Coffee, Capitalism and the State
by Joseph Heathcott
My favorite beverage on this good earth is coffee. In fact, this essay is largely powered by lengthy, energetic caffeine molecules, bundled into drop after drop of the caustic liquid. And while I might take small comfort in consuming organic beans purchased through Equal Exchange (a fair-trade marketing co-operative),
that hardly effaces the fact that coffee is deeply embedded--like so many foods--in the history of colonialism.
The origin myths of coffee consumption are quaint and pastoral.
The Persian shepherd Kaldi noticed one day that his goats
became frisky after eating the berries of a certain tree. But
humble herders and stimulated goats belie the real histories that
brought coffee into world political
prominence. Pastoral
myths do not account for metropolitan
expansion, imperial
warfare, colonial subjugation,
terrible slavery, and a regime
of accumulation revolving
around that basest, most barbarian
sort of managed exploitation--
the plantation.
By 1835, 217 million
pounds of coffee (accompanied
by nearly one billion
pounds of sugar) flowed from far-flung colonies like Yemen,
Abyssinia, Haiti, Brazil, and Java, into the imperial ports of Europe,
from Amsterdam to Marseilles, from London to Genoa and
Trieste. Coffee berries were chewed for medicinal purposes for
centuries in the Near and Middle East, and perhaps in present-day
Ethiopia.
Boiling the berry to heighten the potency of the extract more
than likely emerged in the Arab peninsula around 1000 c.e. By
the 1400s in Yemen, coffee was a principal item of leisure consumption,
and by the 16th century Ottoman Turks were roasting,
grinding, and brewing the bean of the coffee berry using a method still very much intact today. Travelers from Western
and Southern Europe to Istanbul, Damascus, and Cairo were
always impressed by the inky black liquid sludge served in steaming
hot cups from tiny stalls in the bazaar. Accompanied by
cardamon pods, clove stems, and occasionally ginger, many
consider the gritty Turkish-Arabic coffee to be unsurpassed by
any subsequent Western innovation.
Nevertheless, Western tastes for "exotic" food commodities
exploded in the 16th through 19th centuries?an explosion
roughly equivalent to the spread of colonialism and the expansion
of markets. Nascent within markets and colonial adventure,
of course, was capitalism.
But capitalism was a
very young child in the
1500s. In fact, the rise of
markets long predates the
rise of capitalism. A market
is a place for the exchange of
goods. This exchange can
exist within any number of
economic orders, though it is
rarely if ever "free" of some
sort of political control.
Capitalism, on the other
hand, is a system in which the ownership of capital--that is,
wealth, land, and machinery--governs the relations of production
and shapes the contours of markets all with the sanction
and support of the state. Early markets evolved in towns throughout
coastal Europe, trans-Carpathian Asia, and the Arabian peninsula
within (and often at the crumbling margins of) older systems
of agricultural production such as feudalism. Markets were
not dominated by capitalists until capitalists controlled the
machinery of the state. If colonial adventures abroad were motivated
by the search for new sources of primitive capital (and as a way to stave off rumblings of bourgeois revolution), the commodities that imperial expansion brought to the metropolitan
table were catalytic.
Coffee was just one among many new and exciting imports
that accompanied this expansion of trade into the corners of
the globe. The British monarchs chartered companies to supply
the metropole with tea from India, Ceylon, and China, while
Spain dominated the importation of maize and chocolate from
Mexico. Omani Sultans, later joined by Portuguese, German,
and British military occupations, converted the hinterlands of
the Swahili coastal city-state Zanzibar into a massive slave plantation
for the production of highly sought-after spices. Meanwhile,
Italy and France parlayed proximity to Mediterranean
shipping routes into a dominance over the trans-European trade
in coffee. The Dutch employed forced labor in Sumatra and
Java to power their now industrial-scale commodity production
in spices and coffee.
By the 19th century, coffee was a commodity
deeply enmeshed in colonial systems of labor
coercion, land use, resource extraction, and
commodity trade. Coffee was at the leading
edge of a colonial system of extraction that, in
numerous guises, persists today. Coffee figured
heavily into the European wars of the 17th,
18th, and 19th centuries. British
dominance of Far East trade, for
example, distorted the commodities
available to France, Italy, and
the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
Empires. There, coffee assumed
a dominant place in consumer
cultures for little other reason
than proximity to the Mediterranean
base of trade. Britain
and the Dutch states (Holland,
Zeeland, Orange) continuously
clashed over shared trade routes
across the Indian ocean.
When the Dutch were banished
from Mediterranean commerce
by the French, the great
Hanseatic companies stepped up
colonial efforts in the East Indies,
establishing a thriving economy
of plantation production based on coerced labor. A young creole
nation in the Americas, the United States, rejected tea as a
British colonial conceit, since tea consumption had been heavily
taxed to support military expansion of the Union Jack in India
and China. Instead, "Americans" embraced coffee to the young
national bosom, allying with their bourgeois cousins in France
who were gearing up to overthrow their own king. In fact, one
irony of the story of coffee is its adoption by bourgeois subversives
and revolutionaries.
Colonial expansion by the monarchical states brought coffee
back to the metropole, where eager young plebeian intellectuals
and radicals clamored for the beverage in coffee houses
throughout Paris, Florence, Budapest, Istanbul, Prague, Vienna,
Berlin, and London. Paris alone had over 2000 coffee shops by
the end of the 18th century?one shop for every 300 people!
Coffee became heavily associated with radicalism and sexual
immorality, and coffee shops were perennially raided or closed
down by insecure governments. Pamphlets printed by the hundreds
and even thousands launched salvos for and against coffee.
Societies held debates, and brewers launched public relations
campaigns to get men out of coffee shops and back into
taverns.
Most importantly, however, watchful authorities kept close
tabs on coffee shops, and filled them with informants and spies.
The beans in the bag may have been colonial gold, but the whiff
of the brew was the whiff of revolution. Throughout the 18th
century, French colonial authorities oversaw the slave-labor production
of coffee in Haiti and other West Indian outposts. However,
at the end of the 1700s, the French state was besieged in
the colonies by plantation uprisings, and in the metropole by
bourgeois revolt.
Hundreds of coffee shops in Paris found themselves
short on their principal input?the coffee
bean. Likewise, weakening trade links among Italian
families due to infighting as well as to increased
British and Dutch dominion resulted in a
decline in coffee imports. Consequently, a move
was afoot to apply the new technologies of incipient
industrial capitalism to
squeezing more from each coffee
bean. As industrial capitalism
swept away the power of old European
aristocracies one by one,
French and Italian engineers labored
to produce machines to extract
the most value from the least
amount of raw coffee.
In addition, German engineers--
considered the finest in Europe--
were especially inventive,
given German dependence on leftover
coffee from the now weak
Mediterranean markets. Colonial
disruptions, then, resulted in a
push for greater and greater
economies of scale through the
application of industrial design.
Consequently, a fury of patents
were lodged in Paris beginning in the 1830s and extending to
the present for lowering the costs of producing a cup of coffee.
These machines intervened in all stages of coffee, from the point
of production to the point of distribution to the point of processing
and consumption. This last point provided most of the innovations
with which we have become familiar today--from
roasters, dryers, and grinders, to beggins, percolators, filter pots,
pressure filters, recirculators, hydrostatic vases, vacuum pots,
plungers and presses, and finally to that ultimate achievement
in value extraction, the steam-driven espresso machine.
Over the course of the 19th century, then, colonial wars introduced
market scarcities, which drove up prices, which stimulated
technological innovations. The higher the costs of these
technological innovations, the more prone they were to become
integrated into the means of production of industrial capitalists. For a time, colonialism and capitalism worked in dynamic
tension, lending support but also locking horns over control of
capital and trade. If capitalism triumphed, colonialism never
really went away, of course.
Third World nationalist struggles in Latin America in the 19th
century, and in countries from
India to Zimbabwe in the 20th
century, succeeded in removing
colonial authorities from direct
instrumental control over the
local state. Nevertheless, the established
imperial powers--and
latecomers like the United States
and Japan--continue to dominate
world commodity markets,
and to set the terms of trade on
the global stage. The legal infrastructure
and military policing
of international trade in products
ranging from oil to automobiles
to electronics to coffee were
established along old lines of imperial
control and spheres of influence.
The World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, and the
World Trade Organization have
labored since World War Two to
consolidate the architecture of Northern capital domination.
This was particularly clear when world commodity prices for
tea, sugar, wheat, maize, sisal, and coffee collapsed in the 1960s
and 1970s, further impoverishing Third World producers to the
benefit of Northern consumers. Old colonial relations die hard,
and the products of imperialism such as coffee retain much of
their colonial character today.
Regardless of whether coffee is produced locally by harsh capitalist
plantations, small-holder farms, or socialist cooperatives,
it is nothing but a commodity once it hits the world market.
There, it flows through commodity chains governed by long-established
relations of power, which distort ownership, valuation,
and wealth-creation in the favor of Northern countries.
There are very few coffee-producing countries, for example,
whose coffee output to world markets can be matched by the
value-added through skillful brokering and retail by Starbucks
or Folgers.
The very class which eagerly consumed coffee in pursuit of
an intellectual foundation for bourgeois revolution, plied old
colonial relations into a severely unbalanced world system of
production and consumption.
So what's the moral of the story? The food that we chose to
put onto our tables and into our gullets has a basis in real material
relations that span the globe. These relations, however,
are usually hidden and obscured by marketing. But a Nike shoe
is not just a Nike shoe, and a cup of coffee not just fuel for an
article.
Your morning cup of coffee is part of a long chain of resource
extraction, land accumulation, capital investment, labor mobilization,
shop floor struggle, input coordination (fossil fuels, for example), processing, packaging, shipping, warehousing, distribution, and resale. At each stage there are real environmental costs to commodity consumption, from soil erosion, mass packaging, and petroleum-powered shipping, to all of the resource inputs needed to make a cup of coffee, such as plastic for the coffee maker and bleach paper for the filter. At each stage there are also real people stage there are also real people the terms of labor.
Coffee passes through dozens
of "shop floors," from the
plantation to the processing
plant to the docks to the tanker
to the warehouse to the truck
to the retail store or coffee
shop. At every point where
value is added to a commodity,
real people add that
value--people who may live
and work under onerous conditions,
people with children
and talents and individuality,
people with joys and sorrows,
hopes and dreams.
Coffee, like all food, brings
us into relationships with
these people, relationships
that stretch across the globe. Understanding the historical nature
of these relationships, seeing the people behind the processes,
and coming to grips with our morning cuppa, are all
crucial steps in gaining political awareness and imagining alternatives.
Email: editors@practicalanarchy.org
Updated: August 27, 2000
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