history of the twentieth-century world. Although my project is more modest than his, I confess to being a fellow sufferer of IRAS. The primary and secondary literature on coffee and the coffee rust is vast, which is both a blessing and a curse. Like coffee itself, the sources are distributed widely across the globe, and they are written in four main languages: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, with some additional important works in Dutch and German. With a project of this scale, it is simply impossible to be either definitive or encyclopedic. In many instances, I have had to be ruthlessly selective. Given the project’s scope, I decided to work mostly with the secondary and published primary literature, although I did make a few forays into select archives. I have tried to give readers a sense of the world of coffee in each place that I describe, and also the evolving scientific ideas about the rust and coffee farming. But many richer, local histories of the rust remain to be told in fuller detail.
At the same time, a global approach offers insights that would not be as clear otherwise. In particular, writing the history of the rust has revealed a largely hidden “horizontal” history of coffee, which reveals the complex and constant global circulation of plants, pathogens, people, and technologies across the world’s coffeelands. This disease-centered global history offers a new approach to thinking about coffee itself. Much of the academic and popular writing on coffee focuses on arabica coffee, especially the high-quality arabicas produced for the specialty market. The story of the rust also sheds light on the entwined histories of commodity arabica, of the oft-despised robusta coffee, and of ephemeral coffees such as Liberian coffee, and it gives us a glimpse of the dozens of wild coffee species found in forests across tropical Africa.
The story of the rust will also, I hope, offer some insights about climate change. It is, at its heart, a story of how farming communities across the Global South prepared for and responded to a sudden and sometimes catastrophic change in their environment. We can learn from some of their successes and failures. But the rust is more than just a precursor to climate change; its own history has recently been transformed by climate change. As I write these words in 2019, the rust’s history looks markedly different from how it did when I began the project in 2004. Then, a number of people told me that the history of the rust was basically over. The rust remained a problem, but it had effectively been domesticated. It was just another disease that was no longer a major agent of change. Farmers knew how to cope with it. I imagined that my story would end there. But starting in 2007, a series of severe rust outbreaks swept first through Colombia and later through the Andes, Central America, and the Caribbean. This outbreak is literally a new chapter in the rust’s history; it is now clear that this history is far from over. These new outbreaks, triggered by climate change and a series of political and economic crises, mark the beginning of a new phase in the story of the rust—and of the global coffee industry.
Acknowledgments
THIS BOOK has been a long time in the making, and over the years I have accrued many debts. Jim Webb first pointed me toward coffee rust as a subject, and I have never looked back. Steven Topik and Jonathan Coulis provided vital feedback on early chapter drafts, helping me clarify my thinking. Jacques Avelino has patiently helped me make sense of coffee rust science. Audra Wolfe gave invaluable editorial suggestions on the first full draft of the manuscript. I have been fortunate to have excellent research assistants, including Lara Andrews, Jonathan Coulis, Wainer Coto Cedeño, Jessica Dionne, Juan Ignacio Arboleda, Kuusta Laird, Miguel Marín, Gustavo Lemos, Lisa Maldonado, and Brody Richardson.
The work has been enriched by conversations and email exchanges with historians, scientists, and other people involved in the worlds of coffee and tropical commodities, including Katey Anderson, Francisco Anzueto, Peter Baker, William Clarence-Smith, Patrick Chassé, Claiton da Silva, Harry Evans, Fabio Faria Mendes, Leida Fernández Prieto, Andrés Guhl, Jonathan Harwood, Carlos Hernández Rodríguez, Jó Klanovicz, Jeff Koehler, John McNeill, Jonathan Morris, Miguel Mundstock de Carvalho, Hanna Neuschwander, Philip Pauly, Paul Peterson, Wilson Picado, Robert Rice, Fabio Rodríguez Prieto, Corey Ross, Mario Samper Kutschbach, Ellen Sancho Barrantes, Karen-Beth Scholthof, Shawn Steiman, Robert Thurston, Frank Uekötter, Vitor Várzea, John Vandermeer, and Jim Waller.
I am sincerely grateful for the friendship, the example, and the sharp critical eyes of my fellow environmental historians, including Eve Buckley, Chris Boyer, Micheline Cariño Olvera, Kate Christen, Greg Cushman, Nicolás Cuvi, Sandro Dutra e Silva, Sterling Evans, Reinaldo Funes, Stefania Gallini, Regina Horta Duarte, Claudia Leal, Casey Lurtz, Heather McCrea, José Pádua, Megan Raby, Myrna Santiago, Lise Sedrez, John Soluri (again), Paul Sutter, Tom Rogers, Shawn van Ausdal, Jeremy Vetter, Emily Wakild, Robert Wilcox, and Gustavo Zarrilli. My colleagues at the University of Guelph offered valuable comments on early drafts of several chapters. Thanks especially to Tara Abraham, Catherine Carstairs, Alan Gordon, Matthew Hayday, Kris Inwood, Sofie Lachapelle, Doug McCalla, Susan Nance, Karen Racine, and Norman Smith.
McGill University’s history department offered me an institutional home for two research semesters. During my time there, I had valuable conversations about coffee, commodities, and history with Brian Cowan, Catherine LeGrand, and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. Ben Forest, Juliet Johnson, and Eleanor Forest gave our family a pied-à-terre in Montreal, and so much more beyond that (including delightful company, excellent wine, and not-so-excellent dad jokes). Thanks to Ben and Juliet for your feedback and encouragement as I worked through the final stages of the manuscript.
I am also grateful for the suggestions offered to me by participants in seminars and workshop papers I presented at Cambridge University, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain), the Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Brazil), McGill University, the Miami University of Ohio, the Rachel Carson Center at the University of Munich, Rutgers University, the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Peru), the Universidade Estadual do Oeste do Paraná (Brazil), the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul (Brazil), the University of Edinburgh, the University of Guelph, the University of Kansas, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Pennsylvania.
I learned a tremendous amount about the rust and the world of coffee at several workshops that brought together academics and people in the coffee trade, including the Workshop on the Moral, Economic, and Social Life of Coffee at the Miami University of Ohio in 2008; East Coast Coffee Madness in Montreal in 2016; and especially Sustainable Harvest’s Let’s Talk Roya workshop in El Salvador in 2013. This workshop included a field trip to Café Pacas’s Finca El Talapo, where we could see the impacts of the rust firsthand. I am also grateful to the history department at the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica for organizing a field trip to the Cafetalera Herbazú and the Finca Vista al Valle in Naranjo in 2016.
This work would have been much poorer without the help I received from librarians and archivists at the following organizations: ANACAFÉ (Guatemala); the Biblioteca Carlos Monge, Universidad de Costa Rica; the Biblioteca Conmemorativa Orton, CATIE (Costa Rica); the Biblioteca Nacional de Costa Rica; the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec; the British Library; CABI Bioscience (UK); CIFC (Portugal); ICAFÉ (Costa Rica); the International Coffee Organization; the Library and Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Linnean Society, London; the McGill University Library; the National Archives (UK); the Natural History Museum (UK); the North Carolina State University Libraries; and the Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Cambridge University. I am particularly grateful to the Interlibrary Loan staff at the University of Guelph, who for more than a decade have scoured the world’s libraries for obscure sources on my behalf.
During this book’s long gestation, important collections of primary sources from the nineteenth and early twentieth century have been digitized and placed online. These digital resources make the task of doing global history much easier and are a valuable complement to traditional libraries. For this project, I made extensive use of the Internet Archive’s Text Archive, the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica, the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service’s
