Coffee is the direct product of its colonial past. Colonialism is over, but a historically evolved division of roles remains to this day. The coffee industry would do well to continually ask itself which relics of the past persist. This requires a critical examination of history, acceptance, non-trivialization, and improved communication.
I'm always taken aback when I walk past a store and see "colonial goods" written in large letters. What considerations led someone to still use such a loaded term today?
It's quite possible that this is about communicating the company's origins and history to the outside world. It's also quite possible that it's about the products a store still offers today, and that "colonial goods" refers to things that traditionally come from far away, such as teas, spices, cocoa, and even coffee. Another possibility is that the store indulges in nostalgia in a somewhat clumsy and unreflective way.
I stumble over the terminology because I lack the historical context, specifically the present.
From a reading of the past, the term is commonplace – in the past, colonial goods primarily referred to foodstuffs that did not come from Europe, i.e., from "overseas." This also included countries that were no longer necessarily colonies, but sovereign states.
A contemporary interpretation would likely require an explanation as to why exactly the term is still being used. Without this explanation, one may quickly find oneself in a corner of argumentative necessity, which requires explaining the sometimes romantic, innocent, and trivializing use. The coffee trade, coffee production, and the spread of coffee are a direct product of four centuries of colonialism and must be viewed with a keen eye.
And here we arrive at a key moment if we want to talk about coffee and its colonial past. We must always interpret concepts, decisions, and actions within the context of the time.
Costa Rica. Machinery used for husking and polishing coffee, UC Davis Library Digital Collections
The role of Switzerland – a non-seafaring nation
Switzerland, for example, was not directly involved in the slave trade in the 17th century, the “foundation of the Caribbean plantation economy” (p. 37, Jürgen Osterhammel), but did provide ships to maritime powers such as Portugal and Spain in the so-called triangular trade.
These, in turn, used it to transport enslaved people from West Africa to the Caribbean and South America, where they worked on plantations to produce products for the European market, which were then re-exported on the same ships. In total, more than 12 million people were transported from Africa to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries – according to Jürgen Osterhammel, 1.5 million of them died on the infamous crossing. (p. 38)
Switzerland wasn't a nation of seafarers, so not many people were aware that Switzerland was involved in triangular trade. Today, we know what Switzerland's role ( Zangger ) in colonialism was, so we can no longer hide behind ignorance. ( More on this in the podcast with Dominik Flammer .)
"Reading from the perspective of 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, we do have a great influence on the way we look back on this period, how we classify it, talk about it, draw our conclusions from it, and deal with our legacy in a more or less reflective way.
Even more – it is our responsibility to critically examine what has happened and to continually ask ourselves whether we are perhaps even continuing to perpetuate 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 just a cup of espresso or a roasted bean, but the entire supply chain: production, trade, processing, serving, the way we talk about it.
Coffee is diverse. It harbors diverse histories from various regions of the world. This diversity also demonstrates how much coffee challenges us. The history of coffee in Brazil, with its 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 allows us to identify and understand any colonial structures, 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 companies are based in Switzerland. Raw and unroasted coffee is generally exported from a coffee-producing country and only "refined" in the destination country. Many large plantations in India and Brazil are still owned by the descendants of former colonial rulers. In regions like Chiapas in southern Mexico, with the recent Zapatista uprising, it is still evident today that the fault lines of colonialism continue to play out along indigenous borders.
And when we look at the issue of poverty, we see producers who generally don't produce coffee at a cost-covering level, and coffee brands in the Northern Hemisphere that generate significant profits from the sale of roasted coffee. There are reasons for these facts, and they are not accidental.
The “coffee system” is per se based on colonial structures.
Many of these have been mitigated or broken down over decades. However, fundamental, structural characteristics of the coffee industry are colonial through and through. While researching this blog, I was repeatedly amazed at how quickly I fell into a colonial mindset myself. Thought patterns have become too entrenched, and I haven't questioned them enough.
Costa Rica, Thomas Forsyth Hunt, UC Davis Library Digital Collections
When we drink coffee, we don't just drink a warm, brown beverage. Anyone who has ever been to a coffee farm knows the effect of drinking a cup of coffee for the first time back home – the images of the experience flood your mind, and the cup becomes more and more colorful. This can happen to us too when we delve into the colonial history of coffee.
Feeling bad about yourself, the past, and the interpretation of the present doesn't do much good. On the contrary – it helps to bring conscious awareness to mind and thus give even more appreciation to the people behind coffee. At the same time, it sharpens our view of seemingly normal things, such as "colonial goods." We don't need to demonize the word, but it should irritate us – then we'll all be one step closer to understanding how we can think about coffee.
Coffee as an export product of the colonial powers
Many products from subtropical agriculture were imported to Europe - spices, sugar, tobacco, indigo, cocoa, but coffee, since its arrival in the first urban coffee houses, had this mix of promise and the forbidden, which made it so attractive to many.
Coffee is now produced in more than 60 countries. In all of these countries, except for present-day Ethiopia and South Sudan, coffee was not originally a native plant, but was brought by the colonial powers. Administrators and missionaries were often the ones who planted coffee seeds in the subtropics.
In 1893, French missionaries were believed to have planted coffee for the first time in the Taita Hills of Kenya. They likely brought their Bourbon coffee seeds from Réunion.
The first producers in Kenya who planted coffee and called it "French Mission" were all settlers who were granted land rights by the colonial power Great Britain. (worldcoffeeresearch.org)
This example makes it clear: coffee didn't simply spread—which gives the entire discussion a passive role. Travelers, scientists, and merchants belonging to a colonial power actively spread coffee by transporting seeds and plants to other continents by sea.
The goals were both economic exploitation and the botanical study of a previously unknown plant. Scientists from the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain in particular undertook the scientific study of coffee, with a long focus on botanical typology.
Coffee rust as a direct product of colonial expansion
However, the first coffee research facilities were established much later: in 1870 on Java, in 1887 in Brazil, and in 1896 in the Dutch East Indies. Until then, it was apparently simply not necessary to fundamentally study coffee for its behavioral and disease-causing effects, because coffee producers—all of them colonialists or officials appointed by them—were able to repeatedly 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 began 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)
This changed dramatically with the first documented coffee rust outbreak in Ceylon in 1869. Until then, coffee rust was unknown and had never occurred in present-day Ethiopia, the region of origin for Arabica coffee, nor in Yemen, from where the Dutch, French, and British embarked on their expeditions to Southeast Asia.
According to Stuart McCook, coffee rust must have originated in Ceylon and spread rapidly because the large estates were cultivated as monocultures and not separated by trees. The first massive wave of rust was a direct product of European expansionist policies.
Land alienation and enslavement
Coffee cultivation in the new colonies generally involved the violent seizure of land, along with forced labor on the plantations. As Osterhammel writes about the colonial economy:
In many parts of the overseas world, the conquerors initially sought ways to employ the indigenous rural population for their own benefit. Complete enslavement of the natives for extended periods almost never occurred, but other forms of unfree labor were commonplace almost everywhere. Characteristic of Spanish America in the 16th century was the allocation of indigenous labor to private individuals by the crown, which was no less coercive and brutal than slavery. (p. 81, Osterhammel)
Especially in recent colonial history, Osterhammel continues, slavery and forced labor were replaced by the loss of access to land, which almost inevitably led to irreversible impoverishment. Land alienation was directly supported by the colonial state, and settlers—such as the aforementioned French missionaries—occupied land.
“The highest quality soils end up in foreign hands”,
Osterhammel continues, which drove the territorial expansion of large-scale haciendas into the early 20th century. The sprawling private estates grew ever larger, encroaching on the land of village communities and small-scale landowners, which then led to a "marginalization of the farmworkers" (Osterhammel). When land acquisition failed to materialize, customs, traditions, and loose agreements were replaced by cadastres, land boundaries, and new property titles that imposed new ownership rights.
Selective, colonial stories
"Colonialism" is more present today than ever before, especially 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 recurring discourses about norms, concepts, and the structures underlying the coffee industry.
Osterhammel again:
As a vanishing point of contemporary self-understanding, colonialism usually appears either in the form of concrete historical events or as a quasi-historically removed term for foreign domination, racism, white supremacy and illegitimate appropriations.
On the one hand, there's the macro level, the view from above of how colonialism and coffee interact. I'd like to draw attention to these patterns, manifestations, and historical derivations here. On the other hand, there are countless micro levels, nourished by individual stories, that grow into a dense, larger whole.
Coffee and colonialism in historical examples - from Jonathan Morris, Decolonizing the History of Coffee
to the article by Morris, 2022
slave ships
There are stories of slave ships, such as the Leusden, a Dutch West India Company ship that sank on its way to Suriname. On board were 680 women, men, and children from West Africa who were meant to work on the coffee plantations. The sinking of the Leusden is the largest documented massacre during the transatlantic slave trade. People from West Africa, in particular, were enslaved and used on plantations in South America. In the 1760s, Suriname was responsible for half of the coffee consumed in Europe.
Haiti
Haiti was also one of the largest coffee producers before a war instigated by Napoleon and his defeat led to the declaration of independence in 1804. Haiti was never able to return to its former status as a major coffee producer – its infrastructure was in ruins after the war, but according to Morris, one 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 overtook Suriname and Haiti as the largest coffee producer. Settlers in Brazil and other Latin American countries produced increasing amounts of coffee in the 19th century, leading to new forms of exploitation, land appropriation, and forced labor. Previously uncultivated land was planted with coffee, and settlers were encouraged to privatize this land and expel the former inhabitants.
Mexico
In Chiapas, Mexico, the "Law of Colonization" came into effect in 1883, parceling out public lands into private units that were sold primarily to European and North American settlers. Indigenous people were often "hired" as laborers on the farms—they were paid for their travel and food to the hacienda, but once they arrived, they owed the owners money and had to pay it off with farm work.
El Salvador
In El Salvador, there are good sources on haciendas' own currencies in the 19th century. The system of farm currencies, fichas de finca , was widely used in Latin America as a payment system for pickers. The workers lived and worked on the hacienda and were paid in the hacienda's own currency, which they could then use to buy goods in the hacienda's shops. This closed system thus economically trapped the workers on the hacienda, as they had nowhere else to use their coins.
What next with this legacy?
Stories about colonialism and coffee always need to be told specifically for context. We can get a sense of an era spanning several hundred years, but individual stories help us better understand the past and present.
We can also read colonial history through the lens of coffee. In this article, we cannot condense 400 years of colonialism, but we can point out that we should also view history through the lens of coffee.
There are still structural characteristics in the coffee world today that are closely intertwined with coffee's colonial history. We've become so accustomed to them that we hardly question the givens anymore.
The Coffee Exchange
- Today, as in the past, the prices for green coffee are largely determined where no coffee grows: on the futures exchanges in New York and London
- Stock prices do not reflect production costs, but show supply and demand
- The current system does not reflect real production costs. However, efforts to establish regional minimum prices are slowly gaining momentum, for example, the discussion on regional FOB prices through Fairtrade.
Large farms, land and labor
- Farms that are large today were already large in the past, or were able to grow because they had better basic conditions. For example, the mostly colonial owners were granted land rights that were denied to the locals.
- Often, in large so-called estates in Brazil, Central America and until the 19th century in the Caribbean, the owners themselves belonged to the colonial power, or these lands were promised to settlers from the country of origin
Good green coffee is exported, inferior green coffee remains in the coffee country.
- Even in coffee-producing countries, the demand of a clientele for good coffee is growing, so that more and more good green coffee remains in the producing country
- The lion's share of good green coffee leaves the country. " Every coffee has a home " is a common phrase, and so, ironically, it has almost become a matter of course that inferior coffee has become the norm in the exporting country.
Coffee is “refined” in the recipient country
- As a rule, roasters buy green coffee and roast it where it is consumed
- Today, however, all technical requirements are met to roast good, reliable and high-quality coffee in the country of production
- Shipping times can also be kept short
- Thus, the argument that coffee must be roasted in the target market to guarantee freshness is outdated
- However, arguments such as time-to-market , rapid reaction to unforeseen events, delivery costs and emissions speak against it.
- However, 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 primarily requires two things: cheap labor and maximum efficiency.
- Taking inflation into account, roasted coffee has only become slightly more expensive in Central Europe over the last 30 years, while production costs have multiplied in all coffee-producing countries.
- Where maximum efficiency drives down prices (Brazil), labor is more expensive than, for example, in Nicaragua, where labor is significantly cheaper. However, the trend is slowly becoming more apparent in Central America: Workers who previously worked seasonally on coffee farms are leaving their homeland and migrating north .
- In northern Guatemala, for example, pickers leave their homes to pick in Mexico. They earn minimally more, as they lose their wages when exchanging currency on their return trip. Why do they do this anyway? Because they get food on the farms, while they would go hungry in Guatemala. On my last trip to Mexico in October 2022, I learned a lot about this from Ensambles Café.
The cross with the logos
Even in recent times, brands have had to revise their logos to keep up with the times. Julius Meinl, for example, only changed its well-known logo in 2004, in which a small “Moor ” was colored red.
Source: Citybee
As recently as spring 2021, I saw this logo in Florence, which had apparently been around for years and the operators hadn't yet seen any reason to change it.
And now? What should we do?
Keep Calm.
Don't demonize anything.
But become more sensitive, constantly re-examine your own history and that of coffee companies, and ask yourself these two simple questions for a quick colonialism check:
Is the doing and/or not doing of a practice contemporary?
Does it need correction? If so, for whom, and what does it mean?
We must regularly examine our own history and always keep in mind whether our way of thinking is influenced by old patterns. Coffee would probably have developed differently without European expansionist policies. Now it's up to us to shape a better future for coffee by taking an honest look at the past.
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/
