The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500-1989 (review)

The editors of this excellent collection bring together contributions from different groups of scholars in such a way that the groups speak meaningfully to each other and offer a clear basis for making general inferences, both about coffee as a commodity and about the global economy. The book is not comprehensive. It contains no detailed analysis of coffee consumption. Apart from Topik's brief but highly informative overview of the integration of world coffee markets and Clarence-Smith's discussion of an international coffee crisis from 1870 to 1914, its chapters focus on particular countries rather than on global commercial structures. Nevertheless, the contributions are placed in categories that suggest a rich array of issues extending from one chapter to another as well as differences in the authors' approaches. The contributors themselves generalize and frequently make reference to each other's work.

One set of essays deals with coffee production over long periods of time. Of particular interest is Mario Semper's discussion of coffee production in Costa Rica in terms of changing commodity chains. Semper confronts a methodological problem of most work on individual commodities—the tendency to examine one product as a uniform entity and in isolation from others. In reality, producers and distributors exploit variations in commodities such as coffee and manipulate tastes and images. They often cultivate products simultaneously or substitute one product for another. This realization, which is developed in several of the other chapters, is one of the important contributions of the volume. The commercial history of coffee can no longer be interpreted in terms of a single, repeated pattern of product introduction, investment, market expansion, and labor exploitation. The importance of varied contexts, of different options taken by producers, processors, distributors, and consumers, must now be at the center of the investigator's concerns—not just with regard to coffee but to most global commodities.

The second group of essays, about peasants in coffee production, bears a similar significance. Though not wholly displacing the conventional emphasis on plantation production and forced labor, these contributions analyze the complex relationships that have existed among peasant producers, large-scale growers, and processors, even in areas (such as Guatemala) in which plantations are traditionally supposed to be dominant. Two chapters on Nicaragua are particularly interesting. Elizabeth Dore, focusing on the Diriomo area, shows how a peasant culture of patriarchy, intersecting with a system of landowner patriarchy supported by national law, structured debt peonage and labor by women. Julie Charlip, writing about the Carazo region, paints a different picture, of a dynamic coffee economy of small farmers taking advantage of investment opportunities. The assumption that globalized commodity production normally leads to the proletarianization of peasant labor turns out to be questionable, at best.

A final set of contributions connects coffee production with politics and state-building. Chapters by Andreas Eckert and Kenneth Curtis address the politics of colonial coffee growing in Africa (particularly in areas of Tanzania), analyzing interaction between the policies of colonial authorities (often continued by postcolonial states), white plantation owners, and peasant coffee growers. Again, these chapters display the complexity of coffee production in the context of global history and the global economy. At the end, the editors not only reinforce the (by this time obvious) point that simplistic generalizations about "worldwide" processes of modernization and globalization are no longer tenable but also offer a number of more limited, but useful, inferences from the collection as guides for future research.