costs, helping drive prices downward. The production of tropical commodities expanded as farmers across the global tropics produced ever more sugar, tea, cocoa, rubber, bananas, and—of course—coffee.36
In these years, global demand for coffee typically increased faster than supply, which encouraged farmers to continually expand production. Initially, producers in Asia—especially in the Dutch East Indies, Ceylon, and India—dominated global production, accounting for about a third of global coffee production until the 1880s.37 But over the nineteenth century the Americas, especially Brazil, decisively surpassed Asia. Coffee cultivation in Brazil quickly expanded into the forest regions around Rio de Janeiro and then vast forest regions beyond. By midcentury, Brazil produced half of the world’s coffee; by the end of the century, it produced more than 80 percent.38
The boom was initially led by small and medium producers. In the early decades of Ceylon’s coffee boom, for example, most of the island’s coffee was produced by Kandyan smallholders. Most of this coffee was grown under shade, as part of a complex production system. Similarly, smallholders in Java “preferred to clear only undergrowth and small trees, planting coffee at stake under tall jungle trees. The coffee trees took longer to bear, and yields were lower, but they lived longer, and soil damage was checked.”39 These cultivation systems embodied a different view of agriculture, economy, and environment. Farmers were not simply seeking to maximize productivity and profit. Profit was certainly one goal, but they also took a longer view about what we would now call ecological and economic sustainability. Perhaps it also reflected the fact that they did not have the same access to “virgin” forests as better-funded farmers.
More specialized estate coffee cultivation began in the eighteenth century. Europeans, especially the French, first cultivated coffee as a plantation monoculture in the Indian Ocean’s Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and in the West Indies: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and—above all—St. Domingue.40 By the second half of the eighteenth century, coffee production in the West Indies had far surpassed production in the Indian Ocean. Arabica coffee had been introduced to St. Domingue in the 1720s; just fifty years later, in 1775, the island exported almost 22,500 metric tons of coffee. By 1789, it was the world’s single largest coffee producer, exporting about 40,000 metric tons.41 These levels of productivity depended, however, on slave labor. St. Domingue’s coffee exports collapsed in the wake of the slave uprising that began in 1789, which also toppled the colonial government. Between roughly 1790 and 1830, estate coffee production across the West Indies collapsed as a result of political strife, abolition movements, and competition with the booming sugar industry for scarce labor. Cuba was the only place in the West Indies where estate production survived, although even there coffee producers had to compete with more-prosperous sugar producers for increasingly scarce slave labor.
While estate coffee declined in the West Indies, it boomed in Asia and mainland Latin America. In those places, coffee monocultures became much more common as planters, often using coerced labor, sought to maximize the productivity and profitability of their farms. Planters cleared “virgin” forests in Brazil, Ceylon, and many other places. Following the so-called West Indian model (developed in colonial St. Domingue), they planted coffee trees in dense rows, eliminating all other plants from the farm. In Ceylon, this could mean a density of between 1,200 and 2,700 plants per acre, depending on the spacing between the trees. The goal, in the words of one planter, was to plant “the great[est] number of trees in a given space so that none shall incommode or interfere with the growth or sustenance of its neighbor.”42 The first generation of European coffee planters generally preferred to plant their coffee in open sun, eliminating all shade trees. The British coffee planter Edmund Hull argued that they did so because the native coffee farmers always did use shade, and “the tendency of the European farmer [was] to regard with the utmost contempt all idea of instruction coming from that quarter.”43 While this kind of prejudice may have been a factor, settlers likely rejected shade trees because they believed that shade reduced yields and, therefore, profits.
In some places, coffee grew as far as the eye could see. At high altitudes in Ceylon, one could see “fields of dark, ever-green, luxuriant coffee-trees, so well clothed with foliage that not a square yard of bare ground is visible for acres.”44 Later in the century the Brazilian novelist Monteiro Lobato described São Paulo’s coffee farms as a “green wave of coffee.”45 On such farms, the coffee trees were planted at carefully measured distances in neat rows. This arrangement reflected European ideas about rationality; it also helped maximize production and manage labor. The goal of this layout, wrote Hull, was to “admit large gangs of laborers working together on an estate without confusion, to enable the employer more easily to check the amount of work done by each person, as well as to economize surface to the utmost, by having the largest number of plants on a given area, each with its due share of ground.”46
But this superficial order masks just how improvised these landscapes were.47 Most European planters had little experience with tropical agriculture; in fact, many had little experience with agriculture of any kind. They learned how to farm coffee by trial and error. In the eighteenth century, French coffee planters seem to have transmitted their knowledge orally. The settlers “had no books or schools to guide them,” wrote the French botanist Auguste Chevalier, “but like the peasants of France they transmitted the improvements they had made from one generation to the next.” Because there were “frequent connections from one colony to the other,” continued Chevalier, “the [farming] methods and techniques were quickly unified” across colonies. From the mid-eighteenth century, then, “the coffee tree was cultivated identically, and coffee was cultivated on [the Île] Bourbon as it was in the Antilles and the diverse countries of the Americas.”48 In Ceylon, some British planters developed an apprenticeship system called “creeping” in which a recently arrived planter would assist an experienced planter for a year or so before setting up a farm of his own.
Over the nineteenth century, some of this practical knowledge was codified in texts. The first significant publication in this genre was P. J. Laborie’s The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo, published in 1798. Laborie had owned a coffee plantation in Saint Domingue, but he lost it during the revolution. In 198 pages, Laborie meticulously described how to clear forests, build the farm, and cultivate and process the coffee, as well as how to manage slave labor. Laborie’s book became a model for coffee plantations around the world; it was a model for the West Indian system of cultivation adopted by British planters in Ceylon. It offered some useful guidance, although some of his suggestions did not always work well in other environments.49 Publications on coffee planting proliferated after the mid-nineteenth century, many of these reflecting the experience of farmers in different coffee zones. Planters also shared their practical knowledge through newspapers and periodicals. And gradually, at least in the British colonies, planters published coffee manuals of their own, usually integrating their practical experience with whatever scientific innovations they felt to be relevant.50
At this point, no particular scientific knowledge was necessary for running a coffee farm; farmers increased production by clearing forests and using more labor.51 And for their part, scientists had not devoted much attention to studying the coffee plant or the practical problems of coffee agriculture. The botanists at Ceylon’s botanical garden were more concerned with acclimating exotic crops than working with the coffee planters. In Brazil, the first coffee research station was not founded until 1887. In the Dutch East Indies, the first dedicated coffee research station was founded in 1896, although coffee researchers at the Cultuurtuin (botanical garden) in Java had started doing some coffee research as early as the 1870s.52 Coffee planters only showed much interest in science when they began experiencing production problems that they could not solve on their own. For that reason, they showed particular interest in Justus von Liebig’s pioneering work on chemical fertilizers. But so long as “land remained cheap and plentiful,” wrote the always-insightful Hull, “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
