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CHAPTER 2

Coffee Rust Contained

HISTORIES OF epidemic disease often begin with a dramatic story of the first outbreak and the chaos it produced. While this approach makes for a compelling beginning, it also privileges the pathogen’s role in the disease. It diminishes, and sometimes erases, the critical role played by the other two elements of the disease triangle. Shifting focus to these other elements—in this case, the coffee plant and the ecosystems—reminds us that epidemics do not appear out of nowhere. Rather, epidemics are fundamentally historical; they are the product of long-term processes that produce vulnerable ecosystems. Here, we will follow arabica coffee’s journey around the world, in a series of transfers that took it from a small corner of southwestern Ethiopia across the global tropics, while leaving the rust fungus behind. We will track how political and economic forces—especially but not only European colonialism—shaped coffee’s growing popularity as a crop and as a drink. As coffee became more popular, farmers continued to expand coffee frontiers, which consisted almost exclusively of rust-susceptible arabica cultivars. They also intensified coffee production. By the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s coffeelands produced more coffee than ever, but they were also more vulnerable to diseases and pests. Productivity and vulnerability were, at that moment, two sides of the same coin.

The coffee that most of us drink is known botanically as Coffea arabica. The plant belongs to the genus Coffea, which includes more than one hundred species. Species of Coffea grow in a wide range of ecosystems across equatorial Africa, from dry lowlands to wet highlands, and from Liberia in the west to Madagascar in the east (see map 2.1). Arabica coffee, however, is native to one small corner of this range: the montane forests of southwestern Ethiopia, west of the Great Rift valley, between 1,300 and 2,000 meters above sea level in the regions of Kaffa and Illubabor. It enjoys the temperate highland climates, growing best in the shaded, diverse under-story of the forest canopy with temperatures between 15°C and 28°C and moderate amounts of rain.¹ It is a small woody tree, like a shrub, that usually has one main stem with lateral branches growing almost horizontally. The branches are densely covered with dark green leaves, which the plant retains year-round. It produces fruit: the coffee “cherries.” The coffee we drink is made out of the dried and roasted seeds of this fruit (see fig. 2.1). “When man does not interfere,” wrote the coffee expert Pierre Sylvain, “the forest is quite dark and the coffee trees are spindly; they reach considerable height but produce only enough fruit to ensure the survival of the species.”²

Map 2.1. Distribution of coffee species in the wild. (From Maurin et al., “Towards a Phylogeny for Coffea,” 1571)

Figure 2.1. Coffee branch and berries. (In Thurber, Coffee, frontispiece)

Genetically, the arabica coffee plant differs from other Coffea species in one significant way. It is self-fertile (autogamous), meaning that only one parent plant is necessary to flower and produce seeds. All other species of Coffea are allogamous, requiring two parents to flower and produce seeds. Arabica’s distinctive genetic makeup made it suitable for transplant over great distances, since only a single plant (or seed) was necessary to establish a new population.³ It also meant that populations of arabica tended to be homogeneous, which, as we shall see, could be environmentally risky but commercially desirable. Arabica’s self-fertility made it easy for farmers to produce a consistent product from one harvest to the next. These advantages came at a price, however. Arabica coffee is also less genetically variable than other coffee species, leaving it susceptible to diseases and pests.⁴

One of these is the coffee leaf rust, caused by the coffee rust fungus known scientifically as Hemileia vastatrix. It is an obligate parasite of coffee; that is, it can only complete its life cycle on plants of the genus Coffea. The fungus begins its life cycle as a tiny spore. The spore will only germinate in specific conditions: it must be deposited on the underside of a coffee leaf, the air temperature must be 15°C–28°C (optimally 21°C–25°C), and water droplets must be present on the underside of the leaf. A coffee writer in the 1920s aptly described fungi like H. vastatrix as the “vampires of the vegetable world” since they feed on the tissue of other organisms. Once H. vastatrix germinates, it penetrates the leaf and sends shoots into the leaf tissue. The fungus creates a branching mycelium that feeds on the surrounding leaf tissue, forming circular orange pustules. Ultimately, these shoots produce spore buds that pierce back out through the underside of the leaf. Each pustule can contain as many as one hundred thousand spores, each of which can begin the infection cycle anew (see fig. 2.2). The spores can be dispersed by winds and rain, or by the many insects, animals, and people that pass through the ecosystem. During a severe rust outbreak, rust pustules can cover the coffee leaves, causing them to fall prematurely. Defoliation deprives the coffee plants of vital nutrients. Repeated infections debilitate the plant, preventing the branches and fruit from developing fully.⁵

The precise geographic distribution of H. vastatrix in the wild remains unclear. The coffee expert Albertus Eskes argues that “it is most likely that H. vastatrix has coevolved simultaneously on many coffee species from all over Africa.”⁶ In principle, the geographic range of H. vastatrix in the wild could have been as large as the range of the Coffea genus. But some fragmentary historical evidence, discussed in later chapters, suggests that H. vastatrix’s wild range spanned the Great Lakes region and Ethiopia in East Africa, as well as the eastern half of the Congo River basin. The genetics of the coffee plant and the fungus also offer clues about the fungus’s historical distribution. The fungus has evolved into strains (physiological “races”) that specialize in attacking particular species of coffee. Most Coffea species, in turn, have developed some degree of resistance to the fungus. The most highly rust-resistant species, such as C. canephora, grew in warm and humid areas favorable to the fungus. The least rust-resistant species, including C. arabica, grew in cooler and drier areas that were less hospitable to the fungus.⁷ The presence of resistant genes in each coffee species therefore offers clues to the presence of the rust in its habitat.

Figure 2.2. Coffee rust infection process, simplified. A. Rust spores are disseminated by wind, humans, rain splash, insects, and animals. B. Spores are deposited on healthy coffee leaf. C. Spores germinate and infect leaf tissue, producing characteristic orange-colored lesions on the leaf. D. Infection causes premature leaf fall. E. Cross-section of infected leaf, showing how fungus colonizes leaf tissue and then sporulates, beginning the infection process anew. (Illustration by Angel Luis Viloria Petit)

Although H. vastatrix was widely distributed across Africa, serious outbreaks were unknown. “The available information,” writes Eskes, “suggests that most African coffee species have developed a balanced relationship with H. vastatrix, showing generally little disease under natural conditions.”⁸ Both the historical and genetic records suggest that the rust fungus was widespread in the wild home of arabica coffee, yet it is unlikely that there was ever a major outbreak there. Wild arabica, like other coffee species, developed ways of coexisting with the rust. All arabica varieties have some degree of resistance, but genetic resistance alone does not explain the absence of major outbreaks in Ethiopia. Under the right conditions, as coffee farmers would later discover to their dismay, arabica could be highly susceptible to the rust. But the rust was also kept in check by the environment of Ethiopia’s highland forests. The average temperatures of the highlands are, in places, cooler than ideal for the rust spores to germinate. The dense forest intercepted rainfall, which made it more difficult for the spores to germinate and spread. The forest also blocked the wind, which limited the circulation of rust spores. The comparatively low density of coffee plants in the forest also limited the opportunities for spores to find a host to reproduce upon. And, in Ethiopia, H. vastatrix was itself parasitized by hyperparasitic fungi found in the forest, of the genera Darluca and Verticillium.⁹

“Arabian” Coffee in the Islamic World, 1450–1700

The first people to regularly consume coffee likely left the forest cover intact, at first. The people of southwestern Ethiopia may have first consumed the leaves of the coffee—as a tisane—rather than the fruit. But at some point, they also began consuming the fruit. According to one often-repeated legend, a goatherd named Kaldi discovered coffee’s stimulant properties when his goats started dancing after eating coffee fruit. Although this charming story is likely not true in its specifics, it does suggest one way that people may have discovered the bean’s stimulant properties. There is some debate as to whether Ethiopians consumed coffee beans as a food—mixed with butter, honey, and spices—or as a drink.¹⁰ At first, the people of Kaffa likely foraged for coffee, harvesting the fruit from wild trees. At some point they realized, speculated the botanist Pierre Sylvain, that plants exposed to the sun yielded more coffee. So they began to manage the forest canopy, reducing the shade to increase the yields of wild plants. Some people transplanted wild coffee seeds and seedlings from the forest to gardens near their houses, where they cultivated coffee alongside other crops. As coffee became more popular in Ethiopia, people started moving coffee plants beyond their native range.¹¹ These changes presented the rust with new opportunities to spread, though if it did, the levels of infection likely remained low. “Diseases and pests do not seem to be a problem in the coffee forest,” wrote Sylvain in 1956, “where man has not changed the biological equilibrium.”¹² The rust was likely not a major problem on the semiforest or garden coffees either. The coffee plants were protected by a measure of genetic resistance, cropping practices, and temperatures that were favorable to the plant but inimical to the rust.

Coffee’s life as a global commodity began early in the fifteenth century CE, carried along trade routes that linked southern Ethiopia to the Red Sea through the port of Zeila. At first, the growth of coffee consumption in precolonial Africa did little to alter the relationship between the plant and the pathogen in Ethiopia because most coffee was harvested from wild plants.¹³ Sufi Muslims were instrumental in diffusing coffee consumption beyond Ethiopia. The monks in Sufi orders used caffeine to stay awake through their long rituals.¹⁴ They first carried the coffee habit to cities of the Arabian Peninsula in the early fifteenth century, including Aden and Mocha—which later became globally important as a center for coffee exports. By the 1490s, coffee had been introduced to Cairo; by the 1520s it was being consumed by the Ottoman court in Istanbul. The new drink also gave birth to a new institution: the coffeehouse. Coffee and coffeehouses spread in tandem to the major cities of the Ottoman Empire, including Mecca, Medina, and Aleppo. Until the mid-sixteenth century, most of this demand was supplied by Ethiopia. After the 1570s, Yemen supplanted Ethiopia as the world’s dominant center of coffee production.¹⁵

Yemen enjoyed a virtual monopoly on global coffee production and trade until the early eighteenth century. This was driven in part by imperial politics: the Ottomans conquered Yemen in the late 1530s, and in the 1550s they also attempted to gain control of parts of Ethiopia. The Ottomans began to promote coffee cultivation in the 1570s, and taxes on coffee offered local and imperial governments a significant source of revenue. Coffee gradually made its way into the Red Sea trading networks that linked Yemen to the Ottoman Empire and the worlds of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In 1635, the Qasimi ousted the Ottomans from Yemen, though the Qasimi state continued to sell coffee to consumers in the Ottoman Empire. In the early eighteenth century, Cairo merchants purchased about half of Yemen’s total coffee production.¹⁶ The historian Nancy Um characterizes the Qasimi as the “coffee imamate.” The imam received a quarter of the sale price, and coffee generated more revenue for the state than any other crop.¹⁷ Yemeni coffee reached growing populations of coffee drinkers in places as far afield as Surat in Mughal India in the east, and London, Amsterdam, and Paris in the west. European traders first appeared at Mocha around 1610; a century later, European trading companies were a regular presence. In the eighteenth century, Yemen exported between 12,000 and 15,000 tons of coffee per year.¹⁸

Coffee cultivation in Yemen likely began sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century as coffee drinking became more popular in the Middle East. The anthropologist Daniel Varisco suggests that coffee was one of a trio of major crops (along with mango and qat) that were introduced to Yemen in the fifteenth century CE. Both coffee and qat (another stimulant plant) were introduced to Yemen from Ethiopia.¹⁹ This movement was part of a much larger history of global botanical exchanges; Yemen had often served as a relay point between African and Asian biota.²⁰ These transfers had greatly enriched Yemen’s agriculture—farmers there cultivated wheat, millet, sorghum, watermelons, citrus, sugar cane, and dozens of other exotic crops. The coffee plant was, at first, integrated into existing agricultural ecosystems, particularly in the interior highlands, often in terraces on the side of steep hills.²¹

Yemen’s climate was marginal for arabica cultivation; it lacked the rainfall and forest cover of arabica’s home in Ethiopia. Farmers in the Yemeni highlands used artificial shade trees to protect the delicate arabica plants in areas otherwise exposed to the full sun during the long dry season.²² The French traveler Jean de la Roque, who visited Yemen’s coffee farms in the early eighteenth century, wrote that were it not for the shade trees, “the [coffee] blossoms would soon be burnt up, and never produce any fruit, as it happens to those trees that have not the advantage of such a neighborhood; and in effect these [shade trees] stretch out their branches to a prodigious length, which are so disposed in an exact circle, as to cover everything underneath.”²³ Through the dry season, farmers sustained the coffee plants by irrigating them using water collected in reservoirs during the rainy season. During the warm and moist rainy season, which lasts approximately from April to September, the countryside receives between 800 and 2,000 millimeters of rain.

While the coffee plant prospered on the Arabian Peninsula, H. vastatrix did not. It is possible that the fungus has never been introduced to Yemen. The fungus feeds on the leaves of the coffee plant, and arabica was most likely brought to Yemen as seeds, which are much easier to transport. But even if the fungus had crossed the Red Sea on live plants or in some other way, it would have struggled to survive in Yemen. The rust spores would have struggled to survive and reproduce during the long dry season and cool nights of Yemen’s coffee zones. When the botanist Pierre Sylvain surveyed coffee cultivation in Ethiopia and Yemen in the 1950s, he was struck by the sharp differences between the health of coffee farms on either side of the Red Sea. He found that in Yemen, coffee could be cultivated at elevations as low as 1,000 meters; at a similar altitude on the Ethiopian side of the Red Sea, “diseases and insects would make coffee cultivation hazardous.”²⁴ In the mid-1950s, Sylvain found no H. vastatrix anywhere in Yemen, which is telling because the rust was, by then, present in every other coffee-growing region in the Indian Ocean basin. Yemeni farming practices may also have helped limit the disease. Yemeni farmers managed disease in coffee (and other crops) by cultivating healthy seedlings and by using shade trees to limit the amount of dew on the leaves.²⁵ None of these disease-control practices were unique to the coffee plant, nor were they specifically directed at controlling the rust. But this broader history reminds us that the health of Yemen’s coffee farms was not only an accident of geography.

The rust’s absence from Yemen matters since Yemen—not Ethiopia—was the center of diffusion for the world’s cultivated arabicas. Yemen was much more tightly connected to global networks of exchange than southwestern Ethiopia was. This is why the coffee we drink is called arabica coffee instead of, say, Abyssinian coffee. India’s coffee farms were founded from coffee seeds taken from the Arabian Peninsula. The Dutch, French, and British also visited the Arabian Peninsula repeatedly to obtain coffee seeds or plants for their expanding tropical empires in Africa and Asia. The progeny of Yemen’s arabica plants also formed the genetic basis for the New World’s coffee industry. Before the mid-nineteenth century, none of the arabica coffee cultivated outside eastern Africa was descended from seeds or plants obtained directly from its wild range in Ethiopia. All of the world’s cultivated coffee descended—directly or indirectly—from a coffee zone singularly free of rust. The health of the world’s cultivated arabica coffee had been preserved by an accident of ecology and history.²⁶

The Ecological Pax Arabica

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coffee production and coffee consumption expanded in tandem. In the mid-seventeenth century, coffee drinking spread to Europe. Some Europeans developed a taste for coffee through contacts with the Ottoman Empire. The Viennese, for example, supposedly developed their taste for coffee after an Ottoman siege of the city was broken and the fleeing Ottomans left behind many sacks of coffee. In other parts of Europe, coffee appears first to have been introduced by individual “Turks” (i.e., people from the Islamic world) who set up coffeehouses in major commercial and cultural centers.²⁷ Europeans were attracted by the drink and also by the coffeehouse as a social institution. In the 1650s and 1660s, coffeehouses sprang up across London, where they attracted the attention of the cosmopolitan English virtuosi, who valued the exotic.²⁸ Some people expressed concern about the possible influence of the “heathen,” “infidel” drink on English society—as in the famed British pamphlet titled The Women’s Petition against Coffee. As in the Ottoman Empire, ruling elites sometimes voiced concern about the coffeehouse as a place for sedition. But official efforts to close or control coffeehouses were ultimately futile.

Coffee consumption soon spread across the social spectrum. In some of London’s coffeehouses, people of all social classes rubbed shoulders, although other coffeehouses served a more exclusive clientele. Coffee became part of popular culture; the composer Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a coffee cantata in which a young woman sings “how sweet coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses…. Coffee, I have to have coffee.”²⁹ By the eighteenth century, coffee prices had fallen so much that, as the Dutch trader François Valentijn noted, “coffee had broken through so generally in our land that maids and seamstresses now had to have their coffee in the morning or they could not put their thread through the eye of their needle.”³⁰ European demand for coffee grew steadily across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as coffee prices continued to fall. Americans embraced coffee drinking in the nineteenth century, although coffeehouses were less popular. Americans usually bought green coffee at general stores and roasted it at home. After the Civil War, large coffee companies began to roast and market coffee on a large scale.³¹

Coffee cultivation spread across the global tropics in tandem with the coffee boom in Europe. Initially, Europe’s coffee boom was fueled by coffee from Yemen. European trading companies—the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC)—started to export coffee from Yemen to London and Amsterdam, and then to consumers across Europe. As European demand grew, Yemen gradually lost its monopoly on coffee cultivation. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, people disseminated coffee plants throughout the Indian Ocean basin. European trading companies, especially the Dutch VOC, played some role in this dissemination. But the plant also circulated through parallel non-European (largely Muslim) trade and pilgrimage networks in the Indian Ocean basin. By the late seventeenth century, arabica coffee was cultivated in western India, where most of the coffee was consumed locally. The Dutch introduced coffee to Java from India rather than from Yemen. By the late seventeenth century, arabica coffee was widely, if not yet densely, cultivated along an arc reaching from Yemen in the east to Java in the west.³²

Arabica coffee was introduced to the New World in the early eighteenth century. In 1696, the Dutch transported a single coffee tree from Java to Amsterdam, where it was cultivated in the city’s botanical garden. From Amsterdam, some of the plant’s offspring were sent to Paris and cultivated in the Jardin du Roi. Based on this plant, the French naturalist Antoine de Jussieu published one of the earliest botanical descriptions of coffee, which he classified as Jasminum Arabicum.³³ Between about 1710 and 1720, both the Dutch and the French took progeny of this plant to the New World. According to popular French legend, it was taken to Martinique by one Chevalier de Clieu, who sustained the fragile plant by giving it some of his water rations. Even if this story is true, de Clieu was not alone; around the same time, and with much less fanfare, the Dutch took arabica coffee to Suriname. By the mid-eighteenth century, the arabica coffee plant—based on the progeny of these early introductions—had been disseminated across the Americas, from Mexico to Brazil.³⁴ The founding populations of arabica coffee in the New World were built on a limited genetic base.

It is safe to assume that H. vastatrix was not present in the Americas before the twentieth century. In the unlikely event that the rust had been present in Java, it would have faced a series of significant bottlenecks on its journey to the Americas. It is virtually impossible that the delicate fungus could have survived the extreme temperatures of the voyage around Cape Horn from Java to Amsterdam. Before the nineteenth century, live plants were usually transported in pots on the ship decks; more delicate plants may have been placed in wood or glass cases to protect them from the elements, but even those were left open so that air could circulate. Had the fungus somehow survived, watchful gardeners at the botanical gardens in Paris or Amsterdam would certainly have seen it; there is no evidence they did. The fungus (and the plant) would have again been exposed to extreme conditions during the Atlantic crossing.

Coffee-farming practices would, at first, have kept rust levels so low that the rust would not have significantly affected production. In the Dutch East Indies, Javanese farmers usually cultivated coffee in densely planted hedgerows (kopi pagar) close to their households. Farmers in India cultivated coffee both as a garden crop and as a forest crop. In Mysore, coffee was cultivated in fenced gardens called hittlus, and coffee was intercropped with “lime, plantain, ginger, and mango.” Kandyan farmers on Ceylon also cultivated coffee as a garden crop, mixed with other cash and subsistence crops. This strategy allowed them to minimize economic and ecological risks. Coffee required little care or attention beyond some basic weeding, and it provided a good source of income. Few native planters produced coffee exclusively, nor did they depend on it as their major source of cash income. It was simply part of a diversified ecological and economic repertoire.³⁵

Power and Vulnerability in the Nineteenth Century

By the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s coffeelands had become critically vulnerable to commodity diseases like coffee rust. A series of political, economic, and technological revolutions had sharply increased production and consumption of coffee around the globe. Many of these changes had their roots in the Industrial Revolution. Among other things, the Industrial Revolution helped spur mass consumption in the metropolises and factory towns of Europe and North America. Europe’s industrial powers competed aggressively to control trade and territories in Asia and Africa and to consolidate control of tropical territories they already held. Colonial states often obliged their subjects to produce tropical commodities, both to meet metropolitan demand and to provide revenue for the colonial states. Settlers also flocked to the tropical colonies, many of them encouraged by the hope that plantations would offer them a quick path to prosperity. In some cases, colonized peoples took advantage of the new colonial networks and started producing tropical commodities on their own. In Latin America, the leaders of the newly independent nations pursued economic development by exporting commodities to the industrializing Global North. In industrializing Europe and the United States, coffee gradually became a cheap stimulant, accessible to rich and poor alike. Coffee consumption in the United States exploded during these years, fueled by growing production from Brazil. By the century’s end, Americans drank more coffee than all European countries combined. New railroad and steamship networks reduced transportation costs, helping drive prices downward. The production of tropical commodities expanded as farmers across the global tropics produced ever more sugar, tea, cocoa, rubber, bananas, and—of course—coffee.³⁶

In these years, global demand for coffee typically increased faster than supply, which encouraged farmers to continually expand production. Initially, producers in Asia—especially in the Dutch East Indies, Ceylon, and India—dominated global production, accounting for about a third of global coffee production until the 1880s.³⁷ But over the nineteenth century the Americas, especially Brazil, decisively surpassed Asia. Coffee cultivation in Brazil quickly expanded into the forest regions around Rio de Janeiro and then vast forest regions beyond. By midcentury, Brazil produced half of the world’s coffee; by the end of the century, it produced more than 80 percent.³⁸

The boom was initially led by small and medium producers. In the early decades of Ceylon’s coffee boom, for example, most of the island’s coffee was produced by Kandyan smallholders. Most of this coffee was grown under shade, as part of a complex production system. Similarly, smallholders in Java “preferred to clear only undergrowth and small trees, planting coffee at stake under tall jungle trees. The coffee trees took longer to bear, and yields were lower, but they lived longer, and soil damage was checked.”³⁹ These cultivation systems embodied a different view of agriculture, economy, and environment. Farmers were not simply seeking to maximize productivity and profit. Profit was certainly one goal, but they also took a longer view about what we would now call ecological and economic sustainability. Perhaps it also reflected the fact that they did not have the same access to “virgin” forests as better-funded farmers.

More specialized estate coffee cultivation began in the eighteenth century. Europeans, especially the French, first cultivated coffee as a plantation monoculture in the Indian Ocean’s Île Bourbon (now Réunion) and in the West Indies: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and—above all—St. Domingue.⁴⁰ By the second half of the eighteenth century, coffee production in the West Indies had far surpassed production in the Indian Ocean. Arabica coffee had been introduced to St. Domingue in the 1720s; just fifty years later, in 1775, the island exported almost 22,500 metric tons of coffee. By 1789, it was the world’s single largest coffee producer, exporting about 40,000 metric tons.⁴¹ These levels of productivity depended, however, on slave labor. St. Domingue’s coffee exports collapsed in the wake of the slave uprising that began in 1789, which also toppled the colonial government. Between roughly 1790 and 1830, estate coffee production across the West Indies collapsed as a result of political strife, abolition movements, and competition with the booming sugar industry for scarce labor. Cuba was the only place in the West Indies where estate production survived, although even there coffee producers had to compete with more-prosperous sugar producers for increasingly scarce slave labor.

While estate coffee declined in the West Indies, it boomed in Asia and mainland Latin America. In those places, coffee monocultures became much more common as planters, often using coerced labor, sought to maximize the productivity and profitability of their farms. Planters cleared “virgin” forests in Brazil, Ceylon, and many other places. Following the so-called West Indian model (developed in colonial St. Domingue), they planted coffee trees in dense rows, eliminating all other plants from the farm. In Ceylon, this could mean a density of between 1,200 and 2,700 plants per acre, depending on the spacing between the trees. The goal, in the words of one planter, was to plant “the great[est] number of trees in a given space so that none shall incommode or interfere with the growth or sustenance of its neighbor.”⁴² The first generation of European coffee planters generally preferred to plant their coffee in open sun, eliminating all shade trees. The British coffee planter Edmund Hull argued that they did so because the native coffee farmers always did use shade, and “the tendency of the European farmer [was] to regard with the utmost contempt all idea of instruction coming from that quarter.”⁴³ While this kind of prejudice may have been a factor, settlers likely rejected shade trees because they believed that shade reduced yields and, therefore, profits.

In some places, coffee grew as far as the eye could see. At high altitudes in Ceylon, one could see “fields of dark, ever-green, luxuriant coffee-trees, so well clothed with foliage that not a square yard of bare ground is visible for acres.”⁴⁴ Later in the century the Brazilian novelist Monteiro Lobato described São Paulo’s coffee farms as a “green wave of coffee.”⁴⁵ On such farms, the coffee trees were planted at carefully measured distances in neat rows. This arrangement reflected European ideas about rationality; it also helped maximize production and manage labor. The goal of this layout, wrote Hull, was to “admit large gangs of laborers working together on an estate without confusion, to enable the employer more easily to check the amount of work done by each person, as well as to economize surface to the utmost, by having the largest number of plants on a given area, each with its due share of ground.”⁴⁶

But this superficial order masks just how improvised these landscapes were.⁴⁷ Most European planters had little experience with tropical agriculture; in fact, many had little experience with agriculture of any kind. They learned how to farm coffee by trial and error. In the eighteenth century, French coffee planters seem to have transmitted their knowledge orally. The settlers “had no books or schools to guide them,” wrote the French botanist Auguste Chevalier, “but like the peasants of France they transmitted the improvements they had made from one generation to the next.” Because there were “frequent connections from one colony to the other,” continued Chevalier, “the [farming] methods and techniques were quickly unified” across colonies. From the mid-eighteenth century, then, “the coffee tree was cultivated identically, and coffee was cultivated on [the Île] Bourbon as it was in the Antilles and the diverse countries of the Americas.”⁴⁸ In Ceylon, some British planters developed an apprenticeship system called “creeping” in which a recently arrived planter would assist an experienced planter for a year or so before setting up a farm of his own.

Over the nineteenth century, some of this practical knowledge was codified in texts. The first significant publication in this genre was P. J. Laborie’s The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo, published in 1798. Laborie had owned a coffee plantation in Saint Domingue, but he lost it during the revolution. In 198 pages, Laborie meticulously described how to clear forests, build the farm, and cultivate and process the coffee, as well as how to manage slave labor. Laborie’s book became a model for coffee plantations around the world; it was a model for the West Indian system of cultivation adopted by British planters in Ceylon. It offered some useful guidance, although some of his suggestions did not always work well in other environments.⁴⁹ Publications on coffee planting proliferated after the mid-nineteenth century, many of these reflecting the experience of farmers in different coffee zones. Planters also shared their practical knowledge through newspapers and periodicals. And gradually, at least in the British colonies, planters published coffee manuals of their own, usually integrating their practical experience with whatever scientific innovations they felt to be relevant.⁵⁰

At this point, no particular scientific knowledge was necessary for running a coffee farm; farmers increased production by clearing forests and using more labor.⁵¹ And for their part, scientists had not devoted much attention to studying the coffee plant or the practical problems of coffee agriculture. The botanists at Ceylon’s botanical garden were more concerned with acclimating exotic crops than working with the coffee planters. In Brazil, the first coffee research station was not founded until 1887. In the Dutch East Indies, the first dedicated coffee research station was founded in 1896, although coffee researchers at the Cultuurtuin (botanical garden) in Java had started doing some coffee research as early as the 1870s.⁵² Coffee planters only showed much interest in science when they began experiencing production problems that they could not solve on their own. For that reason, they showed particular interest in Justus von Liebig’s pioneering work on chemical fertilizers. But so long as “land remained cheap and plentiful,” wrote the always-insightful Hull, “the simple but wasteful method of opening up new estates as soon as the old ones begin to be exhausted, seemed always preferable to an intricate and laborious study of the best means of preserving land already under cultivation.”⁵³

This production boom made the world’s coffee farms more vulnerable to diseases and pests than ever before. Viewed from an epidemiologic perspective, it greatly increased the global population and distribution of susceptible arabicas. The limited genetic diversity of these cultivated arabicas made them even more vulnerable. The world’s globally traded arabicas depended on just two cultivars, Bourbon and Typica, both of which originated from the narrow arabica populations of Yemen. The expanding shipping and railroad networks offered diseases and pests new opportunities to move beyond their native range. The most significant change, however, was the spread of coffee monocultures; many of the new coffee farms were radically simpler than earlier ones. These monocultures involved a trade-off between economic productivity and ecological vulnerability, which may not have been immediately apparent. By sharply reducing the biological diversity of farms—by devoting the farm space to a single crop—farmers also removed the physical and genetic obstacles that kept diseases and pests in check. Looking back on this period, the French coffee expert Auguste Chevalier wrote that “the coffee plant was cultivated on still-virgin lands, in regions not wholly deforested; all the cultivated coffee trees descended from a handful of plants free of disease; and they were cultivated in lands where insects [and] natural enemies of the coffee tree had not yet been imported.”⁵⁴

Harbingers of the Rust

A closer look suggests that Chevalier’s idyllic picture of coffee farming was not entirely accurate. As early as 1773, a French coffee planter on Île Bourbon complained of “little black scarabs that eat the leaves of the coffee tree,” of a “louse that attaches itself to the branches, leaves, and even the roots of the coffee trees, and makes them languish,” and of a “singular malady” in which the “leaves, branches, and often even the fruits of the coffee tree were largely covered with a black matter that ‘freezes’ the plant and dries it.”⁵⁵ These localized outbreaks foreshadowed the global commodity diseases that were to plague coffee farms in the next century.

Even as the world’s coffee farms became more vulnerable to disease before 1870, they suffered only localized outbreaks of diseases and pests. A “coffee leaf disease,” likely an insect rather than a fungus, disrupted production on coffee estates in Ceylon for a few years in the 1840s. Indeed, during the pioneering phases of coffee production, insect pests tended to cause more problems than did diseases. Various species of mealybugs (genus Planococcus) fed on the sap of new tissues in the coffee plants. One of these, the “black bug”—which first appeared in Ceylon in 1843—ate the fresh shoots of young coffee plants and destroyed the cherries. Another, the “white bug,” lived in the axils of leaves and cut them off “either during the blossom stage or just after the young berries have been formed.”⁵⁶ The most serious insect pest of coffee was the borer (probably the coffee white stem borer, Xylotrechus quadripes Chevrolat), first detected in Coorg in the mid-1860s.⁵⁷ This insect bored into the trunk of the coffee tree. The leaves of infested plants wilted and fell, and over time the tree died back to the entry point.⁵⁸ Grubs sometimes attacked the coffee plant’s taproots, ultimately killing the trees. The planters also faced problems from grasshoppers, “which [were] addicted to cutting down young trees close to the ground, and to sawing off the branches of older trees.”⁵⁹

While some of these pests were undoubtedly native to Ceylon, others were probably introduced, particularly from other parts of South Asia. The “coffee bug” that appeared in Ceylon in the early 1840s was previously unknown in Ceylon; apparently these insects were first detected on “plants near coolie lines” of laborers from southern India. Some planters argued that the insect emerged spontaneously in poorly cultivated plantations. Others, however, attributed the introduction of the bug to “Mocha” coffee plants imported from Bombay. George Gardner, the botanist of the Peradeniya Botanic Garden, noted that the insect had not been present on the island five years before. The planters also noticed that the outbreaks of the bug were associated with outbreaks of a fungus. The naturalist Miles Berkeley concurred, noting that “there is a great reason to believe that many of these plagues are in the first instance imported, and we know that some vegetable productions of foreign extraction and some insects also become peculiarly luxuriant and abundant in their new quarters.”⁶⁰

The entomologist John Nietner disputed this idea. “With reference to this comparatively recent appearance of the bug in the island,” he wrote, “it has been suggested that it was not indigenous, but had been introduced with seed-coffee, from some other country.” But he argued that the bugs were indigenous, noting that he had seen the white coffee bug “upon orange, guava, and other trees,” while the brown bug “attacks almost every plant and tree that grows on a coffee estate, more particularly though those that are grown on gardens.”⁶¹ Nietner did not explain why the outbreaks occurred at that particular time, but he was clearly aware that they were connected to prevailing farming practices.

Significantly, Nietner was also aware of the broader global context of these outbreaks, noting that “at about the same time [as the bug outbreaks in Ceylon] the potato, vine, and olive disease[s] became very alarming in Europe.”⁶² This was a historical moment in which microorganisms were becoming increasingly mobile. It was in these years, for example, that the potato blight made its way from South America to Europe and cholera spread from India to Europe and later the Americas.⁶³ Microbes like these traveled on the same modern transportation infrastructure that swiftly moved goods and people around the globe.

Yet for the first half of the nineteenth century, at least, the coffee plant (and by extension the coffee rust) did not circulate. There was little incentive for coffee planters, large or small, to move the coffee plant. It had been so widely distributed in the eighteenth century that further long-distance transfers were unnecessary. Coffee planters almost everywhere could easily obtain planting material locally and saw little advantage to acquiring it from afar. In Ceylon and Southern India, for example, coffee planters obtained planting material from plants that had escaped into the forest, or they purchased planting material from local farmers. Long-distance transfers of coffee began anew in the 1870s, when Europeans found a new species of coffee—Liberian coffee—in West Africa.⁶⁴

By the late 1860s, the pioneering phase of coffee cultivation was ending in India, Ceylon, and Java—the region’s three largest producers. In Ceylon, most of the viable coffeelands were occupied by the mid-1870s. In India, the coffee zones in Mysore and Coorg were similarly almost fully occupied. “Comparatively little land suitable for planting purposes now remains in the hands of the government in either the Neilgherries, Coorg, or Wynaad,” wrote Edmund Hull in 1877, “while there is great difficulty in securing what there is at any price, except under the most stringent conditions.”⁶⁵ George Watt wrote that the coffee tracts of Southern India “extend in nearly an unbroken line along the summits and slopes of the Western Ghauts, from the northern limits of Mysore down to Cape Comorin.”⁶⁶ Java was ringed with a coffee belt extending from 600 to 1,200–1,400 meters above sea level.⁶⁷ The ecological limits of coffee cultivation—as defined by a combination of temperature, rainfall, and climate—had been reached. Nonetheless, coffee planters in these places continued to open new farms in marginal lands or migrate to new frontiers. Some astute planters began to question the long-term viability of the pioneering estate model, which treated forest landscapes and their soils as nonrenewable resources. Hull questioned the “great and serious difficulties in the way of keeping up that constant, unremitting care and culture which appear necessary to maintain in a state of perfect health a plant, which, however hardy in some respects, is after all an exotic in our Indian settlements, and is moreover being grown under a forced and artificial system.”⁶⁸ Hull found an alternative model in the native farms, some of which contained “trees of an age far beyond the power of the oldest inhabitant to define, and which have very probably been flourishing for generations.”⁶⁹ Unfortunately, it seems that Hull’s voice was in the minority.

BY THE mid-nineteenth century, the intensification of production had left the world’s coffee farms highly vulnerable to diseases and pests. This vulnerability was itself a product of coffee’s history as a commodity. In the wild, arabica coffee and the H. vastatrix fungus lived concomitantly, yet the fungus did not cause serious harm to the plant. The disease was kept in check by the structure of Ethiopia’s forest ecosystem and likely also by fungi that parasitized H. vastatrix. By accident or design, the coffee plant was transferred to Yemen without the rust. From Yemen, rust-free arabica coffee was then dispersed across the global tropics. The coffee plant prospered as it was cultivated in diverse ecosystems that were largely free of significant diseases and pests, at least initially. This ecological Pax arabica eroded as the scope and scale of coffee cultivation intensified over the nineteenth century. As production increased, monocultures became much more important, especially in the world’s largest producers—Brazil, Java, and Ceylon. These monocultures were highly productive over the short term. In the absence of any pests or pathogens that could take advantage of this vulnerability, the coffee plants prospered. But these landscapes were also highly susceptible, as Ceylon’s coffee planters would discover after 1869.