Coffee is the direct product of its colonial past. Colonialism is over, but historically grown role distributions persist to this day. The coffee industry does well to repeatedly ask itself which relics of the past stubbornly persist today. In doing so, it is important to engage critically with history, accept things, not downplay anything, and improve communication.
I'm startled every time I walk past a shop and read "colonial goods" in large letters. What considerations led someone to still communicate with such a loaded term today?
It's quite possible that it's about conveying the company's own origins and history to the outside world. It's also possible that it's about the products a shop still offers today and by "colonial goods" means what traditionally comes from far away, such as teas, spices, cocoa, and coffee. It could also be a variant where something is awkwardly and unreflectively indulging in nostalgia.
I stumble over the terminology because I'm missing the historical classification, namely into the present.
From one reading of the past, the term is common - colonial goods historically designated mainly foodstuffs that did not come from Europe, thus from "overseas". It should be noted that this also included countries that were no longer necessarily colonies, but sovereign states.
A reading from the present would probably require an explanation for why exactly the term is still being used. If this explanation is missing, it can quickly put you in a corner of argumentative necessity from which you must explain the somewhat romantic, innocent, and downplaying approach. The coffee trade, coffee production, and the spread of coffee is a direct product of four centuries of colonialism and must be viewed with a watchful eye.
And here we have reached a key moment when we want to talk about coffee and its colonial past. We must always read terms, decisions, and actions from their time.
Costa Rica. Machinery used for husking and polishing coffee, UC Davis Library Digital Collections
Switzerland's Role - A Non-Seafaring Nation
Switzerland, for example, was not directly involved in the slave trade of the 17th century, the "foundation of the Caribbean plantation economy" (p.37, Jürgen Osterhammel), but did provide ships to seafaring powers such as Portugal and Spain in the so-called triangular trade.
These in turn used them to transport enslaved people from West Africa to the Caribbean and South America, where they produced goods for the European market on plantations, which were then exported again on the same ships. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, more than 12 million people were forcibly removed from Africa to the Americas - according to Jürgen Osterhammel, 1.5 million of them died on the infamous passage. (p.38)
Switzerland was not a nation of seafarers, so it is unlikely that many were aware that Switzerland was involved in triangular trade. Today we know what Switzerland's role (see Zangger) in colonialism was, so we can no longer hide behind ignorance. (More on this in the podcast with Dominik Flammer)
"Reading from the time" today means: we know what happened in world history between approximately 1500 and 1975, but we no longer have any influence over it. However, on the way we look back on this time, how we classify it, talk about it, draw our conclusions from it, and more or less reflectively deal with the legacy, we do have great influence.
Even more - it is our responsibility to critically examine what happened and to keep asking ourselves whether we might even continue to maintain colonial structures in what we do.
We work with coffee - and coffee is a broad term for us. When I say "coffee," I mean many things, not necessarily exclusively a cup of espresso or a roasted bean, but the entire commodity chain. The production, trade, processing, service, and the way we talk about it.
Coffee is diverse. It is home to various stories from different regions of the world. This diversity also shows how much coffee challenges us. The history of coffee in Brazil with a focus on the colonial past is different from that in Mexico or Haiti.
If we want to communicate precisely and respectfully about the product and its history, we must understand the individual history of a coffee region. This way we can manage to recognize any colonial structures, understand them, translate them into the present, and question them.
On the topic: the podcast conversation with Christian Cwik, historian at the University of Graz, about coffee, slavery, and colonialism
Colonial Structures in the Present
The largest coffee trading houses are based in Switzerland. As a rule, green coffee and unroasted coffee is exported from a coffee-producing country and only "refined" in the destination country. Many large plantations in India and Brazil are still owned today by the descendants of former colonial rulers. In regions like Chiapas in southern Mexico with the recent past of the Zapatista uprising, it is evident today that the fault lines of colonialism run along indigenous borders.
And when we look at the issue of poverty, it is producers who, as a rule, cannot produce coffee at cost, and coffee brands in the northern hemisphere who make high profits from the sale of roasted coffee. There are reasons for these facts, and they are not accidental.
The "coffee system" is based per se on colonial structures.
Many of these have been mitigated or broken over decades. But fundamental, structural characteristics of the coffee industry are thoroughly colonial. In researching this blog, I repeatedly marveled at how quickly one could fall into a colonial trap of thought. Thought patterns had established themselves far too much and I questioned them too little.
Costa Rica, Thomas Forsyth Hunt, UC Davis Library Digital Collections
When we drink coffee, we're not just drinking a warm, brown beverage. Everyone who has ever been on a coffee farm knows the effect when they drink a cup of coffee at home for the first time again - the images in their head from the experience just pour in and the cup becomes increasingly colorful. So too can it happen to us when we delve into the colonial history of coffee.
Feeling bad about it does little for oneself, the past, and the interpretation of the present. On the contrary - it helps to keep conscious perception in mind and to give even more appreciation to the people behind the coffee. At the same time, it sharpens our view of what seems normal, such as "colonial goods." We don't need to demonize the word, but it should irritate us - then we're all one step further in how we can think about coffee.
Coffee as an Export Product of Colonial Powers
Many products from subtropical agriculture were imported to Europe - spices, sugar, tobacco, indigo, cocoa, but since coffee's arrival in the first urban coffeehouses, it had this mix of promise and the forbidden, which made it attractive to many.
Coffee is produced today in more than 60 countries. In all of these countries, except present-day Ethiopia and South Sudan, coffee was originally not a native plant but was brought by the colonial powers. Administrators and missionaries were often those who planted coffee seeds in the subtropics.
In 1893, it was French missionaries who first planted coffee in the Taita Hills in Kenya. They likely brought their Bourbon variety coffee seeds from La Réunion.
The first producers in Kenya who consequently planted the coffee and called it "French Mission" were all settlers to whom the colonial power Britain granted land rights. (worldcoffeeresearch.org)
This example makes clear: coffee did not simply spread - which would give the whole discussion a passive role. Travelers, scientists, and merchants who belonged to a colonial power actively spread coffee by transporting seeds and plants by sea freight to other continents.
The aims were both economic exploitation and the botanical exploration of a previously unknown plant. It was mainly scientists from the Netherlands, France, and Britain who undertook the scientific study of coffee, and for a long time it was about botanical typology.
Coffee Rust as a Direct Product of Colonial Expansion
However, the first coffee research facilities emerged much later: 1870 in Java, 1887 in Brazil, and 1896 in the Dutch East Indies. Until then, it apparently seemed unnecessary to fundamentally investigate coffee's behavior and diseases because coffee producers - notably all colonists or officials appointed by them - could constantly increase production volumes through deforestation and the use of cheap labor.
"as land remained cheap and plentiful, the simple but wasteful method of opening up new estates as soon as the old ones begin to be exhausted, seemed always preferable to an intricate and laborious study of the best means preserving land already under cultivation" (Stuart McCook, p. 31)
With the first documented coffee rust outbreak in 1869 in Ceylon, this changed dramatically. Coffee rust was previously unknown, occurring neither in present-day Ethiopia, the origin region for Arabica coffee, nor in Yemen, from where the Dutch, French, and British embarked on their voyages to Southeast Asia.
According to Stuart McCook, coffee rust must have developed in Ceylon and spread rapidly because large estates were grown in monoculture and not separated by trees. The first massive rust wave was a direct product of European expansion policy.
Land Dispossession and Enslavement
Coffee cultivation in new colonies usually required violent seizure of land along with forced labor on plantations. As Osterhammel writes about the colonial economy:
In many places in the overseas world, the conquerors first sought ways to make the indigenous rural population work for them. Almost never did complete enslavement of the natives occur for longer periods, but almost everywhere there were other forms of unfree labor. Characteristic of Spanish America in the 16th century was the assignment of indigenous workers to private individuals by the crown, which was no less coercive and brutal than slavery. (p.81, Osterhammel)
Particularly in more recent colonial history, Osterhammel continues, enslavement and forced labor were replaced by loss of access to land, which almost inevitably meant the cause of irreversible impoverishment. Land dispossession was directly supported by the colonial state, settlers - such as the mentioned French missionaries - occupied land and soil.
"The most valuable lands came into foreign hands",
Osterhammel continues, which drove the territorial expansion of large-scale haciendas into the early 20th century. The private, sprawling estates became larger and larger, expanding into the land of village communities and small landholders, which then led to a "marginalization of agricultural workers" (Osterhammel). When land seizure did not occur, customs, traditions, and loose agreements were replaced by cadastres, field boundaries, and new property titles that imposed new ownership rights.
Specific Colonial Stories
"Colonialism" is more present today than ever, particularly when it comes to understanding one's own role in the world, as well as in the context of climate justice. The legacy of the past permeates the present in ever-recurring discourses about norms, terms, or structures underlying the coffee industry.
Osterhammel on this again:
As the focal point of present self-understanding, colonialism usually appears either in the form of concrete historical events or as a quasi historically detached term for foreign domination, racism, white supremacy, and illegitimate appropriations.
On one hand, there is the macro level, the view from far above, how colonialism and coffee interact. I want to draw attention to these patterns, expressions, and historical derivations here. On the other hand, there are countless micro levels, nourished by specific stories and growing into a dense, large whole.
Coffee and Colonialism in Historical Examples - from Jonathan Morris, Decolonizing the History of Coffee
Slave Ships
There are the stories of slave ships, such as that of the Leusden, a ship of the Dutch West India Company, which sank on the way to Surinam. On board were 680 women, men, and children from West Africa, who were to work on coffee plantations. The sinking of the Leusden is the largest documented massacre during the transatlantic slave trade. Particularly people from West Africa were enslaved and employed on plantations in South America. Surinam was responsible for half of the coffee drunk in Europe in the 1760s.
Haiti
Haiti was also one of the largest coffee producers before a war sparked by Napoleon and his subsequent defeat led to the declaration of independence in 1804. Haiti was never able to return to its former times as a major coffee producer - the infrastructure was in ruins after the war, but according to Morris, another reason was that European buyers did not want to do business with a "Black Republic" that opposed Napoleon.
Haiti. Hand pulping machine for Coffee, Thomas Forsyth UC Davis Library, Digital Collections
Brazil
Brazil replaced Surinam and Haiti as the largest coffee producer. Settlers in Brazil and other Latin American countries produced increasingly more coffee in the 19th century, which brought new forms of exploitation, land appropriation, and forced labor. Previously uncultivated land was planted with coffee, settlers were encouraged to privatize this land and displace former residents.
Mexico
In Chiapas, Mexico, the "Law of Colonization" came into force in 1883 and divided public land into private units, which were primarily sold to European and North American settlers. Indigenous people were often "hired" as workers on the farms - they were paid for their journey and provisions to the hacienda, but once they arrived, they were indebted to the owners and had to work off this debt on the farm.
El Salvador
In El Salvador, there are good sources on the haciendas' own currencies in the 19th century. The farm currency system, fichas de finca, was widely used in Latin America as a payment system for pickers. Workers lived on the hacienda, worked there, and were paid in the hacienda's own currency, which they could then use to shop in the stores on the hacienda itself. This closed system kept workers on the hacienda economically trapped, since they could not use their coins anywhere else.
How to Move Forward with This Legacy?
Stories about colonialism and coffee must always be told specifically for better classification. We can get a sense of an era spanning several hundred years, but individual stories help us better understand the past and the present.
We can read colonial history through a coffee lens as well. In this article, we cannot condense 400 years of colonialism, but we can point out that we should also view history from the coffee angle.
Because there are still structural characteristics in the coffee world today that are closely intertwined with the colonial history of coffee. We have become so accustomed to some of them that we hardly question what is given anymore.
The Coffee Exchange
- The prices for green coffee are set today, as before, largely where no coffee grows: on the futures exchanges in New York and London
- exchange prices do not reflect production costs, but rather show supply and demand
- actual production costs are not reflected in the current system. However, efforts to establish regional minimum prices are slowly getting underway, e.g., the discussion about regional FOB prices through Fairtrade
Large Farms, Land Ownership, and Labor
- Farms that are large today were already large in the past, or were able to grow because they had better starting conditions. For example, mostly colonial owners were granted land rights that were denied to locals
- it often runs through large so-called estates in Brazil, Central America, and until the 19th century in the Caribbean, that the owners themselves belonged to the colonial power or that power promised settlers land from their country of origin
Good Green Coffee is Exported, Inferior Green Coffee Remains in the Coffee-Producing Country.
- even in coffee countries, there is growing demand from a clientele for good coffee, so that more and more good green coffee remains in the producing country
- the lion's share of good green coffee leaves the country, however. "Every coffee has a home" one often hears, and so it has ironically almost become self-perpetuating that inferior coffee has become standard in the exporting country
Coffee is "Refined" in the Destination Country
- as a rule, roasters buy green coffee and roast it where it is consumed
- today, however, all technical prerequisites are met to roast coffee well, reliably, and with good quality in the producing country
- shipping times can also be kept short
- thus, the argument that coffee must be roasted in the target market itself to guarantee freshness is outdated
- however, arguments such as time-to-market, quick response to unforeseen circumstances, as well as shipping costs and emissions, speak against it
- concepts such as Moyee, Coffee Annan, or Desarrolladores de Café, etc., show how efficiently and effectively roasting can be done at the coffee origin
Cheap Coffee requires primarily two things: cheap labor and maximum efficiency.
- Roasted coffee in Central Europe has only become marginally more expensive in the last 30 years when inflation is taken into account, while production costs in all coffee-producing countries have multiplied.
- Where maximum efficiency brings prices down (Brazil), labor is more expensive than, for example, in Nicaragua, where labor is cheaper by a large factor. Slowly, however, a trend is becoming increasingly evident in Central America: workers who previously worked seasonally on coffee farms are leaving their homeland and migrating northward.
- In northern Guatemala, for example, pickers are leaving their homeland to work in Mexico. They earn only marginally more, since they lose their wages when converting currency on the return journey. Why do they do it anyway? Because they get food on the farms while they would starve in Guatemala. On my last trip to Mexico in October 2022, I learned a lot about this from Ensambles Café
The Problem with Logos
Even in the very recent past, brands have had to redesign their logos to meet the times. Julius Meinl, for example, only changed the well-known logo in 2004, in which a small "Moor" was colored red
Source: Citybee
I still saw this logo in Florence in spring 2021, which apparently had lasted for years and the operators saw no reason to change it.
And Now? What Should We Do?
Stay calm.
Don't demonize anything.
But become more sensitive, look at your own history and that of coffee companies again and again, and ask yourself these two simple questions for a quick colonialism check:
Is the practice of doing and/or not doing something contemporary?
Does it need correction? If so, for whom, and what does it matter?
We must regularly examine our own history and always keep in mind whether our way of thinking is shaped by old patterns. Coffee would probably have developed differently without European expansion policy. Now it's up to us, with an honest look at the past, to better shape the future of coffee.
A Selection of Literature Used
Coffee & Colonialism, Erika Koss
Decolonizing Coffee, Jonathan Morris
Colonialism, Jürgen Osterhammel
Stuart McCook, Coffee is not forever
All photos in black and white: https://digital.ucdavis.edu/search/forsyth/%5B%5D//10/
