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coffee trees in dense rows, eliminating all other plants from the farm. In Ceylon, this could mean a density of between 1,200 and 2,700 plants per acre, depending on the spacing between the trees. The goal, in the words of one planter, was to plant “the great[est] number of trees in a given space so that none shall incommode or interfere with the growth or sustenance of its neighbor.”⁴² The first generation of European coffee planters generally preferred to plant their coffee in open sun, eliminating all shade trees. The British coffee planter Edmund Hull argued that they did so because the native coffee farmers always did use shade, and “the tendency of the European farmer [was] to regard with the utmost contempt all idea of instruction coming from that quarter.”⁴³ While this kind of prejudice may have been a factor, settlers likely rejected shade trees because they believed that shade reduced yields and, therefore, profits.

      In some places, coffee grew as far as the eye could see. At high altitudes in Ceylon, one could see “fields of dark, ever-green, luxuriant coffee-trees, so well clothed with foliage that not a square yard of bare ground is visible for acres.”⁴⁴ Later in the century the Brazilian novelist Monteiro Lobato described São Paulo’s coffee farms as a “green wave of coffee.”⁴⁵ On such farms, the coffee trees were planted at carefully measured distances in neat rows. This arrangement reflected European ideas about rationality; it also helped maximize production and manage labor. The goal of this layout, wrote Hull, was to “admit large gangs of laborers working together on an estate without confusion, to enable the employer more easily to check the amount of work done by each person, as well as to economize surface to the utmost, by having the largest number of plants on a given area, each with its due share of ground.”⁴⁶

      But this superficial order masks just how improvised these landscapes were.⁴⁷ Most European planters had little experience with tropical agriculture; in fact, many had little experience with agriculture of any kind. They learned how to farm coffee by trial and error. In the eighteenth century, French coffee planters seem to have transmitted their knowledge orally. The settlers “had no books or schools to guide them,” wrote the French botanist Auguste Chevalier, “but like the peasants of France they transmitted the improvements they had made from one generation to the next.” Because there were “frequent connections from one colony to the other,” continued Chevalier, “the [farming] methods and techniques were quickly unified” across colonies. From the mid-eighteenth century, then, “the coffee tree was cultivated identically, and coffee was cultivated on [the Île] Bourbon as it was in the Antilles and the diverse countries of the Americas.”⁴⁸ In Ceylon, some British planters developed an apprenticeship system called “creeping” in which a recently arrived planter would assist an experienced planter for a year or so before setting up a farm of his own.

      Over the nineteenth century, some of this practical knowledge was codified in texts. The first significant publication in this genre was P. J. Laborie’s The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo, published in 1798. Laborie had owned a coffee plantation in Saint Domingue, but he lost it during the revolution. In 198 pages, Laborie meticulously described how to clear forests, build the farm, and cultivate and process the coffee, as well as how to manage slave labor. Laborie’s book became a model for coffee plantations around the world; it was a model for the West Indian system of cultivation adopted by British planters in Ceylon. It offered some useful guidance, although some of his suggestions did not always work well in other environments.⁴⁹ Publications on coffee planting proliferated after the mid-nineteenth century, many of these reflecting the experience of farmers in different coffee zones. Planters also shared their practical knowledge through newspapers and periodicals. And gradually, at least in the British colonies, planters published coffee manuals of their own, usually integrating their practical experience with whatever scientific innovations they felt to be relevant.⁵⁰

      At this point, no particular scientific knowledge was necessary for running a coffee farm; farmers increased production by clearing forests and using more labor.⁵¹ And for their part, scientists had not devoted much attention to studying the coffee plant or the practical problems of coffee agriculture. The botanists at Ceylon’s botanical garden were more concerned with acclimating exotic crops than working with the coffee planters. In Brazil, the first coffee research station was not founded until 1887. In the Dutch East Indies, the first dedicated coffee research station was founded in 1896, although coffee researchers at the Cultuurtuin (botanical garden) in Java had started doing some coffee research as early as the 1870s.⁵² Coffee planters only showed much interest in science when they began experiencing production problems that they could not solve on their own. For that reason, they showed particular interest in Justus von Liebig’s pioneering work on chemical fertilizers. But so long as “land remained cheap and plentiful,” wrote the always-insightful Hull, “the simple but wasteful method of opening up new estates as soon as the old ones begin to be exhausted, seemed always preferable to an intricate and laborious study of the best means of preserving land already under cultivation.”⁵³

      This production boom made the world’s coffee farms more vulnerable to diseases and pests than ever before. Viewed from an epidemiologic perspective, it greatly increased the global population and distribution of susceptible arabicas. The limited genetic diversity of these cultivated arabicas made them even more vulnerable. The world’s globally traded arabicas depended on just two cultivars, Bourbon and Typica, both of which originated from the narrow arabica populations of Yemen. The expanding shipping and railroad networks offered diseases and pests new opportunities to move beyond their native range. The most significant change, however, was the spread of coffee monocultures; many of the new coffee farms were radically simpler than earlier ones. These monocultures involved a trade-off between economic productivity and ecological vulnerability, which may not have been immediately apparent. By sharply reducing the biological diversity of farms—by devoting the farm space to a single crop—farmers also removed the physical and genetic obstacles that kept diseases and pests in check. Looking back on this period, the French coffee expert Auguste Chevalier wrote that “the coffee plant was cultivated on still-virgin lands, in regions not wholly deforested; all the cultivated coffee trees descended from a handful of plants free of disease; and they were cultivated in lands where insects [and] natural enemies of the coffee tree had not yet been imported.”⁵⁴

      Harbingers of the Rust

      A closer look suggests that Chevalier’s idyllic picture of coffee farming was not entirely accurate. As early as 1773, a French coffee planter on Île Bourbon complained of “little black scarabs that eat the leaves of the coffee tree,” of a “louse that attaches itself to the branches, leaves, and even the roots of the coffee trees, and makes them languish,” and of a “singular malady” in which the “leaves, branches, and often even the fruits of the coffee tree were largely covered with a black matter that ‘freezes’ the plant and dries it.”⁵⁵ These localized outbreaks foreshadowed the global commodity diseases that were to plague coffee farms in the next century.

      Even as the world’s coffee farms became more vulnerable to disease before 1870, they suffered only localized outbreaks of diseases and pests. A “coffee leaf disease,” likely an insect rather than a fungus, disrupted production on coffee estates in Ceylon for a few years in the 1840s. Indeed, during the pioneering phases of coffee production, insect pests tended to cause more problems than did diseases. Various species of mealybugs (genus Planococcus) fed on the sap of new tissues in the coffee plants. One of these, the “black bug”—which first appeared in Ceylon in 1843—ate the fresh shoots of young coffee plants and destroyed the cherries. Another, the “white bug,” lived in the axils of leaves and cut them off “either during the blossom stage or just after the young berries have been formed.”⁵⁶ The most serious insect pest of coffee was the borer (probably the coffee white stem borer, Xylotrechus quadripes Chevrolat), first detected in Coorg in the mid-1860s.⁵⁷ This insect bored into the trunk of the coffee tree. The leaves of infested plants wilted and fell, and over time the tree died back to the entry point.⁵⁸ Grubs sometimes attacked the coffee plant’s taproots, ultimately killing the trees. The planters also faced problems from grasshoppers, “which [were] addicted to cutting down young trees close to the ground, and to sawing off the branches of older trees.”⁵⁹

      While some

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