Steven Topik

Coffee Anyone? Recent Research on Latin American Coffee Societies

The recent explosion of the popularity of coffee houses in the United States coincides with a swelling number of monographs on the history of coffee in Latin America. However, these studies are less motivated by the faddishness of the Starbucks Revolution than by concerns about the fate of peasant producers, particularly in Central America. Unlike most coffee sippers who care only about the brew, scholars who study the history of coffee are more concerned with the local social, cultural, and economic impact of its cultivation; the arabica itself is often almost incidental. In the last decade a spate of excellent historical monographs, often influenced by anthropology, have deconstructed earlier conventional wisdoms, models, and categories through detailed local studies. Many of these works raise several new and important questions and provide insights principally in social and cultural history. More important, several scholars have used coffee as a backdrop to study peasant societies, state building, class formation, as well as national, racial, and gendered identities. Nevertheless, generalizations about the impact of coffee cultivation on societies that employ these recent insights have been rare. The main purpose of this essay is to trace the changing perspectives applied to the historical study of coffee societies and to suggest that the current trend in history towards deconstructing categories and exploding verities,

The Evolution of the Economic Role of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930

recently from economists. Those who have studied it generally assume that the State first became economically active on a large scale after I930 when it fostered industrialization. They also assume, often implicitly, that politicians and bureaucrats have had a great deal of freedom of action in policy formulation and that greater state economic intervention increases national independence from foreign markets and capitalists.1 These assumptions have led scholars to misrepresent the process by which the Brazilian State increased its involvement in the economy and to overstate the Governments autonomy. This study will demonstrate that, in fact, the State had already intervened substantially in the economy during the First Republic (1889-9I3o) in order to expand the agricultural export economy. Brazils close ties to the world market and foreign capital forced a government controlled by a ruling class ideologically dedicated

Brazil's Bourgeois Revolution?

The centennial of the founding of the Brazilian Republic, which coincides with the bicentennial of Frances republican revolution of 1789, has not aroused the same debates as the French Revolution. The extent to which Frances eruption represented a bourgeois revolution has been much questioned. Indeed, bourgeois revolutions everywhere have been subject to greater scrutiny and skepticism. This debate has excited much less passion in Brazil. Most historians have viewed the Brazilian Republics birth as a rather unimportant event—and a failure. It was neither bourgeois nor a revolution. Rather, the overthrow of the Emperor on November 15, 1889 was a palace coup that replaced one authoritarian rural regime with another. According to this interpretation, no social change occurred as the population stood by “beastlike.” Historians often argue that although the army, which launched the coup, was able to maintain some autonomy in policy formulation for five years, it soon succumbed to the revived agrarian export elite, leaving behind few positive achievements. Yet at the time, the London Statesman declared that the overthrow of the Brazilian monarchy to be the worlds most significant event in a very busy 1889. Historians are now starting to echo this sentiment, reasserting the importance of the early 1890s. Decio Saes, for instance, asserts that the 1889-1891 period marked the advent of the “bourgeois state” which confirmed on the political level the transformation set into motion by the emancipation of slaves in 1888.

Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and SurvivalBrewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, by JaffeeDaniel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. 331 pp.

Daniel Jaffee, a sociologist at Michigan State University, has written an innovative and wellresearched study of Fair Trade coffee that combines interviews with participants in the U.S. conventional and Fair Trade coffee areas with almost two years of field research in two villages in southern Mexico. His subject is of broad interest because coffee has become one of the most contested arenas in debates over the nature and consequences of neoliberal policies and globalization. Farm gate prices for the world’s second most valuable internationally traded commodity collapsed when the 27-year reign of the International Coffee Agreements expired in 1989. A few gigantic international conglomerates such as Nestle, Proctor and Gamble, and Philip Morris took advantage of the absence of state intervention in the trade to virtually corner the market. At the same time, the Starbucks revolution meant that the final price to consumers, at least those who drank in coffee houses, rose precipitously. The return to growing countries fell from over 40 percent of the final price in the 1970s to 15 percent by the 1990s and only 12 percent by 2000/01. Born of famine and poverty relief efforts by religious groups in Europe after World War II, Fair Trade (FT) organizations turned to helping Latin American coffee growers. These groups sought a fair price to farmers by establishing alternative trade networks that would reduce the profits of the middle men and corporations, thereby rewarding growers with a larger share of the final price. Jaffee is clearly sympathetic to the Fair Trade movement, yet he notes tensions between three different wings of people interested in advancing fair trade and is critical of some of their practices in the field. The first are market access advocates who mainly want growers to get a better price for their coffee; they see the market as a means of problem solving. The second group consists of market reformers who want to: improve growers’ share; emphasize ecologically sound sustainable development techniques (such as organic farming to make the coffee safer for consumers in the global North); and strengthen community development, especially of indigenous coffee farming communities. The third wing is the market-breaking advocates who see Fair Trade as a much larger battle than just improving the lives of coffee communities. For them, it is the vanguard of the struggle against capitalist corporate globalization. The tension between fair traders reveals itself in the controversy over convincing giant roasters like Proctor and Gamble, Sara Lee, and Starbucks to sell some Fair Trade coffee and Wal-Mart to carry it. Market access advocates applaud this because more FT coffee is being sold. For the other two wings, this undercuts the alternative networks that sell only FT goods and is a form of whitewashing since the corporate giants can claim to be progressive when in fact only a tiny share of their coffee is FT. This makes the decision to purchase FT just another flavor, not a politically inspired act of protest against the global corporations. Jaffee’s discussion of the tensions is well thought out and helpful for readers new to the controversies. Jaffee makes an important contribution in his detailed field work in the Oaxacan villages of Teotlasco and Yagavila, where he spent much of two years. Through intimate interviews and detailed surveys of 51 coffee-growing families, half in the Fair Trade network and half in the conventional one, Jaffee is able to evaluate what difference Fair Trade makes to the small scale grower. His findings are somewhat mixed. There were clearly economic benefits to participating in Fair Trade: prices were higher, a larger share of the final price went to growers, their children attended a bit more school, and they had more access to health benefits. On the other hand, ironically, the FT growers became much more closely tied to the market, they had to invest more in their coffee and hire wage workers to tend their corn plots because organic FT is so labor intensive. Growers freed themselves from the control of the “coyote” commercial intermediary but still faced what Jaffee calls

21.95 paper. 9780520249592.

The strength and urgency of Milian’s study resides in her cultural-studies approach to widening understandings of Latinoness and Blackness (via texts taken from narrative production, travel dispatches, urban tags, and television, among others), as well as her use of transdisciplinary approaches to bridge Latino/a studies with African American studies. While cultural production itself has engaged the interstitial relationship between blackness, dark-brownness and brownness, Milian’s study views this production from a unique critical lens that forces us to understand racialization and the Global and local South in more sophisticated critical terms with regard to embodiment, resistance, politics, and identities.

Los orígenes de la burguesía de El Salvador. El control sobre el café y el Estado. 1848-1890 by Antonio Acosta Rodŕıguez (review)

Evan Liebermans study is a longitudinal comparison of the interplay of fiscal and social structures roughly between 1880 and today, a historically sensitive study of nation building and state-building through the lens of taxation policy. What make this study especially innovative are the countries he analyzes. Brazil and South Africa are rarely compared, even though they would seem to demand comparison. The first is American, colonized by the Portuguese with heavy Italian immigration; the second is African and colonized by the English and the Dutch Afrikaner. Brazil , was one of the first American countries to win independence (1822) and to establish a solid central state under a constitutional monarch; South Africa was not a unified country until almost a hundred years later, and separated from the British Commonwealth in 1961. The national myths and conventional wisdom of the two countries are almost diametrically opposed: Brazil is known as the country of racial democracy (slavery was abolished in 1888), while South Africa is the land of racial apartheid, a system institutionalized in 1948.