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

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

The consumption of cacao in New Spain remained an important market throughout the colonial period, supplied largely by the Guayas and Caracas plantations. The Crown always frowned on trade between the Spanish viceroyalties, and for

several periods the Guayas trade with New Spain was prohibited completely. This caused some problems for Guayas merchants, but smuggling was rampant and illegal shipments of cacao avoided duties. This may have allowed the Guayas merchants to undercut their seventeenth century Caracas competitors in the New Spain market. Guayas production grew throughout the seventeenth century, and then remained steady at about 1200 to 1500 tonnes annually throughout most of the eighteenth century. (13)

As the cacao trade grew in the New World, the consumption of cacao became part of elite Spanish behavior in colonies well beyond New Spain. In Andean South America cacao consumption was popular amongst the colonial elite by the late seventeenth century. In the city of Cuenca, in the Andean highlands above Guayaquil, we see the first tablewares for the consumption of chocolate appear on the tables of the local elite in the late seventeenth century. These included coconut cups, molinillos, graters and jugs. (14)

The Bourbon administrative reforms in the Spanish New World colonies in the late eighteenth century dissolved many of the mercantilist prohibitions on inter-colonial trade. This served to greatly increase the export of Guayas Basin cacao to New Spain. From the 1780s until the first decade of the nineteenth century Guayas cacao dominated the market in New Spain, usurping Caracas and providing up to 75% of the cacao consumed in New Spain. The marketing of the product changed as local Guayas producers ended their reliance on church credit, and tied themselves to merchant houses in Lima and Mexico City. By the 1790s production had expanded greatly, and over half the Guayas crop was going to Spain, supplying the Old World market as well as the new. Cacao made up about half of the Kingdom of Quito's exports at the end of the colonial period. (15)

World price drops in the first decade of the nineteenth century combined with the Wars of Independence to reduce Caracas production, but Guayas continued to increase their production, reaching 6300 tonnes annually by the early 1820s. It was only with the collapse of Spanish imperial power in the l820s that Caracas and the Guayas Basin lost their predominance in cacao production for the world, when cacao was introduced as a plantation crop in West Africa. The supply of cacao to the colonial market in New Spain, which had been the initial impetus for converting cacao into a mercantile plantation crop, had thus remained a very significant market throughout the Spanish colonial period. (16)

The European encounter with coffee and tea

As opposed to the thousand-year history of cacao among Mesoamerican peoples, coffee (genus Coffea) had begun to be cultivated in Yemen (Figure 3) from wild sources in Ethiopia only in the mid-15th century. It was initially restricted to the Arab world, and popularized through Sufi religious practices, where it was used in all-night ceremonies emphasizing wakefulness and trance-like states. Coffee spread widely throughout the Arab world in the first century after its domestication. In the first decades of the sixteenth century it was introduced in Mecca and Cairo, and by 1555 it reached Istanbul via Syrian entrepreneurs. The drink was spread not by religious use, but through the new Arab social venue of the coffeehouse, where men would go to drink coffee and socialize. These institutions came with their own material culture, the coffee made in and served from pear-shaped metal pots, and poured into small clay or porcelain cups. By the 1560s there were over 600 coffeehouses in Istanbul alone. Some were luxuriou s, with gardens and fountains, while many were simple rooms off the street. Women were socially excluded from all of them. By the end of the seventeenth century the city of Cairo stood as the central coffee market for the Near East, with production of the crop remaining in the hands of Arab growers and merchants in Yemen and Eritrea. (17)