Coffee on the move: technology, labour and race in the making of a transatlantic plantation system

ABSTRACT

In the mid 19^th century, plantations began to spread across multiple geographies of the Global South. This paper discusses this particular institution and phenomena, by focusing on the Atlantic circulation of coffee plants, agronomic knowledge and racialized labour practices. Combining approaches from mobilities studies and history of technology, it argues that plantations are particularly well suited to grasp the dynamics of displacement and resettling, and to connect the global and the local scales. More specifically, this paper follows a group of men, directly or indirectly involved in the trade of enslaved persons from Angola to Brazil, and analyses what travelled along with them, namely, plantation artifacts, technologies and ideas about labour and race. By doing so, it unveils the hidden links between the Paraíba Valley and São Tomé, and shows how plantations moved between these localities, and adapted to different social and natural environments.

KEYWORDS:

• Plantations
• Paraíba Valley
• São Tomé
• coffee
• technology
• labour and race

 

São Tomé’s history and geography make it a perfect case-study to examine the entanglements of empire, slavery and capitalism in the longue durée. In the early 16^th century, sugarcane transformed this small island in the Gulf of Guinea into a modern plantation colony. Portuguese planters realized that with the work of men and women captured on the West African coast it was possible to produce sugar with massive profits. In this plantation world, slavery, and the practices of dehumanization of men and women that made it possible, helped to consolidate previous ideas about racial difference and hierarchy that persisted well beyond abolition and would shape labor relations in the following centuries. When sugar moved to Brazil and the Caribbean, in the mid 1600s, São Tomé became a major entrepôt in the transatlantic slave trade. The very same ships that carried enslaved people from Africa to the Americas brought, on the way back, the first coffee plants from Bahia to São Tomé at the turn of the 19^th century. But coffee was not immediately turned into a cash-crop. Profits from the slave trade made futile any attempt to set up an agrarian enterprise. It was just in the early 1850s, after the ban of the slave trade to Brazil, that former slave merchants invested their money on plantations in São Tomé, adapting several technologies of land and labour management from the burgeoning Brazilian coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley.

This paper argues that the maritime lives of slave traders impacted the various landed spaces they inhabited (Anim-Addo, Hasty, and Peters 2014). People involved in this commerce had a high degree of transatlantic mobility, travelling between São Tomé, the centres of recruitment of enslaved persons in Africa and the centres of capital accumulation in the Americas. Even if scholars have already discussed the centrality of Africa in the construction of Brazil, less has been written about the multiple ways Brazilian plantation experiences shaped African ones (Alencastro 2000; Ferreira 2012; Candido 2013). By focusing on the trajectories of slave traders across the Atlantic and what moved along with them, namely agronomic knowledge and labour management technologies, it is possible to better understand the history of coffee plantations in São Tomé. Merging local episodes with broader histories of imperialism and migrant labour, it is also possible to shed light on the circulation of plantation race making practices, both the material and symbolic processes that transformed ‘Africans’ into ‘blacks’ suited to grow coffee (Thompson 1975; on the relation between plantation labour and race see the recent works of; Bastos 2018; Dusinberre 2019).

Mobility studies have contributed to show the transformative power of people and things on the move and to better acknowledge the new social and material realities generated by these processes of displacement and resettling (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). There is an evident link between this research agenda and that of historians doing global history. Global historians of science and technology in particular have contributed to emphasize the efforts to fix, standardize and adapt travelling knowledge and artifacts as they crossed different localities (Secord 2004; Raj 2007). Looking at movement and change while paying attention to matter becomes even more crucial when dealing with crops, inherently local and rooted, and at the same time highly mobile objects (Bray et al. 2019). But the conceptual affinities between mobility studies and global history of technology make for other productive conversations. Among those, the act of following people, things and ideas allow us to destabilize common approaches to scale, be them geographical or chronological, too often taken for granted (idem). By paying attention to the trans-imperial connections established around enslaved people and coffee, the missing link between Brazil and São Tomé becomes obvious. Looking at São Tomé’s history through a mobility lens also brings forward the work required for coffee plantations to cross national and imperial boundaries, the strategies of adaptation to new natural and social environments, and the way ideas of race and labour were embedded in these material worlds.

The present text is organized in four parts. The first one examines the practices of land and labour management of the coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley that inspired the 19^th century colonization of São Tomé. The other three sections follow the path of three different men – directly or indirectly involved in the trade of enslaved persons from Angola to Brazil – who became important coffee growers in the island. Even if some eminent women operated as slave traders in the African coast very few came to own plantations. Each biography opens a window into distinct dimensions of these mobile experiences: João Maria de Sousa e Almeida’s Atlantic connections bring to light the relation between slave trade, plantations and the imperial government; José Velloso de Carvalho career as a planter reveals how Brazilian coffee technologies circulated and adapted to São Tomé environment; Diniz de Castro’s written work calls attention to the plantation labour and race relations that crossed the Atlantic and shaped the social landscape of São Tomé.

Paraíba Valley

In the mid 19^th century, Paraíba Valley plantations, occupying forest lands from the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, had transformed the global coffee market (Marquese and Tomich 2009). Paraíba Valley’s impact on the Brazilian economy, society and political life has been the object of an extensive literature (Stein 1957; Dean 1997; Salles 2008). More recently, historians began discussing the specific entanglements of technology, labour and race in this coffee region, by looking at the biological characteristics of coffee, the particular requirements of the market, and the different tasks involved in coffee growing (Marquese 2015).

Originally an understory tree from the mountains of Ethiopia, Coffea arabica was firstly grown as a plantation crop in Yemen in the 16^th century, and from there it moved to the Dutch colonies of Java and Surinam, the Spanish colony of Cuba, the French colonies of Réunion, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue, before it reached Brazil. In the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, with heavy rainfalls, temperatures of 20º to 24º C, rich soils protected from the coastal winds, the plant found an ideal habitat. The rather long dry season, from May to August, also favoured flowering and fructification and, mostly, facilitated coffee drying (Dean 1997).

The agronomic expertise of Caribbean growers, most of them exiles from post-revolutionary Saint-Domingue who produced one of the most appreciated coffees in the world, guided the first Paraíba Valley planters. However, as the coffee market expanded, the expectations of the Valley’s landed class regarding quality, productivity and profit started to change. At that time, Francisco Werneck, a major planter, was a lone voice against the low standards of Brazilian commodity makers. He criticized those who openly declared: ‘what I want is a lot, even if it gets a lower price, I take the same net profit and I don’t have as much work’ (Werneck 1847, p. 26). It was exactly the production for quantity not for quality that shaped coffee cultivation and processing in Brazil.

Several strategies were put in place to fulfil this goal. The first one was to grow coffee without shade. Cultivating coffee under full sun meant initial higher yields but also implied a decrease in the plant life cycle, thus forcing a continuous expansion of the coffee fields (Dean 1997). While voraciously consuming the Atlantic Forest through slash and burn, planters also devised a new method to distribute coffee plants. In a context of land abundance, and capital and labour scarcity, Brazilian coffee growers discredited Caribbean procedure of spacing plants evenly in a dense diamond pattern and started to plant coffee in wide-spaced rows, vertically distributed along the hills (Marquese 2009). This form of spatial organization directly impacted the technologies of labour management. It facilitated visual control, and a closer surveillance of the workforce during all operations.

Aligned rows made it easier to implement a gang labour system, common to the cotton plantation in the United States or the sugar plantations in Cuba (Morgan 1988). The image of enslaved men and women harvesting or weeding at the same pace from dawn to dusk under the vigilant eye of a foreman was a typical one in the Paraíba Valley. But this form of labour organization coupled with the task system (Stein 1957). Planters specified minimums for a whole host of operations, from digging holes to pruning coffee trees, from weeding to picking coffee cherries. For example, during harvest enslaved people received monetary bonuses, rather than free time, whenever they surpassed the pre-defined quotas, regardless if they harvested green, ripe or over-ripe coffee (idem). Because of the extraordinary amount of coffee collected, planters preferred the simpler, cheaper and fastest ‘dry’ method to transform coffee cherries into coffee beans, instead of the ‘wet’ method used in the Caribbean. Rather than removing the outer shell and the inner parchment of coffee in water tanks before drying, cherries were immediately laid out in the sun. To hull coffee, plantations adapted machines long used to dehusk rice and ground corn. These prestel mills [engenhos de pilões] were labour-saving devices, thus allowing more workers to clear new grounds, increasing the number of coffee trees cultivated and, as a consequence, the amount of coffee grown and harvested (Marquese 2015).

Besides increasing the production, Paraíba Valley technologies were also devised to keep the workforce permanently occupied. It is important to bear in mind that Brazilian coffee plantations inaugurated a new scale of operations. Compared with the Caribbean or even with the Cuban coffee plantations, which had an average of 40 enslaved workers, in the Paraíba Valley it was common to find estates with 80 or 100 men and women, and many with 200 or 400. Administering and controlling this large enslaved population was the object of precise management practices, justified on racial grounds. Carlos Augusto Taunay, an important Brazilian coffee grower, compared the mental development of African adults to that of 15-year-old Europeans. Just like white adolescents, black people were portraited as passionate, impatient, vain, and, mostly, as natural enemies of work (Taunay 1839, p. 6). To counter that supposedly natural predisposition, planters enforced a military-like discipline that, apart from organizing agricultural tasks, colonized all spheres of the laborers’ life, from food to shelter, from clothing to family arrangements. When the coerciveness of discipline was not enough, planters devised another economy of violence to ensure that the plantation routines were not challenged (McCann 1997). Fear, ‘employed with system and art’, allowed for labour extraction (Taunay 1839, p.7).

The local environment of the Paraíba Valley together with the technologies of labour management resulted in unprecedented coffee production rates. The average of 1,5 tons of coffee per 1000 trees represented a three-fold increase as compared to Caribbean plantations and the productivity rates of 1,2 tons of coffee processed per worker per year grew by a factor of six (Marquese and Tomich 2009). In the mid 19^th century, Brazil was exporting more than 180.000 tons of coffee (Marquese and Tomich 2009, p.365).

Slave trade, plantations and the imperial state: João Maria de Sousa e Almeida

On the 23 October 1869, the Official Bulletin of the Province of São Tomé and Príncipe announced the death of João Maria de Sousa e Almeida, Baron of Agua Izé. The text lamented that ‘with the passing of this gentleman the province suffers an important loss and the agricultural industry is deprived of its main chief’ (BOSTP, October 23, 1869). Almeida, who pioneered the cultivation of coffee as a plantation crop in São Tomé in the early 1850s, was, at the time of his death, São Tomé’s most prominent planter. By then, the market value of the Agua Izé estate had increased by more than 3000% (Nogueira 1893; Ribeiro 1877).

Almeida’s name figures prominently in the narratives about São Tomé, but it was in Angola where he made his first fortune from the traffic of men and women to Brazil. Operating illegally in the southern Angolan port of Benguela, from the 1830s until 1851, he actively participated in one of the largest inflows of enslaved Africans to the New World, supplying the labour force that built the coffee plantations of the Paraíba Valley. His biography, published in 1901, while silencing his involvement in the slave trade, mentioned several of his transatlantic voyages. Brazilian sojourns were justified on the basis of Almeida’s ‘commercial relations’ and inquisitiveness: ‘he wanted to see, he wanted to instruct himself, he wanted to have perfect knowledge of the agricultural processes that have been adopted in Brazil, and so much fame and glory have reached’ (Ribeiro 1901, p.17). It is fair to suppose that Almeida had a real interest in the Paraíba Valley coffee revolution.

As with other revolutions this one was far from straightforward. Ever since coffee started to be cultivated on a large scale in the Valley, labour had been a sensitive issue. Bilateral treaties signed between Britain and Brazil, and between Britain and Portugal in the 1830s and 1840s, aimed at suppressing the slave trade, raised the price of labour (Bethell 1970). Despite British vigilance, Brazilian and Portuguese government turned a blind eye on the illicit practices of recruiting a shipping men and women across the Atlantic. Plantations were the backbone of the Brazilian economy and Portuguese slave traders, who profited from the monopoly and illegality of the trade, had become indispensable to the Portuguese colonial government. As other traders, Almeida funded public works and military operations in colonial Angola. For those services he received several honorary distinctions. He was the first and one of the hand-few black-skinned barons of the Portuguese empire.

During the 1840s Almeida was both an influential man in Benguela and in Rio de Janeiro. From local newspapers records, it is possible to trace Almeida’s many voyages to Brazil and his immersion in the Rio de Janeiro society. There he owned a house in Rua do Livramento, conveniently located close to the port, and a farm in the Andaraí Hill towards the north (Ribeiro 1901). His trips reveal the complex oceanic and landed geographies of the illegal slave trade (Anim-Addo, Hasty, and Peters 2014). For example, on 2 September 1849, Almeida reached Brazilian shores from the British colony of Santa Helena in the Portuguese brig General Rego, carrying with him, according to estimates, more than 400 enslaved men and women embarked in Benguela (Correio Mercantil, September 3, 1849; www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database).

The fate of Almeida and of other Portuguese slave traders changed in 1850, when Brazilian authorities began to effectively criminalize this commerce. The British consul in Lisbon calculated that, between March 1850 and March 1851, 300 to 400 slave traders operating in Rio de Janeiro had voluntarily returned to Portugal, or had been expelled (Bethell 1970, p. 353). Almeida joined these first ones. He left Brazil on 14 February 1851 (Correio Mercantil, February 15, 1851). That same consul reported that those individuals brought with them capital amounting to £400,000. Over the long run, historians claim that more than 12 million pounds, corresponding to almost half the Portuguese public debt, entered the national economy (Ferreira 1995–1999). Discussing the role of those men and their slave money in financing the modernization of Portugal in the second half of the 19^th century, by investing in public works, industry and the banking system, is outside the scope of this paper (Capela and Santos 2007). But besides feeding Portuguese capitalism, slave-trade money, together with plantation knowledge from Brazil, transformed the history of São Tomé.

With the ban of the slave-trade from Angola to Brazil, João Maria de Sousa e Almeida began exploring new business opportunities. While in Lisbon, he initiated the process to become a coffee planter in São Tomé. He had money, he had knowledge about coffee, but he needed land. And, as important, he needed labourers. In a context of diplomatic pressures from the British government, he looked for the support of the Portuguese administration to transport men and women from Angola to São Tomé. Following the trail of letters sent to and from the Overseas Council, the advisory body supporting the decisions of the Minister of Overseas, it is possible to analyse both the innerworkings of the Portuguese empire and Almeida’s own understandings of how plantations should operate.

In 1852, Almeida petitioned the Council for the following: the concession of a portion of land covering an area of 45 square miles, with harbour, river or bay; authorization to arm 50 men with bladed weapons and firearms; tax exemptions for his property, for himself, for the machineries imported and for the products to export; clearance to sail around the island without a passport; and permission to transport in state vessels 100 slaves from Benguela. To that long list he added another request: that ‘the provincial authorities, of whatever category, [could not] exercise supervision, under any pretext, on the land belonging to the supplicant’ (AHU 1). Almeida had obviously internalized the experience of Brazilian plantations where planters used power at will.

Councillors examined Almeida’s demands and issued a highly critical final report. The amount of land demanded was considered ‘exorbitant’. Several other claims ‘could and should not be granted for their unreasonableness’. They concluded: ‘the law must be for the benefit of all, and not as a privilege to a particular person’ (idem). Despite the Council’s disapproval, Almeida was powerful enough to get a legal document that met his needs. In 1853 he was granted a smaller piece of land, but mostly he was allowed to bring workers from Angola (Decreto de 25 de Outubro de 1853). The colonial government, by creatively interpreting the treaty signed with Britain in 1842 for the ‘suppression of the traffic in slaves’, determined that Almeida’s enslaved men and women should receive manumission before embarking, and as free labourers they could circulate in the territories of the Portuguese empire without clashing with the international agreements. To confirm the new free status, and according to the 1842 Treaty, the ‘symbol of freedom’ should be marked on upper part of the right arm of each man and woman . With these ‘liberated negros’ – a very conservative version of abolition, that bounded men and women to work without pay for a period of seven years – Almeida could start his plantation.

However, Almeida did not want to depend entirely on the imperial state. Besides renting public lands he also secured his own property. In the island of São Tomé he bought the Agua Izé and Castelo Sul estates, along with the enslaved population living on its grounds (Nogueira 1893). Água Izé would become his main plantation site from 1854 onwards. In 1861, it had already more than one million coffee plants and 250 workers, producing an average of 75 tons of coffee and expecting future harvests of more than 180 tons (Anais do Conselho Ultramarino, 1862).

Sources are scant regarding Almeida’s operations. However, there are no reasons to doubt contemporary claims that in Água Izé the ‘planting system is similar to that employed in Brazil’ (idem, p.6). A 1950s monograph on coffee still documented on Água Izé a century old ‘engenho de pilões’ identical to those employed in the Paraíba Valley (Silva 1958). Almeida was also responsible for the introduction of the breadfruit, an important tree crop used to feed slaves in Brazil and the Caribbean (Almeida 1865). Beyond this material evidence, the colonial archive shows the coerciveness and violence of the labour management system in Agua Izé. In January 1856, just two years after starting the operations, 50 workers, who had rebelled against the brutality of Almeida, were imprisoned and deported to the nearby Príncipe island (AHU 3). Almeida initiated the common practice of transforming Príncipe into São Tomé’s penal colony, shifting a reserve army of laborers between the two territories. There are also registers of other moments of cruelty and impunity – in 1860 a worker of Água Izé, flogged 550 times, was forced by the colonial authorities to keep working for Almeida (AHSTP). The supply of a steady contingent of laborers and the complicity with the violence inflicted against them would be an important dimension of the state’s political and juridical support to the new planter class.

Global knowledge and local environments: José Velloso de Carvalho.

It is possible to better understand the impact of Brazilian plantation knowledge in São Tomé by following another coffee pioneer: José Velloso de Carvalho. Carvalho was a business partner of Manuel José da Costa Pedreira. Pedreira, born in the north of Portugal in 1816, had migrated to São Tomé as a young man. There he opened a warehouse supplying ships operating on the coast of Africa. Even if not directly involved in the slave trade, Pedreira profited from it. In the 1850s he occupied an important position in the network of businesses, mostly illegitimate, that dominated the island’s economy. When the illegal trade of enslaved persons to the Americas came to an end, Pedreira decided to invest in land. Making public his private expectations, he named his new property Monte Café [Mount Coffee]. In 1855, Pedreira petitioned the Overseas Council for the same privileges granted to Almeida to transport laborers to his newly acquired estate (AHU 2).

Again, the colonial archive provides a unique window into the innerworkings of empire. Pereira, even if prominent at the local level, was a fairly unknown person in Lisbon. To judge if ‘his intentions were sincere’, councillors were forced to ask for references. The opinion of the member of Parliament elected by the province of São Tomé was crucial to certify Pedreira’s ‘honesty’ and confirm his ‘considerable fortune’. Besides character and capital, the representative also pointed out that he ‘was associated with white knowledgeable persons, who had expertise on coffee plantations after several years spent in Brazilian farms’ (idem). Together with knowledge, whiteness was an important attribute in a colonial society dominated by a creole elite of African descent. Without mentioning his name, the deputy was referring to José Velloso de Carvalho.

A series of articles Carvalho published in the Official Bulletin of the Province of São Tomé and Príncipe in 1858 show his familiarity with the plantations of the Paraíba Valley and his optimism regarding the possibilities of coffee culture in São Tomé. In São Tomé ‘coffee (…) grows almost spontaneously, and in the best Brazilian lands coffee trees are of inferior quality than those found here’ (Carvalho 1858, p.63). However, Carvalho pointed at the efforts to adapt the plantation coffee practices of the Paraíba Valley, and the ‘frictions’ of traversing different environments (Tsing 2005).

Following Brazilian planters’ advice, Monte Café lands were cleared with the same techniques based on the axe and fire. Every month of June, at the beginning of the dry season, gangs of men started to cut forest trees. Some wood went to the plantation headquarters, but the majority was left in the fields to dry. In September, just before the rains, the forest was set afire. But while in Brazil fires left the land ready for planting, in São Tomé the lack of low-lying combustible vegetation complicated the process. Because fires didn’t reduce all trees to ashes, it was common to find terrains covered with partially incinerated trunks. Trunks left on the ground posed extra difficulties to the spatial organization of the coffee fields. Even if Carvalho acknowledged that, as in Brazil, ‘coffee should be aligned in rows, not only to become more attractive, but also to better distribute the service of the slaves, both in weeding and harvesting’, the irregularity of the terrain made it almost impossible to implement a geometrical distribution of the coffee plants (Carvalho 1858, p.92). There were also environmental specificities limiting the coffee harvest. Considering that in São Tomé the harvest season (April to August) did not totally coincide with the dry season, a huge percentage of mature cherries were lost. With the heavy rains cherries dropped from the trees and workers, instead of picking coffee in the trees, had to collect it from the muddy ground. If ‘in Brazil a good worker picks around 120 kilos each harvest (…) [Carvalho] estimated that a good worker cannot pick here more than 50 kilos’ (Carvalho 1858, p. 104).

Carvalho advocated for similar levels of violence and coercion towards laborers as in Brazilian plantations in order to cope with these environmental constraints. In fact, he had no qualms about calling his workers slaves even if all those men and women brought from Angola had been nominally emancipated. The labour reality of São Tomé plantations clashed with the image of legality that the Portuguese government wanted to enforce. When the overseas council supported Pedreira’s claims to transport laborers to São Tomé it added a particular clause: besides being marked with ‘the symbol of freedom’, ‘before embarking workers should be clothed like Europeans’ (Decreto de 25 de Agosto de 1855). In order to elude British vigilance, freedom was transformed into a matter of appearance.

According to Carvalho, São Tomé would never grow the amount of coffee that the plantation aristocracy that governed the Paraiba Valley exported each year. According to his best calculations, in São Tomé ‘coffee fields can produce approximately 120 tons per 100.000 trees’, and the island would be able to ship a maximum of 30.000 tons (Carvalho 1858, p. 104). Those optimistic figures never materialized, but in 1854 he was committed to boost São Tomé coffee production. In July that year, Pedreira and Carvalho had 50 workers opening land for coffee. In the early 1860s their plantation had 300 workers caring for 410.000 coffee plants and preparing new ground for another 600.000. In 1861 Monte Café plantation produced more than 90 tons of coffee (Anais do Conselho Ultramarino, 1862).

Labor and race practices: Diniz de Castro

Diniz Maria de Almeida e Castro is another important actor in the transatlantic mobility of Brazilian coffee plantation practices. Born in Portugal, the traces of Castro in Brazil are scantily documented. It is possible to know that he travelled to Africa from Rio de Janeiro in January 1847 (Diário do Rio de Janeiro, January 4, 1847). He was back in Brazil in 1848 and again in 1854 (Jornal do Comércio, July 7, 1848; Diário do Rio de Janeiro, January 20, 1854). When and why he went to São Tomé, where he founded the plantation with the telling name of Novo Destino [New Destiny], is even more obscure.

However, we can get further insights into Castro’s role in the circulation of Brazilian coffee technologies by reading the book he authored in 1867. The 130 pages-long monograph entitled São Tome Island Farmer’s Guide [Guia do Agricultor da ilha de S. Thomé] was, according to Castro, a compilation of materials ‘collected during the last five years from several authors’ and aimed at stimulating the colonization of the island (Castro 1867, p.11). Castro’s guide was for the most part a plagiarized version of The Coffee planter of Saint Domingo originally published by Pierre Joseph Laborie in 1798. Laborie’s coffee treaty, translated into Portuguese in Brazil just two years after its first edition, had been an important reference for the first Paraíba Valley planters and remained the main authority for those interested in coffee cultivation well into the late 19^th century (Marquese 2015). Without ever mentioning Laborie, the guide copied extensively from The Coffee planter, but it added some new passages where Castro replaced the specific information regarding Saint-Domingue with the reality of São Tomé and the particulars of coffee cultivation in Brazil of which he had first-hand knowledge. He also adapted the language. By substituting ‘negro’ for ‘men’, ‘slave’ for ‘worker’, ‘master’ for ‘planter’ or ‘farmer’ and ‘overseer’ for ‘administrator’, without actually altering the content, Castro gives us important insights into how the racialized plantation system adapted and survived abolitionist campaigns.

Castro discredited all those who defended that whites could perform manual labour in the tropics. Just like in Brazil, it was obvious for him that ‘the European is needed in São Tomé; not to handle these heavy agricultural tools, because the climate does not favour it; but to direct the natives of those immense regions, who are the sole ones who can endure hard and permanent work’ (Castro 1867, p.5). Literature has already demonstrated that African labourers working in São Tomé came from the impoverished and dry savanna regions in the south of Angola and were not at all familiar with the tropical forest environment of those islands (Dias 1981). In fact, fusing Angolan peoples’ diversity into a unified category was part of the race-making practices of planters and colonial authorities. Moreover, Europeans were actually manual labourers in plantations elsewhere (Bastos 2008). In his book, Castro mentioned the massive immigration of Europeans to Demerara, in British Guiana, but decided to ignore, voluntarily or not, the fact that these men and women were toiling in the sugar fields (idem). While contributing to naturalize blackness as the appropriate colour for tropical agricultural labour, Castro fixed the binaries of manual work and supervision, with the unfixed markers of whiteness and blackness. A racial discourse was also at the centre of his reasoning about servitude and freedom. Racist claims served to justify the coercive regime he had observed in the Brazilian plantations. Laziness, decisiveness and wickedness, perceived as attributes of blacks, allowed him to claim that the idea of granting total liberty to blacks was a ‘pernicious’ one. He believed that after manumission ‘blacks, of murderous condition’ would get together ‘by the thousands (…) launching themselves into gangs to murder and steal whatever pleases them’. Even if the liberation of São Tomé’s enslaved men and women in 1875 proved him wrong, in 1867 he urged Portuguese colonialists to ‘meditate well before the complete abolition of forced labour’ (Castro 1867, p.8–9).

Castro was as optimistic as Carvalho regarding the future of coffee plantations in São Tomé, as coffee on those islands was ‘superior in flavour and aroma to that of the best plantations in Brazil’ (idem, p.13). But he was aware that quality was a contingent and situated concept. ‘Superior’ coffee would be valued differently according to different markets. If the British, Dutch, Germans, Swiss and ‘some French’ appreciated coffee, in Lisbon both consumers ‘most of whom take beans, chickpeas, barley and etc. for good coffee’ and traders would not pay and extra price for well-prepared coffee. He concluded that ‘generally in Portugal the different qualities of coffee are not even known’ (idem, p.50).

While some planters exported their coffee production, the most important market for São Tomé’s coffee was Lisbon. That impacted the way the crop was harvested and prepared. Following Castro, it is possible to know that, just like in the Paraíba Valley, ‘in São Tomé there is the terrible practice of picking coffee without caring for its maturation’ (idem, p.124). Batches with a high percentage of green coffee were also processed according to the ‘dry’ method. Besides requiring less investment in labour, Castro recognized that the ‘dry’ method had some advantages for those interested in making quick profits: ‘in 1843 I had occasion to see this for myself in the province of Rio de Janeiro, in several farms, and together with the information from knowledgeable farmers, that using this drying process coffee weighed 3 to 4% more’ (idem, p.52).

Castro advocated a strict control over the labour force justified on the grounds of racial difference, thus following the system adopted by Brazilian planters. A specific prescription about plantation hospitals is particularly revealing: ‘as all farmers know, in order to cure Africans from any serious illness, it is necessary to enclose them in such a way that prevents them from communicating with their fellows, because of their careless nature they are unaware of the drugs that apply to their illnesses, and they are always looking for ways to reach a whole variety of tree bugs, and ultimately anything that is harmful to their healing. That is why the inexperienced farmer must pay attention to the most insignificant things practiced by these people, and every care is demanded in surveying and controlling them’ (idem, p.73). To cope with a new medicalized blackness Castro prescribed surveillance and incarceration. As in other contexts across the Atlantic, hospitals worked as prisons, thus blurring the lines between cure and coercion (Hogarth 2017). Plantation hospitals, and plantations as a whole, also show the racialized dimension of mobility and immobility in the colonial context.

Reading São Tome Island Farmer’s Guide it is possible to know that coffee in the islands was a low-quality commodity produced with similar technologies and an analogous level of labour extraction as in Brazil. Castro summarizes the aspirations of São Tomean planters, again shamelessly plagiarizing – this time an 1821 article by a Portuguese military officer and colonial administrator on the importance of rural bookkeeping: ‘being the agriculture of coffee equal to any other object in which capital is used, its main goal is to draw from a given plot of land the greatest possible liquid product, it is therefore evident that success rests entirely on the comparison between the means employed and the products collected. The greater or lesser excess of the second regarding the first is the only element for evaluating the state of the culture, showing the greater or lesser convenience of any agronomic system’ (idem, p.81).

Conclusion

In São Tomé the average of 0,5 tons of coffee per 1000 trees and productivity rate of 0,3 tons of coffee processed per worker per year were less impressive figures than those of Brazilian plantations. Also, the modest production of 2000 tons of coffee in 1873 did not revolutionize the global coffee market (Silva 1958, p.91). Nonetheless, it helped increase the metropolitan consumption of coffee. In 1842 the amount of coffee (90 tons) that reached Lisbon came entirely from Brazil. Just twenty years later, Portugal was importing more than 1300 tons of coffee, 65% of those coming from the Portuguese colonial territories (Pedreira 1998, pp.248–249). As with other colonial commodities, the growth of the Portuguese coffee market was directly related to the establishment of plantations in its empire, protected by special tariffs (Mintz 1985). But as importantly, coffee plantations opened ground for cocoa. Cocoa would transform São Tomé into a major player in the global commodity market (Macedo 2016).

While asserting the importance of the internal dynamics of the Portuguese empire, this paper argued that the development of coffee plantations in São Tomé can be better understood by tracing the routes followed by men directly or indirectly involved in the trade of enslaved people from Angola to Brazil. The networks forged by these highly mobile characters defined the space though which plantation technologies of land and labour management circulated. Those men, who had crossed the Atlantic several times, had first-hand knowledge of the practices of extensive agriculture, based on axe, fire and hoe, dependent on slave labour, that had transformed Brazil. After the effective ban of the transatlantic slave trade, they mobilized their capital and knowledge and established themselves as planters. By intersecting the trajectories of men like Almeida, Carvalho or Castro with the historical dynamics of the slave trade, it is possible to bring together macro-narratives of global change and connected microhistories.

In a recent article, Mimi Sheller (2019) contested the pervasive notion that ‘mobility studies is purely about the contemporary world’. Sheller’s comment builds on decades long academic work connecting mobility, modernity and the imperial past (Cresswell 2006; Sheller 2003; Lambert and Merriman 2020). Those approaches have shown how an historical focus can shed light on the material consequences of people, things and ideas on the move. In the specific process of circulation of coffee from Brazil to São Tomé, and despite plantations common forms of landscape simplification, the plant had to adapt to different environments. Besides environment, labour was also a disputed issue. This article showed how planters in São Tomé learned from previous labour relations, adapted this knowledge and fought for state support. Inside power relations characteristic of the colonial encounter, those plantations produced and reproduced racial difference. Traveling across the Atlantic, slave traders and planters shared notions about how specific bodies were ideally suited for agricultural tasks, and how to organize these bodies for labour. São Tomé plantations were built upon expanded repertoires and techniques of racialized violence inherited from past imperial plantation experiences, thus revealing how forms of labour exploitation survived abolitionist pressures and spread across the globe.

Acknowledgments

I thank the organizers of this Special Issue and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive feedback and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the European Research Council Project “The Colour of Labour: Racialized lives of Migrants”, PI Cristiana Bastos (Advanced Grant No 695573).