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

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

It was fairly simple for commercial growers to transplant cacao and coffee to new plantations, but yerba mate proved to be a finicky crop. Spaniards apart from the Jesuits had little success in growing it, so production after the Jesuit expulsion came largely from the harvest of wild stands in Paraguay. The town of Concepcion, founded in 1773, became the northern mate port, with land access to the stands of wild plants in the hinterland. Yerba mate was the only caffeine crop ever harvested commercially from wild stands in large quantities. Harvesting of the plant was a speculative enterprise, with Indian debt peons spending months in the forest harvesting, drying and bailing the crop. Many members of these work parties died. (25)

The crop was sold regionally in South America, never gaining European markets. The Bourbon reforms massively increased the volume of the yerba mate trade in South America, as it did with the cacao trade from the Guayas region. The creation of the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata in 1776 meant that the merchants of Buenos Aires took control of both the yerba mate production zones in Paraguay, and one of the major consumer markets, in Alto Peru. Free trade and tax reforms in 1778 and 1780 made exports far more profitable. (26)

By the 1770s yerba mate was a popular social drink throughout the Andes, served at all hours of the day. The tea (or yerba) was traditionally drunk from a gourd (or mate), sipped through a straw known as a bombilla. By the 1770s this market had penetrated as far north as Cuenca, where the traditional gourd with silver straw began to appear on elite tables in this tertiary northern Andean city. Several examples of mate gourds mounted in silver with a silver straw have been encountered in late eighteenth century inventories from Cuenca. There was a female association with this form of Andean consumption, a contemporary observer stating that "... there is no house, rich or poor, where there is nor always mate on the table, and it is nothing short of amazing to see the luxury spent by women on mate utensils." The gendered nature of the consumption of caffeine drinks in the early modern world has not been extensively studied outside Europe, but in the case of yerba mate in the Andes the association is with female, and domestic, consumption. (27)

Yerba mate thus provides us with an example of a caffeine beverage crop with a unique historical trajectory. Developed as a plantation crop by the Jesuits to supply a South American market, it reverted to a system of commercial harvesting of wild plants after the Jesuit expulsion. The difficult transplantation of the wild plants meant that domestic plantations were not easily founded, and the wild plant harvest remained important for much of the commercial history of yerba mate. This situation continued until the 1890s, when large yerba mate plantations were successfully developed in the southern Mato Grosso to serve the modern regional market. (28)

Other American caffeine plants