rise. It charts the passage of coffee from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe, the parallel circulation of textual material on coffee across works of travel, natural history, and natural philosophy, and the emergence of the coffeehouses and the new modes of literary sociability they produced. In doing so, it reveals the importance of this commodity to some of the most significant developments in the literary and intellectual culture of the period, including shifting conceptions of taste, fraught debates about identity and assimilation, and the invention of new forms of fiction.

This chapter takes a comparative approach to fossil fuel narratives to consider whether there are continuities between coal fiction and oil fiction in different periods of modernity and whether there are identifiable formal features that unify fossil fuel fiction. The chapter pursues these questions by examining correspondences between Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, which depicts the socio-environmental consequences of oil extraction in the Niger Delta, and several exemplary fictions of extraction written 100 or 150 years earlier, including Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), Joseph Conrad’s ‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), and D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913). The commonalities that persist across the historical gap from coal fiction to oil fiction express distinguishing aspects of life under fossil fuels and constitutive elements of the writing of fossil fuels.

Through an analysis of Jacob Ross’s 1999 story ‘Rum an Coke’, this chapter examines the role of rum in contemporary literature, both as an emblem of the Caribbean and a commodity historically connected to slavery and the plantation economy. As both noun and adjective, word and thing, rum is peculiarly open for language play characteristic of ‘the literary’ and productive for examining the silences and echoes of colonialism in everyday life. By tracking substitutions across commodities in the story—sugar, rum, Coca-Cola, and cocaine—the role of the United States and Europe becomes central to material conditions in contemporary Grenada. Stereotypes about alcohol and drug use deflect historicization of these conditions as legacies of colonization and enslavement in the Caribbean. Through this method, I suggest that reading commodities in historical perspective can frustrate colonialist interpretive circuits to reckon ethically with the past and speculate on postcolonial futures.

The movement of tin frontiers across the globe both shapes and tells the tale of key vectors of capitalist imperialism across the world-system: expropriation, industrialization, decolonization. This chapter takes as its organizing principle the idea of the ‘mystery’ of the commodity and the ‘curse’ of tin. The literary and cinematic narratives examined reveal the capacity of tin texts to shape understandings of the socio-economic, gendered and racial inequalities in both peripheral and core territories. Whether in realist or irrealist representation, the mystery of the commodity of tin is frequently mobilized as plot hook, organising metaphor or structural principle. Whether in the tales of the tío or the memoirs of Cornish miners, in the realist films of Bolivia’s Ukamau group or Hammer’s schlock-visions of extraction in the British South West, we find instructive accounts of land expropriation, leeching of natural resources, ecologies of exhaustion and the broken bodies of the global working class.

Water is rarely a subject of Euro-American literary attention, even if it is one of the most essential commodities today. But this is not the case for literary studies in places such as Oceania and the Caribbean, and in our world’s moment of environmental crises the status of water as (and as not) a commodity is more important than ever. This chapter first sketches out broader trends of water’s commodification in several canonical literary texts. The chapter then examines imaginaries of transnational waters, hydro-power, and water contamination in works by Ruth Ozeki and Nnedi Okorafor. Finally, I focus on contemporary authors from Oceania who prioritise water’s critical importance as they challenge notions of it as a commodity and complicate the ‘Blue Humanities’. This chapter considers shows how fictions and poetry can creatively engage with forms of water’s commodification but also theorise alternative water futures.

Examining the entangled relations between commodities and kin in Indigenous literature, this chapter presents an Indigenous/non-Indigenous research collaboration in the form of dialogue. The first part of the chapter analyses how two Indigenous memoirs, Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed (1973) and Jesse Thistle’s From the Ashes (2019), critique western commodification by elaborating on concepts of relationality and responsibility. The second part of the chapter analyses the processes of commodification of Indigenous lives for western consumption in the context of climate change, drawing on Cherie Dimaline’s novel The Marrow Thieves (2017) and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s essay collection titled Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). The chapter’s broader contention is that the genre of Indigenous memoir, which often represents Indigenous bodies as ‘anti-commodity’, adds to conceptualisations that aim to redefine relationships of respect and reciprocity between humans and more-than-human beings.

Taking my cue from the recent critical and popular efflorescence of social reproduction theory, this chapter looks to the commodified gendered dynamics of our neoliberal conjuncture by focusing on migrant women’s poorly paid domestic work. It draws on two novels about female domestics, published either side of the 2008 financial crash, Thrity Umrigar’s Mumbai-set tragedy, The Space Between Us (2005) and Christy Lefteri’s topical, Cypriot-based Songbirds (2021). Both make visible the gendered labour not taken into account sufficiently in economic discussion, while simultaneously reflecting the challenges of writing about those with lesser social standing. If Umrigar investigates the tensions of madamhood from a self-confessed problem-space within (inviting her middle-class readers to do the same), Lefteri struggles to render the same concerns from without (encouraging the passive hand-wringing of a European liberal readership). One final tension troubles both books though: while registering and resisting processes of commodification, they simultaneously commodify the voices of women who otherwise might not have the means to tell, or sell, their own stories. In this way, the novels express the problems of commodification inherent to an uneven literary marketplace.

As a material and literary world, the Silk Road ‘reorients’ our maps of both global capitalism and world literature. The commodities that circulated along the Silk Road included not only objects such as silks, leather, pottery, spices, silver and paper, but also artisans and courtesans, foods and cuisines, languages and knowledges, ideas, ideologies, texts and cultural institutions. This chapter explores the connections between world literature and Silk Road commodities, focusing on the global cultures of tea and specifically the literary culture of the teahouse, which it reads as a precursor to the coffeehouse of early modern literary culture. The history of tea’s origins and proliferation, and of its production and consumption as well as attendant technologies, material cultures, rituals and spaces, allows us to track its movement from the Silk Road to Europe, specifically through the rise and development of teahouses and the intercultural dialogues facilitated by the practice of tea consumption. Bringing together examples of tea poetry in Chinese, Japanese, Moroccan-Arabic and Sufi literatures this chapter shows how tea is a staple feature of fictional worlds across connected literary cultures. In doing so, it explores the broader potential for using the commodity cultures of the Silk Road as a framework for literary study in a global context.

In European voyage narratives, the islands of Polynesia are frequently imagined in Edenic terms as bountiful green landscapes ripe with fecund soils, fruit-bearing trees, and available women, articulating colonial fantasies of resource abundance and fertility. This chapter examines three texts written at different moments in the long twentieth century as they disrupt Pacific fertility myths from settings scarred by fertilizer mining. Focusing on imaginaries of guano and phosphate in three regions of the Pacific basin—Walpole Island (near New Caledonia) as it appears in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900); the Chincha Islands reconstructed in Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s God of Luck (2007); and Banaba as imagined by the Capitalize-Kiribati writer Teresia Teaiwa (1998)—this chapter shows how writers have undermined the fictions of fertile islands through their attention to fertilizer extractivism and its anti-reproductive effects. Equally, it shows how they reimagine fertility as a relation rather than a resource, centring the shared reproductive work of an assemblage of birds, people, nutrients, islands, and ancestors.

This chapter considers SPAM’s emergence as a mass commodity and agent of ‘gastrocolonisation’, charting its appearance in literary texts and popular culture from witty ‘SPAM-ku’ poems’ to the work of Indigenous poets from Oceania. It begins by discussing the commodity’s emergence as a cheap protein source for immigrants and urban working-class Americans during the Depression, before tracing SPAM’s migration to countries such as Hawaii, South Korea and Guam, where American military personnel were stationed during wartime. While SPAM captured hearts and appetites, transitioning from a war ration to haute cuisine, it has been seen as problematic by Indigenous writers such as Craig Santos Perez. The chapter ends by examining SPAM’s appearance in Perez’s poetry as it visualises the devastation wrought upon the CHamoru body and land.

The two possibly most-sold and most-read ‘classics’ of the postcolonial canon, such as it may be, are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899/1902) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Both have achieved bestseller status, and have been reprinted in the thousands, in iconic editions in Everyman’s, OUP’s World’s Classics, and Heinemann’s African Writers Series, not to mention Penguin. Both works have become exemplary literary commodities, extracted from their complex initial contexts of production, launched into mass-market global circulation and transformed into packaged teaching texts (often within the framework of similarly commodified anthologies) within highly normed pedagogical systems. This article takes a third mass-market paperback novel, M. J. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets (1996), to make an argument about the ways in which postcolonial texts can also be read as anti-commodities, as auratic entities that resist commodification. As such, they give rise to affective networks within which commodities are constantly accruing social use values – thereby making them co-agents in processes of subversion and revivification.