The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine dependencies in the early modern world

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2001 by Ross W. Jamieson

The prehispanic systems of production could not, however, survive the colonial encounter. By the late sixteenth century this system was becoming overburdened. The deaths of a huge segment of the local population from European diseases depleted the farming workforce, and Spanish insistence on the intensification of farming practices on the cacao plots caused catastrophic drops in productivity. Traditional cacao production in regions such as Soconusco declined, a trend that continued throughout the seventeenth century. (9)

As Mesoamerican production in traditional areas declined, the vast market of New Spain needed new supplies. Cacao was not yet commercially viable in Europe, but its value in the Mesoamerican marketplace was huge. Entrepreneurs filled this gap with the founding of commercial cacao plantations in two entirely new regions; the Guayas Basin in what is now Ecuador, and the Caracas region in what is now Venezuela (Figure 2). These were the first plantations for the production of a caffeine crop set up deliberately by European colonizers anywhere in the world. Significantly this was done to supply New World, rather than European, market demand. An earlier generation of historians looking at colonial political economy characterized regions such as Latin America as peripheries, producing goods to be shipped out and consumed in Europe. Models of dependency and world systems implied a one-way flow from colony to metropolis. These models have now come to be critiqued by historians, looking toward colonies as societies wh ere goods were consumed as well as exported. Cacao provides a good example of this, with the initial impetus toward mercantile capitalism and a plantation economy coming from a crisis in the cacao supply for New Spain itself. (10)

Wild cacao grew in many parts of tropical America, including the coast of what is now Ecuador. It was here, in the basin of the Guayas River, that commercial cacao plantations were first developed by Spanish colonists to supplant Mesoamerican production. The beginnings of the Ecuadorian plantations are sketchy. Cacao may have been a garden crop in the region before the conquest, and there is some suggestion that it was being planted in Ecuador, and shipped from Guayaquil to Panama, by the 1570s. English corsairs captured Spanish ships entering port at Huatulco in the 1580s with a large cargo of cacao, presumably from Guayaquil. By the 1590s there is good evidence that the Guayas plantations were exporting their crop to New Spain. By the first decade of the seventeenth century Vazquez de Espinosa described the many cacao plantations along the Guayas River, and how "the planting of them has enriched many people and swollen their tithes and revenues". (11)

On the Caribbean coast of South America the Caracas region began producing cacao soon after Guayaquil, in a rival bid to supply New Spain. Exports began in the first decade of the seventeenth century, and by the 1620s Caracas was exporting 5 tonnes per year to New Spain. It is likely that these early exports were harvested from wild stands of cacao trees in the area. Caracas encomenderos used the profits from these sales to purchase African slaves. The slaves provided a key labor force for land clearance and tree planting, allowing the massive expansion of Caracas plantations in the l620s and l630s. Most of the successful Caracas cacao growers of the period had ties to Portugal, and to Portuguese slave traders. Caracas was a convenient first stop for overcrowded Portuguese slave ships from Africa, and slaves could be traded for cacao, which the traders carried on to New Spain for cash sales. (12)