John and Mary Bishop left London by train in the spring of 1940 to stay with an old widow in the country. John had just turned thirteen and his sister, who cried the entire trip, was nine. The platform had been full of tearful mothers, but Alice Bishop was not a sentimental woman. She handed her teenage son a roll of pound notes and shook Alice by the shoulders and told her through gritted teeth to “stop yer bawlin.’” She didn’t wave. The pair shared a compartment with four other children, two boys and two girls, who politely ignored Mary’s sobbing. The oldest brother, a few years older than John, stared out the window, rising a little in his seat as they passed a muster of soldiers on one of the platforms. “Our dad’s in France,” said the youngest of the girls sitting across from John and Mary. “Where’s yours?” John just shrugged and Mary began crying harder. John fought back tears himself, unwilling, like his mother, to let the others see him cry.

The six children disembarked at the same platform, a rickety, sunbaked wooden structure surrounded by trees and a muddy cart path. The widow arrived for the Bishops. She was not as old as John had suspected, but much fatter. She was walking, with a basket on one arm, and after a terse greeting, gestured to the two of them to fall in behind. The young girl from the train waved at John as he looked back at the four children, alone on the platform. The widow proved nice enough. She would save up her sugar and butter rations and then let Mary choose from a battered old cookbook what they would bake for Sunday tea. Her little farmhouse was warm and no bombs fell there. She even had a typewriter, where John plunked out transcripts of the wireless reports in the evenings. The widow’s favorite topic of conversation was her eccentric neighbor, a professor of antiquities who, she claimed, had a vast collection of sinister artifacts. She once told the children that her husband had helped him collect a large parcel from the train platform. The professor claimed it contained a magical wardrobe. “Nuts, I say,” she’d exhale. John enlisted at eighteen when the war was winding down. He spent his enlistment sitting in an office in Southampton typing up discharges for returning soldiers. After the war, he worked in a canning factory, but fell to drinking. He committed suicide in 1959. Mary got very into the sixties. Later she moved to Majorca and opened a dog grooming studio.

Thomas Tanner lived south of the river in a thatched house with his parents, grandparents, and seven siblings. Tom was the middle child and had just begun helping his father in the vats, dredging goat and cow hides though the solution of salt and potash. His father told him that his hands would soon turn “tanner’s black,” which scared the eight-year-old who already hated the foul smells that clung to him and the burning that lingered in his nose and eyes after the day’s work was done. The priests had commanded that all workshops were to be closed the day of the tournament. Thomas, his father, and his older brother, Peter, who had lost a hand to gangrene after piercing it on a farrier’s nail on the riverbank, went to watch the joust. The crowd pushed and pulled at the small, stinking boy and eventually, Thomas found himself alone, wandering the alleys on the north side of the cathedral. He tried to make his way toward the jubilant cries of the crowd, but the narrow alleys echoed and channeled the sound so that the shouts seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Eventually, he emerged into the deserted square in front of the church. He watched as a tow-headed boy, a few years older than himself, emerged from the alley opposite and headed towards him. Tom lingered in the shadows, and the boy streaked across the cobblestones towards the gleaming hilt of a sword, standing upright in a stone in the center of the square. The blond boy reached the stone and in one swift motion pulled the sword from it before taking off at a run, back in the direction from which he’d come. Tom continued to wander the streets aimlessly. He found the river sometime after dark and made his way back to his house. It was dark when he arrived. His family had gone to sleep. He never told them about what he saw though there was a good deal of bell ringing and cheering from the far side of the river the next morning. Tom overheard chatter about swords and kings that day around the vats, but he began feeling poorly around noon. His brother led him to a pile of raw goat hides and laid him down on top. His father carried him home at dusk where he died three days later from fever.

David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (Yale, 2009)

Hancock, by telling wine stories, hopes to approach a coherent theory of production, distribution, and consumption. Madeira flowed throughout the Atlantic world and beyond, and its trip from vineyard to table represented a system of networked individuals and institutions. This “wine complex” illustrates the influence and accessibility of commodities in a new, globalizing economy and undermines old assertions that the early modern period was one of rigid, competing empires. Hancock writes, “The boundaries of empire were extremely permeable, and drinkers made the most of the situation.”[1]

During, the period between 1640 (when the Portuguese regained sovereignty from the Spanish Hapsburgs) and 1815, the island of Madeira was a wealthy, cosmopolitan port within the Atlantic triangle. Early experiments with sugar cultivation were quickly overrun by viticulture, a new and profitable industry that forged commercial connections between the island’s Portuguese natives and its controversial foreigners (largely Britons). Ties to “importers, sellers, and drinkers in London, Lisbon, Bahia, and Philadelphia” placed Madeira at the center of a network, one throughout which wine and information moved at the speed of sail. On the island itself, farmers served as intermediaries between wealthy landowners and tenant vintners. These actor-groups, over the course of the 18^th century, experimented with a number of grape varieties with a high degree of attunement to the tastes of foreign markets. Rising prices brought entrepreneurial interlopers into the wine network (supplanting the farmers) and “by the turn of the 19^th century, producers and distributors together had transformed Madeira into a complex, highly processed, expensive, and status-laden beverage.”[2]

When an independent American market reopened after the Revolution, a stockpile of Madeira was waiting. Distributors not only capitalized off the demands of a country that had been too long without refreshing diversion; they also created strata of consumption. Color, flavor, dryness, age, booziness – all discursively influenced the production and consumption of wine across the Atlantic world. People and purses of influence demanded wine that met particular criteria and, thus, Madeira was bound up in circles of fashionability and emulation. Even its packaging evolved to elicit consumer preference. Anglophone North America forged a special alliance with the island, receiving the bulk of wine shipments and its inhabitants consumed more Madeira than any other variety by the early-18^th century.[3] It became the target of boycotts during the early years of the Revolution in response to prohibitive British duties and later to Portuguese trade restrictions. In terms of volume, imports never recovered after independence, while simultaneously, Madeira trade flourished in British India and Asia. Regardless, Madeira would remain “American’s wine” and American’s would comprise the most robust customer-networks that conspired with producers in the making of Madeira. A capitalist, transimperial economy emerged. Hancock writes, “there was too much to be gained by regularity and consistency, by ongoing relationships with suppliers and customers, by the carefully maintained networks.”[4] American wholesalers and merchants dispersed Madeira throughout the colonies and west. The wine complex extended the entire length of the Atlantic seaboard, throughout the Caribbean, into Canada, and west to the frontier taverns and trading posts of the Ohio River Valley. Amidst grocers and shopkeepers, specialized wine retailer arose, cultivating their own marketing techniques to appeal to the customer-complexes that sustained the trade.

Hancock does not hesitate to place Madeira in the heart of a consumer revolution in America. Additionally, he argues that while drinking constituted participation in a vibrant pub-lic sphere, it was chiefly consumed in the home. These spaces and the practices and accessories associated with alcohol consumption “reconnected people’s behaviors and ideas to the production, distribution, and use of goods in their lives.”[5] Women, blacks, and Native Americans developed their own (or were prescribed by white men) certain associations with drink and were, therefore, “nodes of the network.” Predominantly, Madeira was conscripted into fashionable performance, a scene in which “possessions alone were insufficient to denote quality, rather, consumers had to know how to perform with them; how to talk about them, use them, and conduct themselves with them.”[6] Toasts represented a language of taste. Cellars were ripe with their own codes of connoisseurship. Other props (labels, decanters, corkscrews) represented the revealed world of fashionable consumption and were part of Madeira’s expanding role in an emerging consumer society.

Summarily, Hancock’s work is a bit dry at times (pale in color, notes of chestnut and unripe pear). That said, its value lies in highlighting the importance of distributors in a world of Atlantic exchange. Between makers and users exists an intricate complex of productive middlemen, without whom the flow of goods and the revolutions consumer activities engendered would never have been possible.

[1] Hancock, xv. Network here bears the mark of Latour and Callon.

[2] Hancock, 73. A comprehensive chronicle of wine making techniques and practices follows in Chapters 3 and 4. Of particular interest here are descriptions of how winemakers, anxious to capitalize off of a particularly marketable color or degree of sweetness, adulterated wine mixtures with everything from animal blood (used in clarification) to lead.

[3] Hancock, 114-5.

[4] Hancock, 198.

[5] Hancock, 278.

[6] Hancock, 335.

Beatie was small for her age and wore thick glasses. Her dark hair was naturally untidy, and her clothes didn’t fit. Instead they hung from her small frame and seemed to shout “charity shop” to the cruel hordes of eleven-year-olds that comprised her class at school. No one wanted to be her friend, so she stuck to her books, stories about dragons and fairies and goblin treasure. One day in June, right before the end of the school term, she was walking home with her nose in the pages of a book about magical rings, when she hooked her toe on a jagged piece of paving stone. She braced herself for a hard fall on the coarse surface but instead fell atop a soft, velvet cushion, purple with gold trim, where none had been before. She squeaked with surprise and jumped to her feet just in time to lock eyes with a boy at the end of the street. She recognized him from school. He also kept to himself and had a scar on his forehead that you could see if you caught him at the right angle. Beatie looked back at her feet to see that the pillow had vanished. And so had the boy. When she got home, her mother feebly asked her about her day. She mumbled that it was fine and retreated to her small room, little more than a closet, at the back of the house. The following day, the year six students were dismissed at midday. It was the start of summer holiday, and Beatie looked around the crowd of children kicking footballs and listening to music from portable cassette players for the boy with the green eyes and the scar. Suddenly the crowd parted and she saw him, standing alone by the corner of the school library. He looked at her and smiled sadly. The two began to move deliberately towards one another when a shout rang out, causing the boy to start. “Oy, you! You’re dead!” A pudgy, pink-faced brute with a prominent cowlick lumbered towards the pale boy who took off running around the library.

That was the last time Beatie ever saw him. Once, a few weeks into the start of year seven, she had seen the pink-faced bully at the local drugstore and had asked him about his skinny cousin, “the boy with the scar.” The fat boy’s mother seemed to condense out of the air in the candy aisle, snatched her son by the back of his shirt, and gave her a cruel, stinging look. Beatie spent the remainder of her school years reading in the small bedroom at the back of her parents’ rental. She was offered a scholarship to a small university nearby, but by then, her father had taken ill, so she went to work in a dress shop. When he died a few years later, Beatie and her mother moved in with an aunt who lived up north. In her thirties, Beatie tried online dating. Her profile read, “Seeking a life of magic and adventure, a partner who is kind, considerate, and brave; not averse to scars; I’ve got my share.” Nothing ever came of it.