Coffee is a direct product of its colonial past. Colonialism is over, but a historically established distribution of roles remains to this day. The coffee industry would do well to constantly ask itself which remnants of the past still persist stubbornly. It is important to critically engage with history, to accept things, not to trivialize anything, and to improve communication.
I stumble 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 is quite possible that it is about conveying the company's origin and history to the outside world. It is also quite possible that it is about the products that a shop still offers today, and by "Colonial Goods" they mean what traditionally comes from far away, such as teas, spices, cocoa, and indeed coffee. Another possibility is that it is a somewhat clumsy and unreflective indulgence in nostalgia.
I trip over the terminology because I lack the historical context, specifically in the present.
From one interpretation of the past, the term is commonplace - the term "colonial goods" previously referred mainly to food items that did not come from Europe, i.e., from “overseas”. Notably, this also included countries that were not necessarily colonies anymore, but sovereign states.
An interpretation from the present would likely require an explanation as to why exactly the term is still being used. If this explanation is missing, one might quickly find oneself in a position of having to justify the occasionally romantic, innocent, and trivializing handling of the term. The coffee trade, coffee production, and the spread of coffee are direct products 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 within the context of their time.
Costa Rica. Machinery used for husking and polishing coffee, UC Davis Library Digital Collections
The Role of Switzerland - A Non-Maritime 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 like Portugal or Spain in the so-called triangular trade.
These, in turn, used them to ship enslaved people from West Africa to the Caribbean and South America to produce goods on plantations for the European market, which were then exported on the same ships. In total, between the 15th and 19th centuries, more than 12 million people were abducted from Africa to the Americas - according to Jürgen Osterhammel, 1.5 million of them died on the infamous crossing. (p. 38)
Switzerland was not a nation of seafarers, so it is likely that not many were aware that Switzerland was involved in a triangular trade. Today we know what the role of Switzerland (Zangger) was in colonialism, so we can no longer hide behind ignorance. (More on this in the podcast with Dominik Flammer)
“Reading within the context of the time” means today: 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 major influence on how we look back at this time, how we classify it, talk about it, draw our conclusions from it, and handle the legacy with more or less reflection.
What's more, it is our responsibility to deal critically with what happened and, in doing so, to constantly ask ourselves whether we might even be maintaining colonial structures in what we do?
We work with coffee - and for us, coffee is a broad term. When I say “coffee”, I mean many things, not necessarily just a cup of espresso or a roasted bean, but the entire commodity chain. The production, trade, processing, service, the way we talk about it.
Coffee is diverse. It contains a wide variety of stories from diverse world regions. This diversity also shows how much coffee challenges us. The history of coffee in Brazil with a focus on the colonialist 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 is how we can manage to identify potential 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 not roasted 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 by the descendants of former colonial masters today. In regions like Chiapas in southern Mexico with the recent history of the Zapatista uprising, it is still evident today that the fault lines of colonialism play out along indigenous borders.
And when we look at the topic of poverty, it is the producers who generally do not produce coffee at a price that covers their costs, and coffee brands in the northern hemisphere that generate significant profit from the sale of roasted coffee. There are reasons for these facts, and they did not come about by chance.
The “coffee system” is per se based on colonial structures.
Many of them have been mitigated or broken up over the decades. Fundamental, structural characteristics of the coffee industry, however, are through and through colonial. In my research for this blog, I was repeatedly amazed at how quickly one can fall into a colonial thought trap. Patterns of thought have become too established, and I have questioned them too little.
Costa Rica, Thomas Forsyth Hunt, UC Davis Library Digital Collections
When we drink coffee, we are not just drinking a warm, brown beverage. Everyone who has ever been to a coffee farm knows the effect when they drink a cup of coffee at home again for the first time - the mental images of what they experienced come flooding back, and the cup becomes increasingly colorful. This is how it can be for us when we dive into the colonial history of coffee.
It helps little for oneself, for the past, and for the interpretation of the present to feel bad. On the contrary, it helps to bring conscious awareness to the forefront and thus give even more appreciation to the people behind the 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 are all already 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 coffee had this mix of promise and the forbidden since its arrival in the first urban coffee houses, which made it so attractive to many.
Today, coffee is produced in more than 60 countries. In all these countries, except for modern-day Ethiopia and South Sudan, coffee was originally not a native plant but was brought by the colonial powers. It was often administrators and missionaries who planted coffee seeds in the subtropics.
In 1893, it was French missionaries who likely planted coffee for the first time 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 who were granted land rights by the British colonial power. (worldcoffeeresearch.org)
This example makes it clear: coffee did not just spread on its own - which assigns a passive role to the whole discussion. Travelers, scientists, and merchants belonging to a colonial power actively spread coffee by bringing seeds and plants to other continents by sea freight.
The goals were both economic exploitation and the botanical research of a previously unknown plant. It was primarily scientists from Holland, France, and Great Britain who took on the scientific investigation of coffee, although for a long time, the focus was on botanical typology.
Coffee leaf rust as a direct product of colonial expansion
However, the first coffee research institutions were established significantly later: 1870 in Java, 1887 in Brazil, and 1896 in the Dutch East Indies. Until then, it was apparently simply not necessary to fundamentally study coffee for its behavior and diseases because coffee producers - notably all colonialists or officials employed by them - could repeatedly increase production volume through forest clearing 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 leaf rust outbreak in 1869 in Ceylon, this changed abruptly. Coffee leaf rust was unknown until then; it did not occur in present-day Ethiopia, the region of origin for Arabica coffee, nor in Yemen, from where the Dutch, French, and British undertook their journeys to Southeast Asia.
According to Stuart McCook, coffee leaf rust must have developed in Ceylon and multiplied rapidly because the large estates were cultivated as monocultures and were not separated by trees. The first massive rust wave was a direct product of European expansion policy.
Land alienation and enslavement
Coffee cultivation in the new colonies generally necessitated 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 make the indigenous rural population work for them. It almost never came to the complete enslavement of the natives for long periods, but almost everywhere it led to other forms of unfree labor. Characteristic of Spanish America in the 16th century was the allocation of indigenous labor to private individuals by the Crown, which was in no way inferior to slavery in terms of coercion and brutality. (p. 81, Osterhammel)
Especially in more recent colonial history, Osterhammel continues, enslavement and forced labor were replaced by the loss of access to land, which almost inevitably caused irreversible impoverishment. Land alienation was directly supported by the colonial state; settlers - such as the aforementioned French missionaries - occupied land and soil.
“The highest quality soils end up in foreign hands”,
Osterhammel continues, which pushed the territorial expansion of large-scale haciendas into the early 20th century. The private, sprawling estates grew ever larger, expanding into the land of village communities and smallholders, which then led to a “marginalization of farm workers” (Osterhammel). If land seizure did not occur, habits, traditions, and loose agreements were replaced by cadastres, field boundaries, and new property titles that imposed new ownership rights over everything.
Punctual, colonial histories
“Colonialism” is more present than ever today, 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, terms, or the structures underlying the coffee industry.
Osterhammel on this again:
As a vanishing point of contemporary self-understanding, colonialism usually appears either in the form of concrete historical events or as a quasi-ahistorical term for external determination, racism, white supremacy, and illegitimate appropriations.
On one hand, there is the macro level, the view from high above, of how colonialism and coffee interact. I would like to draw attention to these patterns, characteristics, and historical derivations here. On the other hand, there are countless micro levels that are nurtured by punctual stories and grow into a dense, large 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 the stories of the slave ships, such as that of the Leusden, a ship of the Dutch West India Company, which sank on its way to Suriname. On board were 680 women, men, and children from West Africa who were supposed to work on the coffee plantations. The sinking of the Leusden is the largest documented massacre during the transatlantic slave trade. Especially people from West Africa were enslaved and deployed on plantations in South America. In the 1760s, Suriname was responsible for half of the coffee consumed in Europe.
Haiti
Haiti was also among the largest coffee producers before a war instigated by Napoleon and his defeat resulted in 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 stood against Napoleon.
Haiti. Hand pulping machine for Coffee, Thomas Forsyth UC Davis Library, Digital Collections
Brazil
Brazil replaced Suriname and Haiti as the largest coffee producer. Settlers in Brazil and other Latin American countries produced ever more coffee in the 19th century, which brought with it new forms of exploitation, land grabbing, and forced labor. Previously uncultivated land was planted with coffee, and settlers were encouraged to privatize this land and displace the former inhabitants.
Mexico
In Chiapas, Mexico, the “Law of Colonization” came into effect in 1883 and subdivided public plots into private units, which were sold primarily to European and North American settlers. Indigenous people were often “hired” as workers on the farms - their travel and food were paid for to get to the hacienda, but once they arrived, they were in debt to the owners and had to pay it off through work on the farm.
El Salvador
In El Salvador, there are good sources on the private currencies of haciendas 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 on the hacienda, worked there, and were paid in the hacienda's own currency, with which they could then shop in the shops on the hacienda itself. This closed system thus kept the workers economically trapped on the hacienda, as they could not use their coins anywhere else.
What next with this legacy?
Stories about colonialism and coffee must always be told specifically for better classification. We can get a sense of an era of several hundred years, but individual stories help us to better classify the past and the present.
We can read colonial history with a coffee lens. In this post, we cannot condense 400 years of colonialism, but we can draw attention to the fact that we should also view history from the coffee angle.
For 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 the status quo.
The Coffee Exchange
- The prices for green coffee are, today as in the past, largely made where no coffee grows: at 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 represented in the current system. Efforts to establish regional minimum prices are slowly getting underway, e.g., the discussion about regional FOB prices by 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 initial conditions. E.g., the mostly colonial owners were granted land rights that were denied to the locals
- often with large so-called estates in Brazil, Central America, and into the 19th century in the Caribbean, it is the case that the owners themselves belonged to the colonial power, or the latter promised land to settlers from the country of origin
Good green coffee is exported, inferior green coffee remains in the coffee-producing country.
- even in coffee-producing countries, the need of a clientele for good coffee is growing, so that more and more good green coffee remains in the country of production
- however, the lion's share of good green coffee leaves the country. “Every coffee has a home” is often heard, and ironically, it has almost become self-evident that inferior coffee has become standard in the exporting country
Coffee is “refined” in the receiving country
- as a rule, roasteries buy green coffee and roast it where it is consumed
- today, however, all technical requirements are met to roast coffee well, reliably, and qualitatively in the country of production
- 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
- Arguments such as time-to-market, reacting quickly to unforeseen events, as well as shipping costs and emissions, however, speak against it
- Concepts such as Moyee, Coffee Annan, or Desarrolladores de Café, etc., show, however, how efficiently and effectively roasting can take place in the coffee origin
Cheap coffee primarily requires two things: cheap labor and maximum efficiency.
- In Central Europe, taking inflation into account, roasted coffee has only become slightly more expensive in the last 30 years, while production costs in all coffee-producing countries have multiplied.
- Where maximum efficiency brings prices down (Brazil), labor is more expensive than, e.g., in Nicaragua, where labor is cheaper by a large factor. But slowly, the trend in Central America is becoming more and more apparent: workers who previously worked seasonally on coffee farms are leaving their homes and migrating to the north.
- In northern Guatemala, for example, pickers leave their homes to pick in Mexico. They earn minimally more, as they lose the salary when changing currency on the return journey. Why do they do it anyway? Because they get food on the farms, whereas they would have to go hungry in Guatemala. During my last trip to Mexico in October 2022, I learned a lot about this from Ensambles Café
The trouble with logos
Even in the recent past, brands have had to revise their logos and live up to the times. Julius Meinl, for example, only changed its well-known logo in 2004, where a small “Moor” was colored red
Source: Citybee
As recently as the spring of 2021, I saw this logo in Florence, which had likely lasted for years and the operators saw no reason to change it yet.
And now? What should we do?
Stay calm.
Do not 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 the quick colonialism check:
is the doing and/or omission of a practice up-to-date?
is a correction needed? If so, for whom, and what does it entail?
We must regularly examine our own history and always keep in mind whether our way of thinking is shaped by old patterns. Coffee would likely have developed differently without European expansion policy. Now it is up to us to shape the future of coffee better with 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/
