Book review: The World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma
Book review: The Bean and the World by Rutger van der Molen
Rutger van der Molen's The Bean and the World sets out to be a genuinely worldwide account. Instead of settling on one region, van der Molen moves through every important coffee-growing zone, opening with Brazil and Java, the two territories that between them supplied most of the coffee traded in the early 1900s. His subject, though, is not the familiar arabica bean alone. Robusta — hardier, cheaper to raise and for a long time thought unworthy of serious attention — is treated as its equal, and the author traces how, across the past hundred years, it has been produced on an industrial scale in fast-growing lowland districts and sold at such low prices that the smallholders who grow arabica have watched their earnings collapse again and again.
The book's range shows in van der Molen's account of the coffee trade in the Netherlands. Dutch consumers were at first supplied from plantations in the East Indies, which the country itself governed and ran on forced labour. Once that compulsion was scaled back within its own possessions, merchants looked instead to beans raised under still harsher conditions abroad, bringing them in from Brazil and other producers where coerced work continued. Only in the final decades of the nineteenth century did cheaper African robusta begin reaching Dutch harbours, and it was not until the twentieth that roasters set about building their blends around it.
Van der Molen's book is also a global history of labour, examining the many forms of work that coffee has required. People often imagine that the crop came chiefly from sprawling estates in the hands of the rich; the author shows how misleading that picture is. In the highlands of Java, for example — among the leading exporters of the early twentieth century — coffee bushes were tended beside food crops by peasant families, in a fashion that consumed a staggering quantity of hand labour.
Resemblance and continuity run all through his account of coffee-growing. The larger operations, he points out, have long depended on workers fetched from elsewhere: estates in Ceylon relied on indentured hands shipped over from South Asia, while those in Brazil pulled in labourers from distant places. Harvesting coffee, he reminds the reader, remains punishing and poorly paid across much of the globe even now. Yet the book gives just as much weight to the survival of older, small-scale ways of working, which as recently as the middle of the twentieth century still yielded most of the coffee grown in parts of Africa and Latin America.
It is, besides, a history of financiers and coffee dynasties, and of companies whose hold lasted across generations. Powerful business interests, van der Molen argues, have again and again turned the policies of states to their own ends. In Brazil most of all, though in Colombia and the Dutch East Indies as well, a commanding class of planters and exporters moulded national politics, and governments duly protected them, buying up unsold stock to keep prices high and raising barriers against foreign rivals. In every struggle over who would control the trade, it was nearly always the poorer producing countries that came off worst. The whole tangle is unravelled by van der Molen with remarkable delicacy.
Coffee, even so, was never a purely agricultural affair. As soon as the cherries were gathered, the beans inside had to be drawn out near the place they were grown, work that demanded machinery turned by hand, by animals, by water or by steam. After this came drying and hulling, and — from the nineteenth century — the sorting and grading of the beans, before the final roasting, which was carried out for the most part in the countries that consumed the coffee. From early on, then, coffee was an energy-hungry industrial business, pursued both in the countryside and in the roasteries of far-off cities. As it grew, it carried methods and machinery quickly from one country to another: railway lines were laid to shift pickers and beans, steam-driven mills multiplied, and prized varieties spread across the world wherever soil and taste would have them.
Where coffee had once been scarce and dear, new varieties, fertilisers, irrigation and better processing turned it in time into an ordinary drink to be had almost anywhere. The amount consumed rose sharply. A drink formerly held to be a luxury came to be commended as a harmless stimulant that quickened the wits. But as more of it was swallowed, worries mounted — over adulteration, over what caffeine might do, over the conditions in which the crop was raised. Whenever critics raised such matters, the trade was inclined to pay for soothing research and to pin the fault on other habits. The recent past, van der Molen notes, has brought a further, unwelcome twist: soluble or ‘instant’ coffee, made cheaply and mostly from robusta by a drying method perfected in the mid-twentieth century, now stocks vending machines and a host of packaged goods, and its spread the author judges to be a coarsening of what people drink.
The outcome is a book of genuine richness — a model for the writing of global history, and of the history of industry and of capitalism together. Van der Molen holds his emotions back, in praise as in blame, even where a little more warmth might have driven home his account of the many wrongs bound up with coffee. Human beings, he remarks, could always have got by without it, and there is today no want of other comforts to reach for instead. And still, for a great many of the world's poorest people, coffee is the very thing that puts food on the table.
Question 1 - 4
Choose appropriate options A, B, C or D.
1.
What does the reviewer suggest, in the first paragraph, about how coffee is grown and traded?
Coffee has come to occupy a central place in relations between countries.
Cultivating coffee in new districts has raised the amount produced.
Robusta is now thought to be of higher quality than arabica.
One kind of coffee has been priced low so as to compete on world markets.
Giải thích chi tiết theo Linear
Định vị đáp án
LINEARTHINKING
Đăng nhập để xem giải thích chi tiết