In Latin America, goods substitution dynamics are evident in states that have recently opposed US hegemony, such as Venezuela and Ecuador. However, the case of Colombia – one of the USA’s closest allies in the region – shows how asset substitution dynamics come to operate under conditions of hierarchy. Colombia does not seek to challenge the USA directly. Rather, Colombia is consistently seeking to diversify its ties with the USA, thereby increasing its leverage and autonomy and hedging its bets from within a hierarchical arrangement. Colombia is a “least likely” case for the theory of goods substitution, and there is limited evidence of actual Chinese goods substitution in Colombia. Yet, China’s increasingly central role in a global goods ecology is a new context in which Colombian hedging strategies are used to threaten with goods substitution. This chapter shows that the mere threat of exiting or hedging strategies has the potential to effect policy change, particularly when combined with domestic political context – a diversification of ties interacts with domestic and international politics, with one area having possible unintended effects on the other.

Although Florence was where Piero lived and where his fate would be decided, he was nevertheless sustained by an extensive web of patronal, as well as banking, relationships that stretched outside Florence into its dominion and beyond, providing Piero with support from clients and supporters that helped to sustain him in his exile with a high price on his head. Through his great-grandmother Contessina, Piero was already in close contact with his Bardi relations in the Mugello and with old feudal families in Pistoia and Siena, and his father took care to nurture his role as patron and boss by introducing him early on to these client networks and teaching him through his own example. Like Lorenzo, Piero was called ‘master of the workshop’ to describe his role as boss – even if neither enjoyed the success of Giovanni di Bicci and Cosimo as bankers. Piero was appointed head of the Medici Bank in Pisa in 1489 (aged seventeen) under the aegis of his manager Giovanni Cambi, and he enjoyed a close relationship with his cousin Nofri Tornabuoni, who became manager of the Medici Bank in Rome, both cities of strategic and cultural importance that must have contributed to his political experience if not to his banking skills.