coffee revolution The history of coffee in Brazil, Latin America’s largest coffee producer, illustrates these patterns Before the 1830s, Brazil had undergone a series of export booms: brazilwood, sugar, tobacco, gold, and diamonds In the 1830s coffee production surged, and by the 1840s coffee became the country’s leading export product—a position it held for the next 130 years In the 1840s coffee made up more than 40 percent of total exports; by the 1890s nearly 65 percent; and by the 1920s nearly 70 percent The region around Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the south became the center of the coffee revolution, with the city of Rio de Janeiro emerging as the country’s leading financial and commercial center and principal port city The city’s financial and transport infrastructure of banks, brokerage houses, and port facilities modernized rapidly The decline of sugar production in the northeast and growth of coffee production in the south combined with the decline of the transatlantic slave trade to generate a brisk internal trade in slaves and a shift in the country’s demographic, economic, and political center of gravity southward to the coffee zones By the late 1840s competition for lands suitable for coffee production intensified, prompting the national government to issue a new land law in 1850 that in effect favored large producers and made land acquisition much more difficult for smallholders During this same period, large coffee growers sought to promote European immigration, both to “whiten” the country’s population and to provide an adequate labor supply for their expanding plantations The scheme faltered, however, as European immigrants balked at the slavery-like labor conditions and the lack of economic opportunities—a failure that in turn buttressed large planters’ commitment to slave labor The final abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888 prompted not only the fall of the empire by military coup and the formation of a republican government in 1889, but a surge in European immigration, much of it related to coffee production By 1900 more than twothirds of the world’s coffee was produced in Brazil Coffee remained the mainstay of the export economy until after 1945, but even as late as 1970 coffee revenues made up more than one-third of Brazil’s export sector The precise nature of Latin America’s coffee revolution unfolded differently in different countries and regions, varying widely according to local traditions, preexisting landholding patterns, and power relations between large landholders and smallholders, and many other factors Overall, coffee production and commerce 95 tended to favor large producers over small, but this gross generalization masks important national, regional, and local variations Costa Rica, for instance, the first Central American nation to undergo a coffee revolution, is often cited as an example of a Latin American nation whose coffee revolution favored smallholders, which in turn fostered the development of democratic institutions Scholars generally agree that this was indeed the case Yet even in Costa Rica, different regions experienced the coffee revolution in distinctive ways The province of Cartago, for instance, saw large coffee farms predominate (59 percent with more than 20,000 trees), while in the country as a whole, most farms were smaller scale (60 percent with fewer than 20,000 trees) Tremendous local and regional differentiation, in short, was the norm, and not just in Costa Rica but across Latin America The coffee revolution’s timing also varied greatly Venezuela, like Costa Rica and Brazil, saw surges in coffee production in the 1830s and 1840s; by 1900 Venezuela was Latin America’s second-largest coffee producer after Brazil The approximate sequence in Central America was Costa Rica (1830s–40s), Guatemala (1860s–70s), El Salvador (1870s–80s), and Nicaragua (1880s–90s) Honduran coffee production remained limited through the 19th and early 20th centuries, reaching Costa Rica’s 1860s production levels only in 1949 Colombia’s coffee production boomed in the late 1870s and 1880s (reaching around 14.3 million pounds in 1880), and again in the 1910s and 1920s (approximately 309 million pounds in 1921) Colombia also developed a coffee economy more akin to Costa Rica’s than Brazil’s, in which small, family-owned and -operated farms tended to predominate—again, with significant regional variations, with smaller farms predominating on the coffee frontier region of the central cordillera and larger production units in zones with greater abundance of labor and capital, such as southwestern Cundinamarca Department Everywhere, the coffee revolution introduced a host of changes generally associated with Latin America’s liberal revolution: the privatization of lands formerly unclaimed or owned collectively; the formation of more modern structures of state administration and bureaucracy; the increasing importance of wage labor; the modernization of transport and communications infrastructure to facilitate production for export; state and elite-led promotion of free trade, foreign investment, and European immigration; greater vulnerability to the boom-and-bust cycles of the world market; and