From Beans to Landscapes: Unraveling European Perceptions of the Tropics through Ceylon’s Coffee Culture

• In Event: Innovation, Creation, and Technologies of Change in the 20th Century

Abstract

My paper explores European environmental knowledge and conceptions of the tropics through a close study of British Ceylon’s coffee culture. Nineteenth-century commercial reports of European coffee markets were awash with dozens of descriptors that relayed with precise detail the quality of the coffee beans and their origins to would-be buyers. Unlike coffee produced in places like Brazil and Java, coffee produced in British Ceylon carried additional descriptors: “native” and “plantation.” Coffee merchants used these two distinctions to distinguish between coffee generally produced by Lankan cultivators and European planters. I argue that these categories represented more than just who grew the coffee. Instead, these categorizations embodied the specific places where the coffee was grown and the cultivational techniques used. Closely examining and comparing the sites where cultivators produced “native” and “plantation” coffee reveals how Europeans engaged with and thought about tropical landscapes. Grounding a study of Ceylon’s coffee culture in place uncovers how European planters perceived the tropics and how they sought to control tropical environments through European plantation agriculture.

Author

• Raymond Hyser, University of Texas at Austin