Couleurs café by Marie Hardy-Seguette

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Things always come in threes. After Bordeaux Métisse by Julie Duprat and Parcours contrastés des abolitionnistes Cyrille Bissette et Victor Schœlcher by Léo Ursulet, I received Couleurs café by Marie Hardy-Séguette in the mail. And so the year begins once again with the presentation of a book.

Marie Hardy-Séguette has been working on the history of coffee for a very long time! In 2007, her Master’s degree work focused on coffee and sugar plantations on Martinique’s windward coast, and in 2008, on the coffee plantations of Saint-Pierre and Le Lorrain. It was these initial studies that led her to examine the world of coffee in Martinique, as revealed by the archives, and its own history, in contrast to the history of the sugar plantations.

Couleurs café is a revised and published version of the history PhD thesis Le monde du café à la Martinique du début du XVIIIe siècle aux années 1860; as such, the book is voluminous, rich in statistics and numerical analysis, and with a sustained scientific background that will delight researchers and scholars.

Until now, historiography has focused more on sugarcane production, due to its predominant economic role; Marie Hardy-Seguette’s in-depth work on a secondary crop therefore allows us to discover the world of plantation from another angle, to see its diversity and particularities.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources and a three decennial serial analysis of notarial records, the approach allows us to observe internal changes over a long period of time, throughout the commercial coffee export culture in Martinique from the 1720s to the 1860s, and offers points of comparison with other colonies.

Of particular interest to me were the detailed analyses of concepts and notions that are often taken for granted. What is an « habitation » [plantation] ? What does the word « case » [hut] mean? What is the meaning of the word « habitant » [planter] ? The book systematically examines the use of these words, so common to the colonial world, to ascertain their meaning and how they evolved in the world of coffee during the different periods studied.

The book is organized in three parts, the first of which deals with the coffee business cycle, in other words, coffee production in its colonial geopolitical context, both on the island and internationally. It describes the meteoric rise of coffee-growing in the early days, followed by a difficult period for the industry from the revolutionary period onwards, and then the long decline in the 19th century in the face of declining trade relations with France, competition from the market and, more secondarily, soil exhaustion.

I was surprised to read that foreign coffee was already being imported into the island in the 19th century as Martinique’s coffee exports dwindled. I don’t know why, but in my mind this was a more recent phenomenon. My attention was also caught by the section detailing the coffee-growing plantations and localities for which this crop was of particular importance: Gros Morne, Lamentin and Rivière-Pilote. Not at all the parishes I would have spontaneously suggested!

I was captivated by the section on domestic spaces because, a rare feature in studies of this type, the book details the architecture and the lexicon used. This gives me a very useful point of comparison when I’m carrying out studies to accompany archaeological research! Is there a difference between a « maison » [house] and a « case » [hut]? Is the word « case » connoted by a person’s social status? I’ve learned that while today we easily associate « case » with « slave » and « maison » with « master », this was not the case in the 18th century. Archives material refer to « case à loger », « case à demeurer » or « case de maître ». « La maison de maître » [master house] is an expression that developed in the 19th century, but was rarely used before to refer to the owner’s plantation. The use of the words « case » or « maison » had more to do with the difference in materials and dimensions of the building described.

I was also interested to learn that industrial buildings were rare on coffee plantations, except the coffee mill, which was present on (only) half of the plantations studied. This indicates the existence of two types of plantation: those that produced, harvested and processed coffee on site (« café habitant »), while others left the final stage to a « bonifierie » or coffee factory (« café bonifié »). I thought more plantation produced « café habitant ».

The second part of the book focuses on coffee growers. Here again, a great deal of work was done to question the words « habitant » [planter], « propriétaire » [owner], « agriculteur » [farmer]… I found it really interesting. When a document qualifies a person as an « habitant », in your opinion, is it a profession or a status? What are the conditions to qualify? Do people have to own a farm, live on it, manage it? It seems that in the 18th century, the condition of residence was important, but not necessarily in the 19th century, when the word seems to have taken on the meaning of « exploitant » [farmer]. « Planter » was a profession, while « owner » was a status! After 1848, in the world of coffee, the word « agriculteur » [farmer] was more widely used than « habitant » [planter], which was used only by large-scale sugar growers.

The study draws up a socio-economic profile of the coffee growers; perhaps it would be more accurate if I wrote « the profiles »?! They were poor white Creoles, former cocoa growers, some notables or former soldiers, white people, but also several free people of color, women and men for whom coffee growing was, for some, the main activity, for others, a supplement to their income. Some families particularly involved in the coffee world are listed, such as Bénéteau, Birot, Caffié, Gigon, Morin, Poulet… There were significant social and economic disparities within the category; only a few isolated cases were able to achieve a level of wealth comparable to that of sugar growers (who remained the valued social model throughout the period).

Finally, because there would have been no coffee plantations without slaves to make them prosper, the last part of the book provides information about the people enslaved. In Martinique, the coffee plantations were small, monoculture and later polyculture, with an average of 4 cultivated squares. There were around 1,500 plants per square of land in the 18th century, rising to 1,100 in the 19th century. On average, there were 9 slaves per dwelling in Martinique in 1835; for perspective, there were 128 in Jamaica in 1832! In this part of the book, you will find the information that the archives provide on these people enslaved (origin, age, price, qualifications, illness and infirmities…). For my part, I’ve noted that they were highly creolized, most of them unskilled; as elsewhere, there was some domestic work, but less so than on the sugar plantations, and also a few craftsmen (carpenter, mason…).

For those of you familiar with my academic work, I specifically study free people of color. I therefore read with interest the sub-section on coffee growers devoted to gender and color, which gives an account of the demographic reality and the accessibility (or lack thereof) of this economic sector to minoritized people. We discover a few cases, such as Prudent Dieudonné, a « commis » [assistant] in Saint-Pierre, and his brother Fanfan Eleuther, a watchmaker, merchant, trader and also the owner of a coffee plantation, or the couple Joachim Claire and Reinette Rosa, merchant-confectioners and owners of a coffee plantation. It’s not easy to retrace the history of these people and their families, particularly over several generations, but individual and family paths are part of the broader history of colonial societies and are rich in lessons, so I’d like to express my hope that one day I’ll be able to read a detailed article, in the style of Scott and Hébrard’s Papiers de la liberté, about these people.

At the start of this new year, here’s a suggestion for reading to discover another aspect of plantation society through the world of coffee in Martinique.

French Bibliography