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Coffee Anyone? Recent Research on Latin American Coffee Societies

2000; Duke University Press; Volume: 80; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-80-2-225

1527-1900

Steven Topik,

Argentine historical studies

The recent explosion of the popularity of coffee houses in the United States coincides with a swelling number of monographs on the history of coffee in Latin America. However, these studies are less motivated by the faddishness of the Starbucks Revolution than by concerns about the fate of peasant producers, particularly in Central America. Unlike most coffee sippers who care only about the brew, scholars who study the history of coffee are more concerned with the local social, cultural, and economic impact of its cultivation; the arabica itself is often almost incidental.In the last decade a spate of excellent historical monographs, often influenced by anthropology, have deconstructed earlier conventional wisdoms, models, and categories through detailed local studies. Many of these works raise several new and important questions and provide insights principally in social and cultural history. More important, several scholars have used coffee as a backdrop to study peasant societies, state building, class formation, as well as national, racial, and gendered identities. Nevertheless, generalizations about the impact of coffee cultivation on societies that employ these recent insights have been rare.The main purpose of this essay is to trace the changing perspectives applied to the historical study of coffee societies and to suggest that the current trend in history towards deconstructing categories and exploding verities, while salutary, should perhaps return to seeking patterns through bounded generalizations that ask broader questions about the commonalities shared by coffee producers and the degrees of freedom of action that local producers enjoy. In other words, does coffee production impose certain structures and world views?In a recent issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review, Eric Van Young suggested that we should “take another look at economic history as cultural history.”1 Many of the recent students of coffee societies have done just that. The challenge is to go from particular historically-grounded cases to broader generalizations. This not only accentuates the importance of the study of the past but brings to life the historical economic actors who too often are caricatured as predictable “economically rational men.” By marrying social, cultural, and economic history, historians can accentuate the limitations of neoliberal analyses that are currently animating Latin American economic policy at a considerable detriment to the peoples of Latin America.Social and cultural historians have argued against grand theories or master narratives. To a considerable degree, marxism has been replaced by poststructuralism, which favors decentered, unstable, heterogeneous, and multiple identities. The subjective attitudes and acts of individuals or groups supersede class analysis by emphasizing human agency and diversity. In other words, the deconstruction of categories, such as race, gender, and national identity, have subsumed class. The notion of reason in history (teleology) and greater social structures are reduced by a stress on contingency, disjunctures, and fluidity. Ambiguities undercut certainties.2In contrast, the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism have also encouraged very different self-assured movements such as rational choice and neoliberalism that are very much grand theories undergirded by a positivistic faith in empirical evidence and general laws. The international penetration of the world economy has led these theorists to posit homogeneous, economically rational people whose search for gain and self-interest are rather predictable. These tendencies, particularly noticeable in economics and political science, are very much structural and materialist. Rather than the local and particular, they stress the global and the general.3 Individuals are subordinated to the rationality of the broader capitalist system.4 The struggle between structure and contingency, large systems and individual will is evident in the studies of coffee.Studying larger theoretical trends through the lens of coffee might seem to cloud the issue. But this is not an exercise in “coffee fetishism.”5 Coffee is a commodity worthy of serious attention because of the central and long-standing place it has held in the world economy and in the life of millions of people. One of the few holdovers from the era of the spice trade and mercantilism, coffee has been a major trade good since the sixteenth century. Indeed, it may well be the most valuable internationally-traded agricultural commodity in history. Spreading out from Yemen, coffee is now produced in over one hundred countries on four continents. In Latin America it has been the most ubiquitous of exports. Latin America continues to produce more than twice as much coffee as the rest of the world combined. Even in the mid-1980s, coffee was the principal export of seven Latin American countries and the second export of another two making it by far the most important agricultural export (and second overall in value to petroleum).6But why should one assume that there would be any similarity among different coffee-based societies? Allen Wells and I have recently argued for the usefulness of a commodity-centered approach rather than the more common nation-centered perspective.7 This stems from a central observation of Karl Marx: “[Man] begins to distinguish himself from the animal the moment he begins to produce his means of subsistence, a step required by his physical organization. By producing food, man indirectly produces his material life itself … What they [individuals] are, therefore, coincides with what they produce and how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions which determine their production.”8 But rather than just subsistence, this soon became the activity of local and then international exchange: “The needs of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”9 To dreadfully mix my metaphors, export products became both the umbilical cords and social motors of Latin American societies, especially after the middle of the nineteenth century. Being born and animated by similar impulses does not mean that all societies came out the same. The motor was not driving a social steamroller, flattening all participants into homogeneous pieces of a puzzle. Local social relations, prior history, cultural understandings, and political power all mediated the impact of coffee in Latin America. Indeed, the comparative study of coffee societies is useful precisely because it allows us to understand the extent of the freedom of action that local producers enjoyed.The earliest people involved in the coffee trade used coffea arabica as a commodity for commercial exchange. Since production for three centuries was done in small gardens in remote parts of Yemen, a country rarely visited by Arab or European merchants, coffee was viewed simply as a resource from which merchants could profit and governments could extract taxes. Thus discussion of coffee’s social or political consequences were limited to its consumption: Was the arabica permitted by Islam?; Were coffeehouses centers of intrigue and subversion?10 Similar questions were raised about European cafes.11The analysis of coffee and its implications changed when commercial capital began directly controlling production through colonial impositions. Once the Dutch took the arabica to Java, Ceylon, and Dutch Guyana, the French to Bourbon, French Guyana, Martinique, St. Domingue and indirectly to Brazil, the British to India and Jamaica, and the Spanish to Cuba, coffee became an object of mercantilist analysis. The Dutch East Indies Company and other colonists began imposing coffee cultivation to increase the value of the colonies and enrich the mother countries and trading companies. As an exotic tropical commodity in demand in Europe, it was a natural product for the colonial division of labor. In Java local labor was coerced into producing coffee, but in most other places African slaves were combined with European capital to grow the Arabian bush and integrate the various parts of the system for the advantage of the metropolis.12 There was not much concern about the local consequences in the colonies except the extent to which swelling exports tightened colonial bonds and filled metropolitan coffers.The attacks of Physiocrats and other Liberals, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, on mercantilism together with independence movements in Latin America helped change the angle through which coffee production was viewed. International trade was no longer a zero-sum game directed by states, with winners and losers; now all participants could profit from their comparative advantage in the international division of labor by removing colonial and other state impediments to trade. The international struggle became more economic than political. Rather than serving as a resource for statecraft and empire building, coffee and other export products suddenly became tools for self-enrichment of its producers and traders. The liberal free-trade outlook became particularly popular in nineteenth-century Latin America after the colonial empires ended and nation-states had to be built. Although coffee was just one of many natural riches, it was lumped together with all other export products that jointly demonstrated the wealth of the soil.13Coffee, specifically, was not much the object of study until late in the nineteenth century in Latin America. Only Brazil was a major exporter after the devastating effects of St. Domingue’s wars for independence and before Spanish America planted arabica on any scale. Even in Brazil, the developmental discourse was rather limited in the nineteenth century; for most of the century members of the ruling class and scholars (who tended to overlap) believed that social and political peace were the principal goals. These were mostly achieved through laws, constitutions, and particularly the leadership of great men and astute patriarchal clans. The success of coffee was evidence of the fact that Deus é Brasileiro because of the natural wealth of the soil and climate. Aside from a few planters’ manuals and debates over the morality and efficacy of slavery, coffee production was little analyzed.14 Few records and little data were available—there was only one fairly reliable census in the nineteenth century (1872), and little institutionalization of credit, land, or labor markets. Planters often did not know how many hectares of land they owned nor how many trees they planted to the hectare; there were no schools of agronomy and the first experimental station was only founded in 1887. Individual growers adapted to local conditions on an ad hoc basis. Brazilian fazendeiros’ success at overwhelming and expanding the world market for coffee, however, proved to them that their trial and error methods sufficed. Formal agronomic study was not necessary. The Brazilian elite was much more interested in modernizing the cities than developing the countryside.15 This was true throughout Latin America.The study of coffee is largely a twentieth-century phenomenon, and the guiding concerns have been economic development and political democracy (stability) rather than colonial revenues, balance of trade, or state building. The most common perspective before the Depression of the 1930s was that coffee modernized the economy by strengthening Latin America’s link to Europe and the United States in order to obtain the missing resources necessary for economic development: capital, profits, tax revenues, modern technology, vigorous immigrants, and entrepreneurial mentalities. It was widely believed that the countries of Latin America were not sufficiently developed because of a distorting colonial heritage and domestic lethargy. Once the early-nineteenth-century faith in the transformative power of good laws was dashed upon the rocks of experience, liberalism adopted a more positivist face that stressed central guidance, particularly in the economy. A widespread self-disdain among the elite led to the belief that relief would only come from outside. The wealth of the soil was not sufficient to bring prosperity. The home market was too poor and the native population too indolent to buy goods, provide capital, or take advantage of advanced technology. The relative poverty that resulted led to political quarrels that further deepened the poverty and hindered the construction of a transportational and institutional infrastructure. Rather than seeking an autarkic process of capital accumulation and self-help, most Latin American elites looked to the international market as the savior. Before World War II, most students of Latin American economies did not view this outward-looking posture as an imperialist imposition but rather as a domestically deduced solution for internal problems.16Most analysts focused on the study of exports in general rather than coffee per se. Using a fairly high level of abstraction, all export commodities, at least agricultural ones, tended to be lumped together because they all required the same basic ingredients: land, labor, capital, production technology, and transportation. In Latin American countries, exports generated capital to create a financial system, an internal market, and a stable nation-state that were needed to attract foreign and, to a lesser extent, national capital to invest in the infrastructure and modernize the cities. A market mentality, entrepreneurship, and national identity were to follow lockstep. Even marxist critics of capitalism and imperialism shared many of the basic assumptions of modernizing liberals: Europe was holding a mirror of Latin America’s future, spreading bourgeois praxis, and creating new capitalist classes and consciousness.These perspectives shared fundamental assumptions: a capitalist teleology that saw the materialist structural forces of the system imposing themselves on all people in a unilinear (though perhaps dialectical) and homogenizing process. Political processes, ideologies, and cultures were epiphenomena, manifestations of the shifting tectonic plates of the economy. Individuals could seize or ignore opportunities, but the opportunities themselves were created by the larger structures. One could debate whether competition and the search for profit drove societies and history or whether it was the result of a class struggle, but the metaforces and direction of history were clear in both cases. All people tended to be lumped together as upper class, middle class, or working class, with some distinctions between urban and rural peoples. Cultural, ethnic, and gender differences were largely ignored or seen as remnants of earlier precapitalist formations that would disappear with development or with the socialist revolution. There was a widespread belief that Latin America would follow the same stages of development as Europe with the same attending class formations and political forms, although some ethnic groups would be completely marginalized and banished from the nation. Capitalist development was applauded either because of its educational and eventual spread effects or because it strengthened the internal contradictions that allowed capitalism to be superseded by socialism. Thus coffee was usually viewed as just one commodity among many, one that could be a “leading sector” in Walt Rostow’s words, but not one with any special characteristics.17A partial challenge to these broader currents came in developmental economics. In particular, Albert Hirschman, taking off from staple theory, which had focused on grain production, noted that different commodities produced different spread effects, different social consequences, and thus had different economic consequences. While still subscribing to much of the modernizing metanarrative, he gave coffee its own life and possibilities that inhered in the commodity’s botany and production process rather than being imposed by the world economy and economic laws in general. Indeed, Hirschman argued that the nature of coffee production and processing may have stimulated native entrepreneurship and industrial development.18Some of the central tenets of the modernizing perspective were brought into question with the rise of dependency analysis in the 1960s by people such as Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Samir Amin, who applied the insights of Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and later Raúl Prebisch, who worked for the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America (hereafter E.C.L.A.). Instead of one homogenizing world trend, dependentistas argued that the metropolitan countries in western Europe and the United States set the international rules of the game to their own advantage while countries in the Third World were destined to lag behind or even become ever more underdeveloped. Although this materialist structuralist view still posited the central importance of the economy and especially the international economy, and still believed history had an eventual direction, it did not believe that the Third World could follow the same course as Western Europe to reach “development.” Dependentistas broke with the theory of stages of development. Indeed, they believed that integration into the international economy often brought “backwardness,” repressive and oligarchic political systems, and impoverished, unequal social systems because the imperialist center sucked up capital rather than investing it abroad. Exploitation, not diffusion, was capitalism’s principal motor. While moving away from a uniform narrative, dependentistas still flattened the Third World, assuming that it was all much the same. Rather than class analysis there was national analysis, with the metropolitan countries and comprador elites exploiting the rather homogeneous Third World countries. The solution, socialist revolution, was never closely explained. Since the nation and the world economy became the categories of analysis, specific commodities did not receive much attention. Famous dependentista studies of Brazil, such as those by Andre Gunder Frank, Teotonio dos Santos, and Celso Furtado, saw coffee as only one example of the larger structure of metropolitan domination. Indeed, Frank in his seminal study, half of which was on Brazil, did not even study coffee. (Cardoso and Faletto differed in their emphasis on national and local variation, but they stressed political manifestations rather than commodities.)19Concepts such as comprador elite were popular. Although much emphasis was placed on the role of the international economy and foreign investors, very few dependentista or modernizationist studies actually examined their machinations. Even fewer examined specific export sectors. The one commodity that did receive attention was sugar, but not because of fascination with the usefulness of commodity analysis but rather because of interest in slave studies and the independence movements of the Caribbean. The best known economic histories concentrated on national economies rather than commodities. One of the principal studies to focus on a number of commodities ignored coffee.20The small monographic literature on coffee concentrated on specific case studies. Stanley Stein and Warren Dean each examined one coffee municipio. Only one of the excellent studies in the pathbreaking collections edited by Kenneth Duncan and Ian Rutledge (in which only four of the eighteen articles dealt with coffee) and by Enrique Florescano (in which only three of the twenty-one essays examined coffee plantations) used the comparative method and focused on sugar, not coffee.21 Indeed, aside from Ciro Cardoso’s justly admired essay on Central America, comparative studies of coffee economies were ignored. Brazil (responsible for over half of the coffee exported during the boom), whenever it was included in discussions of coffee systems, was treated as a homogeneous unity that reflected the São Paulo reality or, if dealing with slavery, the reality of Vassouras. Within Brazil there have been few efforts to compare different regional systems within the nation much less compare with other countries. Instead, rather simplistic caricatures of the heroic Paulista fazendeiro were briefly counterpoised to the supposedly backward planters of other states. Indeed, what appeared to be a geographic comparison was in fact often a contrast of two ideal types: capitalist and slave agriculture.22A general set of propositions arose, nonetheless, that tended to be applied to all export crops alike. Coffee was just another case of the general rule. The nation-state, the unit of analysis, was assumed rather homogenous so that regional case studies could reveal a picture of the whole. Export growers tended to be grouped together as planters rather than hacendados in the famous Wolf-Mintz model or sometimes, adopting Lenin’s model, as Junkers rather than farmers.23 Of course, since the former model was formulated in the 1950s with the Caribbean’s capitalist sugar plantations in mind and the latter with Russia’s neofeudal economy, the models had to be somewhat adapted to be applied in the Latin American historical context. A constellation of attributes were deduced from the export model. These general propositions are as follows:Although there were certainly disagreements about these propositions based upon political perspectives and the time period examined, I contend that most students of Latin America would have agreed with these characterizations. However, in the last two decades, and particularly the last few years, much of this has come into question. It turns out that many of these generalizations were more applicable to sugar and bananas than coffee. Our current view of export societies in general, and coffee societies in particular have refined, qualified, and even cast out most of these propositions because of recent research based, in part, on new questions and new categories of analysis.Concern with race relations led to serious reevaluations of the nature of export economies in general and coffee’s place in particular national lives. Slave studies flourished, yielding some of the most important local coffee studies: Stanley Stein’s Vassouras, Emília Viotti da Costa’s Da senzala a colônia, and Warren Dean’s Rio Claro.26 These scholars were more concerned with slavery and race relations than with the functioning of the coffee economy, but our understanding of coffee systems benefited greatly. Their research and other works on slavery led to debates over whether one could characterize Brazilian social formation as capitalist or slave or some intermediary position. The result was an increased focus on labor systems (to which neither the modernization, imperialist, or dependency school had paid great attention) and the use of modes of production analysis that emphasized historical layers of articulated labor systems. Both innovations would have important impacts on the study of coffee in countries other than Brazil where slavery was never important in growing coffee. The debate over the extent to which the coffee labor system could be termed capitalist in Brazil carried forward to the study of the immigrant colono experience that followed abolition undertaken by Emilia Viotti da Costa, Warren Dean, Thomas Holloway, Verena Stolcke, José de Souza Martins, and Mauricio Font. They found a heterogeneous system that combined elements of wage labor, sharecropping, and subsistence agriculture.27The reevaluation of the historical evolution of coffee economies in Spanish America grew out of debates over her “feudal” background, the role of imperialism, and state building as well as concerns over the treatment of peasants in general and indigenous peoples in particular. Modernization theorists posited a dual society, one capitalist in the cities and one feudal in the countryside, while dependentistas such as Frank countered that Latin America had been capitalist since its insertion into the capitalist world economy under the Iberian colonial powers. This debate, and a rising tide of popular revolutions internationally, led to intense discussions about the peasantry’s rationality, functional role, and potential. Combining ethnohistory with studies developed to hinder or encourage rural guerilla warfare (in Southeast Asia as well as Latin America), peasant studies began reevaluating the essentialized and romanticized categories of earlier historical and anthropological works. One solution was the adoption of the notion of a peasant mode of production propounded by Russian thinker A.V. Chayanov.28 Others devised much more heterogeneous social formations with numerous articulated modes of production. The definition of peasant changed as they no longer were seen as strictly subsistence farmers with few links to national or international markets.The shift of focus from economic development and democratization, which concentrated on the elite and the process of capital accumulation, to an emphasis on peasants changed the terms of the debate. Peasant agency and resistance, and new conceptions of power became the guiding watchwords rather than repression and victimization. Historians such as E.P. Thompson, political scientists such as James Scott, anthropologists such as Karl Polanyi, Michael Taussig, Marshal Sahlins, and Clifford Geertz, and social theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault became influential.29 Since resistance and power were not necessarily structural and overtly political but rather took everyday forms, local culture became a key concern. Microstudies of local resistance naturally revealed a far more complicated and varied story than the eagles-eye structuralist approaches had presented.More recently, historians have turned to seeing peasants not only resisting at the local level, but participating in state formation and national identity creation as the issue of nationalism has again become popular.30 Since peasants seemed to act in many different and somewhat unpredictable ways with important consequences, cultural and mode of production analyses (which complemented each other) have freed the political and ideological realms from their servitude to the economic base, though the material conditions of life are still usually recognized as shaping political, ideological, and cultural responses.All of this has revolutionized the study of Latin American coffee economies with the greatest part of the work coming recently in studies of Central America. I should point out that most of the new studies seek to question received wisdom and ask new questions rather than construct new models. Consequently they often eschew generalizations. Since they are often local studies of areas of small coffee production, it is unclear how to evaluate the various cases. If we are interested in the effects of coffee on Latin American societies (unlike most of the authors discussed here), then presumably the areas with the greatest production would receive the most weight in generalizations about coffee. If, on the other hand, we are concerned with a specific national or local histories or the political possibilities that coffee cultivation provides, the range of experiences rather than the number of people involved, is most relevant.Most of the new studies are monographic and local, but a few comparative studies are beginning to emerge.31 Let me briefly sketch how the recent work has challenged the previous understanding of Latin American coffee societies.Coffee did not begin as an export crop demanded by the world economy in many countries nor was it always dominated by latifundia. In areas such as St. Domingue, Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador coffee began as a product for local consumption, not export. Indeed, these countries were initially coffee importers. Peruvians produced for themselves; they began by exporting it to their Latin American neighbors in Bolivia and Chile, not to the United States. And the home market continued to be important at times.32 It is true that during the height of the coffee boom (1880–1930), probably more than 90 percent of Latin America’s coffee was exported and the coffee producing countries did not develop coffee house cultures. However, in the last few decades, in the most important coffee exporting economies, the domestic population has consumed an ever greater portion of production. Brazil has recently passed Germany as the second largest coffee consumer in the world.Having started out as a garden crop for home consumption, it is not surprising that studies of Colombia and Central America quite quickly demonstrated that in many areas the latifundio was not the norm. Although it is true that areas such as Santander, Colombia, the cacao growing areas of Venezuela, southern Mexico, and important parts of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua had larger holdings, in much of Costa Rica small growers prevailed, as they did in Antioquia and the Cauca Valley of Colombia, the Andean area of Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Honduras.33 Recent studies demonstrate the prevalence of small and medium growers around Granada and Carazo, Nicaragua and around Santa Ana in El Salvador.34 Veracruz and Oaxaca in Mexico also had few latifundia. Even in Brazil, especially in important parts of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, medium and small producers predominated as they did in Espirito Santo and Paraná.35 Clearly coffee yielded many different scales of landholdings.Nowhere were large holdings simply a colonial legacy, though some sesmarias in Brazil provided the foundations of early coffee fazendas. Stone traced much of the Central American elite back to colonial ancestors,