Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture by Rafael de Bivar Marquese

The lecture investigates the history of coffee in the longue durée, from its first emergence in the commercial networks of the Ottoman Empire to the world crisis of Atlantic slavery at the end of the 19th century. Within this vast time frame the global circuits of the coffee commodity chain underwent substantive changes. The project explores the multiple combinations of land, labor, capital, and political power involved in the production, circulation, and consumption of coffee. The focus is on the relations between different forms of free and dependent labor mobilized for coffee production in the capitalist world-economy: peasant family organization, slavery, debt bondage, indentured labor, compulsory labor regimes imposed by colonial and national states, sharecropping, and seasonal wage labor. Based on a systematic study of a specific commodity chain, it directly addresses the problem of the structures of asymmetric dependence that evolved in different social orders over time.