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Preface

DURING THE late 1990s, when I was doing research on the agricultural sciences in Latin America, I noticed a curious pattern in my primary sources. In the nineteenth century, most of the world’s tropical crops were struck by a series of devastating crop diseases. Many of these diseases were global, crossing oceans and continents. I started to wonder what had caused these epidemics; biologically, neither the pathogens nor the host plants had much in common. The one thing they did have in common was that all the host plants were tropical commodities. It seemed likely that the plants’ lives as global commodities had contributed to the outbreaks of these global epidemics. I set out to write a global and comparative history of the most important of these epidemics: the South American leaf blight of rubber, the Panama disease of the banana, the mosaic disease of sugarcane, the witches’ broom of cacao, and the coffee leaf rust.

For several years I worked on pieces of this story, but I struggled to find an effective way of organizing the narrative. I had conversations with many other historians about this. One of the people I spoke to was Jim Webb, who, in addition to being an accomplished historian, is also a keen and thoughtful listener. Over pints at a pub in Kew, he suggested that I focus on just one of these diseases, which would allow me explore the issues that interested me in much greater detail. And he encouraged me to focus on the coffee leaf rust. I took his advice, and have never looked back.

This book is a biography of a global crop disease, and a global environmental history of coffee as seen through the lens of the disease. My approach to this global history reflects what Lynn Hunt has described as global history from the ground up. The essential methodology is simple—at least in theory. I followed the fungus on its long journey from the forests of Africa out across the global coffeelands, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. From the fungus, I moved outward to consider the broader forces that moved it around the world and shaped the vulnerability of coffee ecosystems to the rust at particular moments in time. I explore how farmers and farming communities have responded to the rust and how, if at all, they learned to coexist with it. I have been particularly interested in the role of scientists and scientific institutions that have, with varying degrees of success, tried to help farmers adapt to the rust.

Writing a global environmental history involves inevitable compromises. The historian John McNeill has complained (only half-jokingly, I’m sure) about how he suffered from inadequate research anxiety syndrome (IRAS) as he worked on his magisterial environmental history of the twentieth-century world. Although my project is more modest than his, I confess to being a fellow sufferer of IRAS. The primary and secondary literature on coffee and the coffee rust is vast, which is both a blessing and a curse. Like coffee itself, the sources are distributed widely across the globe, and they are written in four main languages: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese, with some additional important works in Dutch and German. With a project of this scale, it is simply impossible to be either definitive or encyclopedic. In many instances, I have had to be ruthlessly selective. Given the project’s scope, I decided to work mostly with the secondary and published primary literature, although I did make a few forays into select archives. I have tried to give readers a sense of the world of coffee in each place that I describe, and also the evolving scientific ideas about the rust and coffee farming. But many richer, local histories of the rust remain to be told in fuller detail.

At the same time, a global approach offers insights that would not be as clear otherwise. In particular, writing the history of the rust has revealed a largely hidden “horizontal” history of coffee, which reveals the complex and constant global circulation of plants, pathogens, people, and technologies across the world’s coffeelands. This disease-centered global history offers a new approach to thinking about coffee itself. Much of the academic and popular writing on coffee focuses on arabica coffee, especially the high-quality arabicas produced for the specialty market. The story of the rust also sheds light on the entwined histories of commodity arabica, of the oft-despised robusta coffee, and of ephemeral coffees such as Liberian coffee, and it gives us a glimpse of the dozens of wild coffee species found in forests across tropical Africa.

The story of the rust will also, I hope, offer some insights about climate change. It is, at its heart, a story of how farming communities across the Global South prepared for and responded to a sudden and sometimes catastrophic change in their environment. We can learn from some of their successes and failures. But the rust is more than just a precursor to climate change; its own history has recently been transformed by climate change. As I write these words in 2019, the rust’s history looks markedly different from how it did when I began the project in 2004. Then, a number of people told me that the history of the rust was basically over. The rust remained a problem, but it had effectively been domesticated. It was just another disease that was no longer a major agent of change. Farmers knew how to cope with it. I imagined that my story would end there. But starting in 2007, a series of severe rust outbreaks swept first through Colombia and later through the Andes, Central America, and the Caribbean. This outbreak is literally a new chapter in the rust’s history; it is now clear that this history is far from over. These new outbreaks, triggered by climate change and a series of political and economic crises, mark the beginning of a new phase in the story of the rust—and of the global coffee industry.