The Second Conquest of Latin America, pt. 2
Latin America | Free Trade, Industry, and the Discipline of Dependency
The nineteenth century did not simply bind Latin America to the world economy — it narrowed entire nations to single exports — and drastically shifted labor, politics, economic relations, and just about anything touched by the economy. If guano revealed the mechanics of extraction, coffee revealed the social order required to sustain it.
Coffee had been a luxury in the colonial world. Europeans consumed, on average, only about one-tenth of a pound per year. It was exceptional, not habitual. Industrialization altered that ratio. As transportation improved and markets expanded in Great Britain, the United States, and beyond, demand accelerated. By the end of the nineteenth century, coffee had become the world’s third most traded commodity. Production grew fifteenfold in the 1800s.
Brazil stood at the center of this transformation.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Brazil was producing more than half the world’s coffee. Independence from Portugal in 1822 had not eliminated slavery, but it had introduced uncertainty. Slavery was waning domestically and internationally. Agricultural downturn and economic crisis marked the first four decades of the century. Initially, Brazil agreed to outlaw the Atlantic slave trade, and a modest protective tariff was briefly erected. There were plans to substitute enslaved labor with European immigrants. The language of modernization circulated.
Then the market spoke.
As demand for coffee rose and the global economy recovered after the Napoleonic wars, hesitation evaporated. European immigrants did not arrive in sufficient numbers. The planter elite returned to what they knew best — slavery. By 1850, 100,000 enslaved laborers worked in Brazil’s coffee fields. Brazil became the largest importer of African slaves and the last country in the Western world to abolish slavery. Emancipation would not come until 1888.
From an economic perspective, the decision appeared rational. Coffee propelled Brazil into global prominence. It produced more than twice as much coffee as the rest of Latin America combined. Rio de Janeiro grew into a metropolis larger than Rome or Madrid. Brazil’s gross national product surpassed that of Eastern Europe, Japan, and even its former colonial master, Portugal. Coffee financed infrastructure. By the late nineteenth century, Brazil possessed one of the largest railroad networks outside Western Europe or North America, and two-thirds of that rail system lay in coffee-growing provinces.
The tracks followed the bean.
Yet the prosperity was narrow. Coffee did not diversify the economy, but rather, it concentrated it. Wealth accumulated in the hands of a planter elite. Investment flowed overwhelmingly into land and enslaved labor. Education levels remained low. Technological innovation lagged. The development of a domestic bourgeoisie was impeded. Internal markets were restricted. Wages — where they existed — were depressed. Capital markets and banks were shaped around the needs of a single commodity, making the entire economy and political stability susceptible to the ebbs and flows of the coffee bean. The state itself assumed the posture of a liberal oligarchy, increasingly dependent upon foreign investment and external demand.
The nation grew, but unevenly. It resembled not a diversified republic but a plantation extended across a continent.
The moral cost did not go unnoticed. In 1883, Joaquim Nabuco, abolitionist and future ambassador, articulated what the balance sheets concealed:
The illusion of wealth, of national development . . . does not fool anyone who examines its shadows. [Our] reality is that of a people who are more slave than master of the vast territory they occupy; a people in whose eyes work has been systematically debased and a people who have been taught that nobility consists of making others work; a people who are strangers to the school; a people indifferent to all those feelings, instincts, desires, and necessities that make the inhabitants of a single country not simply a society, but a nation. When Mr. Silveira Martins told the senate that “Brazil is coffee and coffee is the Negro”—not wishing, of course, to say slave—he defined Brazil as a plantation, a commercial enterprise dominated by a small minority of vested interests, in short, today’s slaveholding Brazil.
The phrase — “Brazil is coffee and coffee is the Negro” — was not a metaphor — it defined the country’s structure. Labor and land were fused. Commodity and coercion were indistinguishable.
Yet even here, the export model proved flexible. When slavery was abolished in 1888 under the Golden Law, the coffee economy did not collapse. In São Paulo, a transformation in labor occurred with startling speed. By 1914, nearly one million Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish immigrants had crossed the Atlantic to work on semi-tropical plantations — the only instance in world history in which massive numbers of Europeans migrated for such labor. Coffee exports ballooned fivefold in the two decades following emancipation.
It turned out that coffee did not require slavery. It required a market.
Capitalism adjusted where morality had faltered. The plantation survived — its labor system changed without Civil War, as was necessary in the United States. The structure of dependence — export concentration, vulnerability to foreign demand, political power anchored in commodity elites — remained intact.
Guano in Peru and coffee in Brazil were different in substance but identical in consequence. Each promised national development. Each deepened reliance on external markets. Each reordered social hierarchies in accordance with export imperatives. Each demonstrated what Topik and Wells describe as Latin America’s integration into the world economy through the export of raw materials — an integration sustained by foreign investment and liberal ideology.
The second conquest did not always appear as violence. Sometimes it appeared as infrastructure, as railways threading through coffee provinces, as ships departing with cargo holds filled. But beneath the language of progress lay the same calculus: commodity first, nation second. Guano exhausted islands. Coffee reorganized a society. Both tethered sovereignty to the market.
And so the arc completes itself. The conquest of the sixteenth century reordered land and faith. The conquest of the nineteenth century reordered labor and capital. The instruments changed. The dependency endured — and I would contend, external dependency grew to greater levels than ever before.
Bibliography | Notes
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.
Topik, Steven, and Allen Wells. The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850–1930. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.