IFP Week 4: Stimulants in The Global Economy

Matt Price

Today's Lecture

  • European Empires & the rise of "exotic" stimulants:
    • Chocolate
    • Tea
    • Coffee
    • Tobacco
  • Chocolate: Food of the Gods
  • Tea: Social Distinction
  • Coffee Houses: Hotbeds of "Modernity"

Understanding Chocolate

  • Like tomatoes, the cacao plant probably comes from the Amazon & moved up to Mesoamerica several thousand years ago
  • contains natural stimulants, esp theobromide and some caffeine
  • used in many preparations by Aztecs and their predecessors (Maya, Olmecs), usually as a drink perhaps called chocolatl
    • important enough to be used as currency
  • Spanish at first disgusted by it, then by around 1670 becomes increasingly popular when mixed with sugar
  • glossary:
    • cacao: the plant
    • cocoa: powder made from dried, fermented, roasted cacao beans
    • chocolate: either a drink or a solid food
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Figure 1: Cacao Pod with pulp and seeds (Geek, 2019)

The main benefit of this cacao is a beverage which they make called Chocolate, which is a crazy thing valued in that country. It disgusts those who are not used to it, for it has a foam on top, or a scum-like bubbling…. It is a valued drink which the Indians offer to the lords who come or pass through their land. And the Spanish men—and even more the Spanish women—are addicted to the black chocolate. (Acosta 1590 in Coe, 1996, Chapter 4)

Chocolate, Luxury, and Slavery

  • in Spanish high society, chocolate was widely drunk by 1700, generally prepared from a solid mass mixing powdered cacao with sugar, cinnamon, chilis, and several other spices
  • spreads through royal courts across Europe
  • by 18th century, with the widespread use of sugar, chocolate begins to appear in "confectionary" – pastries and sweets, which multiply in this period
  • hidden behind this luxury was an abominable practice: widespread slavery

Cacao and Chocolate in Brazil

  • in the 16th century, Portugal was among Europe's great powers (remember spice islands, African trading towns)
  • by 1550, had laid claim to large sections of South America
  • its status as a great maritime power was sustained in large part through the slave trade
  • Brazil accounted for 40% (!) of the transatlantic slave trade
  • the most important crop was sugar (more next week)
  • but second… was chocolate
Imperios_Espa%C3%B1ol_y_Portugu%C3%A9s_1790.svg
Figure 2: Portuguese and Spanish Empires ca. 1790
Figure 3: Port of Salvador de Bahia, the world's largest slave port

From forests to plantations

  • Amazonian peoples gathered cacao in the forest
  • early on, Portuguese settlers enslaved native populations as gatherers
    • but harder to control slaves in the forest!
  • → plantations
    • but: low crop yields!
  • meanwhile: demand exceeds labouring capacity of indigenous peoples
  • slave trade that begins in 1538 accelerates through the next 300 years
  • By 1700, African slaves are the main labourers on all Brazilian plantations, and even on small farms
  • this delicacy was always been founded on an economy that only sees some people as human
    • still true today

Tea and Empire

  • tea (Camellia sinensis) has been drunk in China for well over 2000 years and perhaps as long as 4700 years, and in Japan and Korea for ~1500 years
  • like chocolate, it is labour-intensive to cultivate. Leaves are picked individually and then often "fermented" (really oxidized) before drying. In some places leaves are ground and can be stored as a cake
  • in Europe, it arrived later than chocolate, around 1600, first via the Dutch
    • at first greeted with great suspicion (like the tomato! but added: moral dangers)
  • a fascinating question: how did this subtropical asiatic plant become the "national drink" of so many places?
Figure 4: Tea Plantation in Darjeeling, India
Lady_drinking_tea_-_Lavreince.jpg
Figure 5: (Lafrensen, 1750)

Tea in Asia

  • for many hundreds of years, commercially available tea grew only in China, and became part of many Cinese cultures, including forms of hospitality. Over the centuries, different varieties and modes of preparation rose and fell
  • when it finally spread, outside of China, it was mostly through Buddhism: Chinese Buddhist monks who had developed tea practices brought them to Japan and Korea, where they changed and became "native"
  • In Assam, in India, another, similar plant was used as tea, but not in a widespread manner
    • In the rest of India, tea was not well-known
    • certainly not the national drink!

Tea in European Expansion

  • Tea first became popular in Europe around 1650, though it had appeared 100 years prior
  • Tea rituals developed in royal courts in many places, e.g. in Russia, where tea is still extremely popular
  • As the British Empire rose, it became more and more tied up with tea
    • not an accident that the first riot of the American Revolution was the "Boston Tea Party"
      • the price of tea was a matter of great political import!
      • and had a lot to do with social class!
    • but amazingly, it transitioned from a noble drink to a universal national beverage between about 1650 and 1750 (Kemasang, 2009, p. 70)
    • But ritualization of tea consumption increased greatly in the 19th century, when Britain tried to break the near-monopoly of China on tea exports
      • planted huge plantations across Northern India
      • dramatically changed Indian agricultural economy, becomes exporter of non-subsistence crops
      • since India is a British "possession", drinking tea becomes "quintessentially imperial"
      • by late 19th century, tea was tdrunk by rich and poor alike, largely because of the extractive economics of colonialism

Coffee

  • like tea, an "Old World" plant, but unknown in Europe before 1500; unlike chocolate and tea, there is little evidence of ancient origins
  • brought from Africa by Somali traders who sold it across the Muslim world
  • entered Europe from the East, via Ottoman Empire, Hungary, and Venice
  • Coffeehouses became popular in the late 1600's, especially in Eastern Europe (Austria, Eastern Germany)
  • The British drank tea; the continental Europeans drank coffee
Coffea_racemosa00.jpg
Figure 6: green coffee fruits
  • like chocolate, coffee quickly became a European cash crop, grown on plantations powered largely by slave labour
  • though planted all across Latin America (and the world!), was dominated by Brazilian plantations
  • American taste for coffee began in the Revolutionary War, and as it grew, it displaced tea, and became part of the new American Empire's project for hemispheric domination

Coffeehouse Culture

  • many scholars have argued that coffeehouses were a crucial institution for intellectual and political change
  • as we see in this image, coffeehouses brought together people of various (but not all!) social classes
  • new print forms, like newspapers, were delivered there, and they became places for lively political debate
  • the tremendous flourishing of thought in the late 18th century – maybe it actually comes from coffee?
vienna+coffee-house+18th.jpg
  • a "public sphere" of debate needs a place where people can come together
  • at best, it should be a place where ideas and words matter more than birth and money (cf Habermas, 1989)

Stimulants, Empire, and Industry

  • Stimulants have been used by many peoples around the world for thousands of years
    • many different purposes and cultural rituals
  • In Europe, the main daily stimulants arrived around the same time, in the 17th century
    • they created a world in which rich and poor had access to drugs that kept them alert even in tedious circumstances
    • Not long after, massive changes in the way people worked followed.
      • Industrial revolution
    • To a large extent, that industrial revolution was first tried out in the plantation societies of American agriculture
    • Where slaves laboured in agriculture, proletarians would soon follow in textile mills and iron plants
    • the enslaved and colonized were bound to the worker and capitalist by many bonds; but the stimulants were far from the least of them

Sources

Clarence-Smith, W. G. (2003). The global coffee economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 1500-1989. Cambridge University Press. https://www-fulcrum-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/epubs/zg64tm47v
Coe, S. D. (1996). The true history of chocolate. Thames and Hudson.
Geek, F. F. (2019). What it’s like to eat cacao fruit. In Florida Fruit Geek. https://floridafruitgeek.com/2019/07/31/what-its-like-to-eat-cacao-fruit/
Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of Bourgeois society. MIT Press.
Habermas, J., Lennox, S., & Lennox, F. (1974). The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964). New German Critique, 3, 49–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/487737
Kemasang, A. (2009). Tea — midwife and nurse to capitalism. Race & Class, 51(1), 69–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396809106164
Lafrensen, N. (1750). Lady Drinking Tea. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lady_drinking_tea_-_Lavreince.jpg
Schivelbusch, W. (1992). Tastes of paradise: a social history of spices, stimulants, and intoxicants. Pantheon Books. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/002560871