Crafting a Culturally-Situated Demand: A Microhistory of Market Sub-Segmentation in Chile and Peru between 1845-1855

This paper will examine how textile traders incorporated cultural and political changes into their information-gathering process through a detailed analysis of a set of letters and swatches exchanged between two agents in Lima and Valparaiso, and between them and the Manchester-based commission merchant Crafts & Stell. This correspondence highlights two distinct markets and the varied, evolving conditions impacting Chilean and Peruvian consumers. The cultural instructions each agent provided to Crafts & Stell were not interchangeable. While Chilean markets were subdivided by social class, the agent in Lima divided the Peruvian markets according to urban and rural areas. As this paper will explore, this sub-segmentation reflected each region’s particular geography and economic context, which was relevant only to their specific circumstances and the challenges each one faced.

The limited literature on the nineteenth-century Anglo-Hispanic textile trade agrees that local knowledge was a premium asset for success. Still, it has often approached nineteenth-century Latin American consumers as a sole, somewhat homogeneous market. This paper will show that agents, even if they worked for the same mercantile house, divided the Latin American market into different segments that can only be understood by examining their individual socio-cultural contexts. It will also highlight how British-based merchants needed the support of agents on the spot, not only for logistical reasons but especially to help them interpret the cultural and political realities that influenced demand.

In summary, this paper explores the notion of space by highlighting the importance of locality in textile trade, analysing how British-based merchants navigated and responded to the distinct fashion preferences of Peruvian and Chilean consumers in the second half of the nineteenth century.