Growing Apart: Coffee and Classification in British Colonial Ceylon

Nineteenth-century commercial reports on European coffee markets were filled with numerous descriptors that conveyed, with precise detail, the quality of coffee beans and their origins to prospective buyers. Unlike coffee produced in places like Brazil and Java, coffee from British Ceylon had additional descriptors: “native” and “plantation.” London coffee merchants and Ceylon’s European planters used these classifications to distinguish coffee grown by Lankan cultivators from that grown by European planters. However, these categories represented more than just who grew the coffee. Instead, they were place-based categories that reflected the specific locations where the cultivators grew coffee and the cultivation techniques they used. They emerged in Ceylon in the late 1830s and 1840s following the introduction of the West Indian system of coffee cultivation to the island. This system, epitomized by the 1798 coffee manual, The Coffee Planter of Saint Domingo, by French coffee planter Pierre Joseph Laborie, profoundly shaped coffee cultivation in Ceylon. European planters drew on the agricultural knowledge imparted by West Indian figures like Laborie to recreate West Indian plantations in the environments of the central highlands of Ceylon. Plantation coffee came to mean coffee grown under the West Indian system, while native coffee referred to the earlier cultivation method, which European merchants and planters increasingly regarded as inferior. The story of how native and plantation coffee emerged in British Ceylon highlights the importance of connecting Atlantic World and Indian Ocean histories, emphasizing how coffee cultivation in the circum-Caribbean greatly influenced coffee farming in South Asia.