Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

As part of the Latin American History Speaker Series, this is a book presentation of Ana Maria Otero-Cleves, Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Cambridge, 2025), with a panel including introductory comments by Mariana Diaz Chalela and Marcela Echeverri.

Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world. By exploring Colombians' everyday practices of consumption, Otero-Cleves also invites historians to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between the political world and the economic world in nineteenth-century Latin America.

Ana María Otero-Cleves, D. Phil Oxford in Modern History, is a Lecturer in the History of Latin America at the University of York. She joined York in 2023, having previously held the position of Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia).

Born and raised in Colombia, Otero-Cleves specialises in the history of nineteenth-century Latin America, with a particular interest in the history of consumption and material culture, global history and legal culture. She is the author of Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia, winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition (2022), (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Her work has been published in a number of journals in English and Spanish, such as the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of Latin American Studies and Historia Crítica.

Ana María is also an enthusiastic public historian and co-founder 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)

Sponsored by the Edward J. Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund