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Land and Labor in The Coffee Economies of Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Land and Labor in The Coffee Economies of Nineteenth-Century Latin America
WILLIAM ROSEBERRY
New School for Social Research
The nineteenth century (that is, roughly, from 1830-1930) was the cof-
fee century in Latin America. It was a period that witnessed a dramatic
increase in world trade (from 320 metric tons in 1770, mostly from
Asia; to 90,000 metric tons in 1820, with half coming from Brazil; to
450,000 metric tons in 1870 and 1,600,000 metric tons in 19207 ) and
per capita consumption (in the United States, from 3 pounds in 1830
to 10 pounds in 1900 and 16 pounds in 19608). And it was a period in
which coffee production was associated with a profound transforma-
tion of landscape and society in several Latin American regions. In
most cases, the expansion of coffee cultivation coincided with terri-
torial expansion, the movement of settlers into frontier zones where
tropical forests were destroyed, "new forests ''9 of coffee and shade
planted, towns established, roads and railroads built, regional identities
forged.
It is not surprising, then, that we find some of the same processes and
themes repeated from coffee-producing region to coffee-producing
region - the incorporation of regions within an expanding world mar-
ket, the establishment of outwardly focussed development strategies
with the export of a primary product the price of which fluctuates sig-
nificantly but is beyond the control of local producers and exporters,
the building of roads and railroads (generally with foreign capital) to
carry the coffee from the newly settled interior to port cities, the
ambiguous question of land ownership in frontier zones and the con-
flicts between rural settlers and urban investors, the related legal revo-
lutions in landed property and labor regulations, and the ubiquitous
concern for the labor problem - the "falta de brazos"
few important decades of each other: Brazil, Costa Rica, and Vene-
zuela had important coffee economies by mid-century; Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Colombia turned to coffee several decades later - the
1870s, 1880s and beyond). Each was producing the same primary
product for export to the same European and North American ports
(though one might export primarily to London, another to New York,
another to Hamburg). The structure of trade (that is, the relation
between local exporters and international firms) was roughly the same
(though important differences developed in Brazil as it came to domi-
nate the market). Each of the regions became "dependent" on a single
export commodity, suffering the same reverses and enjoying the same
booms.
Although the primary focus of this essay concerns land and labor
regimes and does not consider commercialization schemes in any
detail, certain basic features of the coffee trade in nineteenth-century
Latin America deserve brief consideration. For those newly independ-
ent countries with exploitable subtropical soils, coffee served as a prin-
cipal point of linkage to an expanding world economy, the means by
which they could turn toward an "outwardly focussed" model of devel-
opment. It could be stored for long periods with relatively little spoil-
age; it had a high value per kilogram, making transport costs relatively
low and making inland territories valuable in a way they could not be
for crops such as sugar; 15 and it enjoyed a growing and lucrative
acceptance in European and U.S. markets. For merchants and trading
firms from countries entering the new Latin American markets, coffee
became a focus of trade.
ican firms and Brazilian or Costa Rican exporters and producers, local
merchants and exporters were not subsidiaries of European or North
American firms for most of the period under discussion. Even where
the exporters were German or English expatriates, they were expatri-
ates acting as individual entrepreneurs and adventurers, often with a
privileged and preferred relationship with a particular London or
Hamburg house, but the tie that bound them was one of credit and
shared nationality rather than ownership. Second, exporters, acting
with their own funds or with borrowed funds from abroad, were the
principal sources of credit for local producers and merchants. For most
of the period that concerns us, national or international banks were not
involved in the coffee trade. Third, with purchasing and credit arrange-
ments linking particular international firms and exporters, producers
and merchants alike were subject to price fluctuations. Exporters
lacked the means to withhold coffee in periods of low prices. There
were no local exchanges, and states were not involved in coffee trade. It
was only with the onset of the first general overproduction crisis in the
1890s that discussions began finally resulted in Brazil's valorization
scheme of 1906. With this scheme, the first chinks in the free-trade
armor appeared? 6
ation of such relations remains beyond the scope of the present essay.
We need to turn now from the structure of commerce and investment
to the transformation of landscapes and societies.
The frontier character of many of the coffee regions has often been
stressed in regional studies? 8 If the frontier has impressed historians
and social scientists, it has also impressed historical actors, both at the
moment of frontier settlement and in memory. The memory of cutting
down the forest (tumbando montes), or the image of a people forged in
settlement and transformation (for example, "the ethos of the hacha" 19
[an ax] in Antioquia) is strong.
Brazil. Let us first consider Brazil, which stands alone in the dimen-
sions of its forest. The extent of territory available and suitable for cof-
fee cultivation, first in the Paraiba Valley of Rio province in the early
and mid-nineteenth century and then into Minas Gerais and the S~o
Paulo west from the mid- to late nineteenth century, dwarfs whole
countries in Central America, not to mention the much more restricted
360
groups in colonial society. When they struggled for freedom and equality,
they were actually fighting to eliminate monopolies and privileges that bene-
fited the mother country and to liberate themselves from commercial restric-
tions that forced Brazilians to buy and sell products through Portugal. Thus,
during this period, liberalism in Brazil expressed the oligarchies' desire for
independece from the impositions of the Portuguese Crown. The oligarchies,
however, were not willing to abandon their traditional control over land and
labor, nor did they want to change the traditional system of production. This
led them to purge liberalism of its most radical tendencies. 26
But the attempt to expand and reproduce such a society took place in
new contexts. In the first place, planters viewing abundant land and a
dependent labor force adopted production techniques that made for
quick profits and long-term destruction. Initial productivity depended
upon the natural fertility of the forest. Whole sections of forest would
be cut and burned, and coffee trees planted in vertical rows up hill-
sides, to facilitate access to the trees by slave gangs. At harvest, trees
would be stripped of cherries and leaves. In a classic and oft-repeated
description, this harvesting method (unique in Latin America) is pic-
tured: "Each branch was encircled by thumb and forefinger, the hand
then being pulled down and outward, thus 'stripping the branch in one
swift motion' and filling the screen with leaves, dead twigs, and coffee
b e r r i e s . ''27 Such methods assured the productivity of labor but not of
land; indeed, with the erosion caused by the vertical rows, they assured
that the land would be exausted at the end of the 20-30 year cycle of
the coffee trees themselves.
Despite the demise of the Vergueiro experiment in the 1850s and the
continued dominance of slave labor until 1888, some planters con-
364
The vast majority of the immigrants were Italian, although Italy prohib-
ited further subsidized emigration to Brazil in 1902. 34 Furthermore,
the state engaged in a remarkable coordination of planter needs and
labor supply. Immigrants would be transferred from Santos to a hostel
in Silo Paulo, where the state would serve as labor contractor. While at
the hostel, the immigrant family would sign a contract to work on a
particular plantation and would then be given railroad passage from
Sgo Paulo to the interior. 35
Costa Rica also moved toward coffee cultivation early in the nineteenth
century, but the occupation of space and titling of land differed
markedly from the Brazilian example, a8 In the first place, the land suit-
able for coffee is restricted, concentrated in the Central Valley from
366
Political and religious office went hand in hand with the generation and pre-
servation of wealth, just as in other, more dynamic Spanish colonial societies.
Ownership of land was not the surest or quickest road to enrichment in this
society, however much it may have been both a form of security and a neces-
sary element in securing elite status and acceptance. Unlike other Central
American societies, landownership in central Costa Rica (excluding Guana-
caste) did not bring with it a servile labor force, a fact that meant that there
was even less interest in landholding among the elite .... [lln Costa Rica land-
ownership was not the distinguishing feature of the elite; instead it was a
combination of commerce, office holding, and diverse investments in urban
and rural real estate. 45
This is not to say that there were no exports at all, or that the new mer-
chants and free tradists in cities such as Bogotfi did not organize proj-
ects and attempt to establish closer ties with world markets. Gold
370
Santander, in the northeast, near the Venezuelan border, was the first
Colombian region to turn toward coffee, after 1850. A region of colo-
nial settlement, hacendados were able to turn to coffee as their tobac-
co, cotton, or cacao markets collapsed. As the first region to turn to
coffee, Santander was to dominate Colombian production throughout
its first coffee cycle, accounting for some 60 percent of Colombian pro-
duction at the end of the nineteenth century. 55 An important percent-
age of its coffee was exported via the developing Venezuelan port at
Maracaibo, as coffee production was expanding in the Venezuelan
Andes at roughly the same time. By the turn of the century, Santander-
ean production was beginning to level off, and the region accounted for
an decreasing percentage of production in this century (only 8.9 per-
cent by 1943). 56 Although the move to coffee involved changes in
structures of production and landed property, with an accumulation of
large properties aided by regional liberal/conservative wars (during
which victorious forces would destroy local land registries57), it did not
depend on or attract strong population movement.
This western zone has been the subject of a powerful myth - the Antio-
quefio colonization, the establishment of a settler society as colonists
moved into the sub-tropical frontier, carved out farms, and established
towns and small-scale enterprises, with a "democratizing" effect on
Antioquefio and Colombian society. More recent studies have empha-
sized the less idyllic aspects of this process, the appropriation of large
tracts of land by a few, the exploitation of small producers by urban
merchants, the violent conflicts over land and resources as public lands
were privatized. 62
The settlement of baldios in the nineteenth century fell into two broad
periods. During the first, from independence to the 1870s, public lands
were sold as a source of revenue for a weak central government and
without regard to the occupation of land by settlers, setting up the basis
for the same kind of conflict that occurred in Brazil. During this period,
colonization took a "collective" character, in which a whole settlement
would be granted title, including house and farm plots. In this form,
baldfos might be ceded by the state of Antioquia, or colonists would
372
The laws of 1874 and 1882 were especially important as the lands held
by settlers increased in value with the expansion of coffee production
in the west from 1890s forward. Before this period, Medellin mer-
chants interested in coffee invested in haciendas in the Cundinamarca/
Tolima region, especially around Sasaima. 65 The first Antioquefio cof-
fee farms were established on large haciendas near MedeUin (Fredonia)
in the 1880s. Further expansion in the 1890s and 1900s occurred in
the areas of small-scale settlement, on the mountain slopes to the
south. By 1913, Antioquia and Caldas had displaced the Santanders as
the most important producing region, creating the basis for a prodi-
gious twentieth-century e x p a n s i o n . 66
However much this may look like an argument that the coffee econo-
mies were different because they were different, the historical and
anthropological understanding that informs it is more complex and
requires elaboration. I have referred at various points in this essay to
specific Paulista or Costa Rican fields of power. I need now to make my
meaning more explicit. Despite the profilerating use of "power" as a
concept in recent literature, my most direct source for the phrase is
Eric Wolf's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. 77 Characteristically,
he defines what he means by practice rather than explicit precept. The
phrase appears most prominently in his conclusion that, "Ultimately,
the decisive factor in making a peasant rebellion possible lies in the
relation of the peasantry to the field of power which surrounds it.''78
While he goes on to use a definition of power offered by Richard
Adams, his understanding of the field of power is less susceptible to
codification. It clearly refers to the class structure of which the peasants
are a part - the landlords, merchants, state officials, capitalist planters,
and others who press claims upon or otherwise threaten peasant liveli-
hoods. But his understanding of the class structure is one that is less
dependent on a ready set of sociological categories than on detailed
anthropological and historical investigation. Earlier, Wolf observed that
Notes
1. This article presents a portion of the summary and argument contained in my intro-
duction for a forthcoming volume on "Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin Amer-
ica," edited by William Roseberry and Lowell Gudmundson. While the present
essay concentrates on questions of land and labor, the longer introduction explores
these questions in a wider range of countries and also treats questions of coffee
processing, commercialization and trade, as well as class formation and politics, all
of which are necessary for the comparative interpretation suggested here. The
introduction, in turn, depends upon and was inspired by the essays by Michael
Jimenez, Lowell Gudmundson, Mario Samper, Hector P6rez, Marco Palacios, Fer-
nando Pic6, David McCreery, Verena Stolcke, and Mauricio Font gathered in the
volume. The conference that led to the volume was generously funded by the Uni-
versidad Nacional de Colombia and the Social Science Research Council, with
funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
378
184. The analogy, while suggestive, is inexact. Coffee is subject to a grading system,
at first developed by traders in consuming countries and in recent decades devel-
oped by marketing boards in producing countries as well. It has never been asso-
ciated with the sort of politically and commercially charged designation of lands
that produce grapes that can be processed into wines with certain appellations, and
within appellations, designation of grapes and the lands that produce them into
grand, premier, and lesser crus, nor can it be. That a discourse of quality can give to
a coffee processor a control analogous to that exercised by, say, a wine negociant is,
nonetheless, an interesting possibility.
18. Stein, Vassouras, 3; Dean, Rio Claro, 1-23; C. Hall, El Caf~ y el Desarrollo
Hist6rico-Geogrdfico de Costa Rica (San Jos~, Editorial Costa Rica, 1976); Pala-
cios, El Caf~ en Colombia, passim; D. A. Rangel, Capital y Desarrollo: La Vene-
zuela Agraria (Caracas: Universidad Central, 1969); W. Roseberry, Coffee and
Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1983),
passim.
19. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 294.
20. The classic account for Rio is Stein, Vassouras.
21. An excellent general treatment of land policy is in E. Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian
Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985), 78-93.
For treatments of the conflicts between squatters and grantholders in Rio and S~to
Paulo, see Stein, Vassouras, 10-17; Dean, Rio Claro, 11-20; HoUoway, Immigrants
on the Land, 112-114.
22. See Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 113, 120-121.
23. Dean, Rio Claro, 13.
24. Stein, Vassouras, 55.
25. B. Bums, A History of Brazil, 2nd ed, (New York, Columbia University Press,
1980), 189.
26. Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire, 7.
27. Stein, Vassouras, 35.
28. Stein, Vassouras, 65-67.
29. Dean, Rio Claro, 89-123; Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 70-72; Stolcke,
Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 1-9; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 94-
124.
30. Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 9-16.
31. Ibid., 17.
32. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 35-40.
33. Ibid., 41.
34. Other important nationalities of immigrants were Spanish, Portuguese, and Japan-
ese. See ibid., 42-43.
35. Ibid., 50-61.
36. This summary has depended on descriptions in Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers,
and Wives;Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, and Dean, Rio Claro.
37. Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 28-34.
38. The best analysis of the occupation of space in Costa Rica is Hall, El Ca# y el
Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogr6fico. See as well idem, Costa Rica: A Geographical
Interpretation in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Westview Press, 1985).
39. L. Gudmundson, Costa Rica before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the
Export Boom (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
40. Hall, El Caf~y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogrtifico, 35-37.
41. J.A. Salas Viquez, "La Bdsqueda de Soluciones al Problema de la Escasez de
380
64. This entire discussion depends on LeGrand, Frontier Expansion, 10-18. See as
well Arango, Caf~ e lndustria, 68-87.
65. Arango, Caf~ e Industria.
66. Machado, El Ca#, 117.
67. Sources for this comparison include Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 187-234;
Arango, Caf~ e Industria, 130-151; Machado, El Cafd, 33-85; Bergquist, Labor in
Latin America, 313-330.
68. Arango, Caf~ e Industria, 149-151.
69. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 191.
70. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 206.
71. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 193.
72. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 342.
73. Ibid., 171-175.
74. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 372-401. See also M. Jimenez, "Traveling Far in
Grandfather's Car: The Life Cycle of Central Colombian Coffee Estates. The case
of Viotfi, Cundinamarca (1900-1930)," Hispanic American Historical Review 69
(no. 2, 1989), 216.
75. Here again, the limited nature of the present comparison needs to be emphasized.
A full understanding of the respective fields of power sketched in this essay re-
quires consideration of the relations between small producers and merchants. But
the bases for merchant control, and the special characterisitics of coffee that make
such control possible, are sketched elsewhere. See the Introduction, cited in note 1,
as well as the Costa Rican sources cited in note 50. For Colombia, see Palacios, El
Caf~ en Colombia; Arango, and Card e lndustria. For other countries, see Rose-
berry, Coffee and Capitalism; Bergad, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capital-
ism.
76. S. Mintz, Sweetness and Power." The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York,
Viking, 1985), 181.
77. E. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row,
1969).
78. Ibid., 290.
79. Ibid., xii.
80. T. Skocpol, "What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?" in R. Weller and S. Guggen-
heim, Power and Protest in the Countryside (Durham, 1982), 166, 178.