MEXAL – From Mexico to Algiers: American Goods in Early Modern North Africa (1492-1659)

This project, supported by an SNSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, restores the overlooked place of the Maghrib in the early modern material exchange across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It investigates the dissemination of materials and knowledge from the Spanish Americas into North Africa from the inception of the Spanish conquest of the Americas (late fifteenth century) to the fall of the Saʿdī Empire (1659), charting the introduction of American goods and the creation of expertise about their use. Specifically, MEXAL focuses on foodstuffs (e.g. maize), materia medica (e.g. guayacan), intoxicants (e.g. tobacco), and dyes (e.g. Mexican cochineal). By charting the under-investigated dissemination of these goods in the Maghrib, MEXAL shows that American materiality transformed the economic, social, and intellectual life of the Ottoman and non-Ottoman Maghrib much more profoundly than previously recognised.

Bridging the historiographies of the Iberian Peninsula, North Africa, and the Americas, MEXAL argues that the early modern Maghrib, broadly understood as Ottoman Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Saʿdī Morocco, was central to the early modern consumer revolution. As the meeting point of three different processes of imperial expansion (Iberian, Ottoman, and Saʿdī), North Africa emerged as a key space of material innovation, where commodities proceeding from these three imperial spaces were used in conjunction. Challenging portrayals of early modern Africans as passive consumers of European colonial ‘novelties’, MEXAL contends that Maghribi uses of specific American goods and new combinations involving other imperial commodities (tobacco-coffee, for instance) predated and influenced European ones. Combining methodologies from global history, Maghribi history, and material culture studies, this project sheds unprecedented light on African understandings and engagements with the Spanish Americas, highlighting their significance to the global history of consumption, trade, and knowledge production. In this way, MEXAL highlights the importance of Maghribi sites, agents, and practices to a historiography centred on Western Europe and its colonial possessions.