The origins of Brazil and Java: compulsory labor and the reconfiguration of the coffee world economy in the Age of Revolutions, c.1760-1840

Abstract

Between 1760 and 1840 the world coffee market went through a great transformation. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the center of the global coffee production was in the French Caribbean. In the 1840s, it has moved to the Empire of Brazil and the Dutch colony of Java. Changes between one moment and the other were largely due to the impacts that the Age of Revolutions has had over the geopolitics of the capitalist world-economy. The article analyzes these changes based on an integrated examination of the different spaces involved in the global coffee economy. Its main goal is to understand the nature of the reshaping of compulsory labor regimes in Brazil and Java, and its global articulations.

Coffee; Brazil; Java; Second Slavery; Cultivation System