COCOA PIONEER FRONTS SINCE 1800

Also by William Gervase Clarence-Smith

SLAVES, PEASANTS AND CAPITALISTS IN SOUTHERN ANGOLA, 1840-1926

THE THIRD PORTUGUESE EMPIRE, 1825-1975: A Study in Economic Imperialism

THE ECONOMICS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN SLAVE TRADE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY (editor)

Cocoa Pioneer Fronts since 1800 The Role of Smallholders, Planters and Merchants

Edited by

William Gervase Clarence-Smith Reader in Economic History School of Oriental and African Studies University of London

First published in Great Britain 1996 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-349-24903-9 ISBN 978-1-349-24901-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24901-5

First published in the United States of America 1996 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 978-0-312-15847-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cocoa pioneer fronts since 1800 : the role of smallholders, planters, and merchants I editor, William Gervase Clarence-Smith. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-15847-7 I. Cocoa trade-History-Congresses. 2. Economic development­-Congresses. I. Clarence-Smith, W. G., 1948-HD9200.A2C568 1996 338.1737 4'0904-dc20 96-10846

CIP

@William Gervase Clarence-Smith 1996 Softeover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-62812-6

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 05 04 03 02 OJ 00 99 98 97 96

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface and Acknowledgements

Notes on the Contributors

Cocoa Pioneer Fronts: The Historical Determinants William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Fram;ois Ruf

2 The Eastern Venezuela Pioneer Front, 1830s-1930s:

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viii

IX

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The Role of the Corsican Trade Network 23 Nikita Harwich Vallenilla

3 The Trinidad Cocoa Industry and the Struggle for Crown Land during the Nineteenth Century 45 Kathleen Phillips Lewis

4 Ecuadorian Cocoa Production and Trade, 1840-1925 65 Juan A1aiguashca

5 A Cocoa Pioneer Front, 1890-1914: Planters, Merchants and Government Policy in Bahia 86 Robert G. Greenhill

6 Equatorial Guinea: The Struggle for a Cocoa Economy, 1880-1930 I 05 Ibrahim Sundiata

7 The Emergence of Duala Cocoa Planters under German Rule in Cameroon: A Case Study of Entrepreneurship 119 Yvette D. A1onga

8 Cocoa Farming in Cameroon, c. 1914- c. 1960: Land and Labour 137 Andreas Eckert

v

VI Contents

9 Mode of Production or Mode of Cultivation: Explaining the Failure of European Cocoa Planters in Competition with African Farmers in Colonial Ghana 154 Gareth Austin

10 Cote d'Ivoire's Pioneer Fronts: Historical and Political Determinants of the Spread of Cocoa Cultivation 176 Jean-Pierre Chauveau and Eric Leonard

II The cocoa frontier in Madagascar, the Comoro Islands, and Reunion, c. 1820-1970 195 Gwyn R. Campbell

12 Smallholder Cocoa in Indonesia: Why a Cocoa Boom in Sulawesi? 212 Franc;ois Ruf, Pierre Ehret and Yoddang

Index 233

List of Figures

1.1 The 'cocoa world', 16th to 20th century 3 2.1 Cocoa in Eastern Venezuela and Trinidad, c. 1900 24 4.1 Cocoa and ecological zones in coastal Ecuador,

~ 1917 69 5.1 Cocoa and forest in Bahia in the 1930s 89 6.1 Land distribution in Fernando P6o in 1941 I 06 6.2 Equatorial Guinea's cocoa exports to Spain,

1889-1930 113 7.1 Dual a cocoa plantations in Cameroon, c. 1907 123 8.1 The Cameroon cocoa zone, 1914-1960 138 9.1 Plantations in colonial Ghana 156

10.1 The spread of cocoa cultivation in Cote d'Ivoire 177 11.1 Cocoa islands in the western India Ocean,

1820s-1960s 196 11.2 Cocoa production in Madagascar, 1900-1962 200 11.3 (a) French imports of Malagasy cocoa, 1950-1962 205

(b) Average monthly rainfall at Toamasina and Nosy Be 205

12.1 Main migratory flows to the Sulawesi cocoa frontier 214 12.2 (a) Sulawesi cocoa production, 1983-93 220

(b) Arrival of Bugis migrants in Lapai, 1959-89 220 (c) Producer prices of cocoa and tobacco in

S. Sulawesi, 1978-91 220

VII

List of Tables

2.1 Venezuela cocoa exports 1872-1932, value and prices (in bolivares) 28

2.2 Venezuela: cocoa production 30 2.3 Carupano customs, cocoa exports 31 3.1 Grants of Crown Land and cocoa export production,

1874-1914, Trinidad 51 4.1 Annual average cocoa exports of Ecuador, 1841-90

(in quintals) 68 4.2 Evolution of 'demographic' weight by Ecuadorian region 70 4.3 Cocoa exports of Ecuador, annual averages, 1881-1930

(in quintals) 71 4.4 Value of Ecuador's cocoa exports, 1881-1930 71 4.5 Limited liability companies for Ecuador set up in Europe 74 4.6 Largest fortunes in Guayaquil, 1879-1925 (in sucres) 75 4.7 The new cocoa entrepreneurs in Ecuador, 1910 75 4.8 New cocoa trees planted in Ecuador from 1830-1920 76 4.9 Population density of Ecuadorian coastal provinces 77 7.1 Cocoa exports through the port of Douala 125 12.1 Productivity of plantations, Sulawesi 221

viii

Preface and Acknowledgements At the origins of this volume there lies a conference on the relation­ship between cocoa production and economic development. Held in London in September 1993, this was a joint venture between the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Coming from all continents, participants presented a total of 34 papers, and the comparative approach proved extremely enlightening. The papers and the ensuing discussion persuaded me to place the focus of the book on 'pioneer fronts', a notion elaborated over the years by my co-author for the introduction, Fran~ois Ruf. While the range of case studies presented here is cer­tainly wide, ranging from Ecuador to Indonesia, my regret is that Nigeria, Malaysia and the Dominican Republic could not be fitted in.

My thanks go in the first place to my co-organiser for the conference, Gareth Austin. A multitude of pressing commitments left him unable to join me as editor of this volume, but he has continued to give me precious advice and support. I would also like to record my gratitude to all those who wrote papers for our conference that could not be squeezed into this book, but whose insights have contributed greatly to the final outcome. A complete set of conference papers is to be deposited in the SOAS and LSE libraries.

The conference could not have been held without generous finan­cial assistance from the SOAS Research Committee, the Sun tory-Toyota International Centre for Economics and Related Disciplines at the LSE, the British Academy, Mars Confectionery Ltd UK, and Gustav W. Hamester GmbH of Hamburg. The University of London's Centre of African Studies and Institute of Latin American Studies funded a Ghanaian reception for participants, and the Centre of African Studies provided welcome administrative support.

Editing the book proved a somewhat more arduous task than I had bargained for, and I would like to thank my wife Dr Keiko Tanaka, for cheerfully putting up with the whole process. My thanks also go to Catherine Lawrence, cartographer at SOAS, for her patient work on the disparate maps which landed on her desk.

WILLIAM GERVASE CLARENCE-SMITH

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Notes on the Contributors

Gareth Austin teaches African and comparative Third World econ­omic history at the London School of Economics. He taught previ­ously at the universities of Birmingham and Ghana, and was a research fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of Lon­don. He is the author of essays on various aspects of the history of production for the market in Ghana, particularly in Asante (Ashanti), and of 'Indigenous credit institutions in West Africa, c. 1750-1960' in G. Austin and K. Sugihara (eds), Local Suppliers of Credit in the Third World I750-I960 (1993). He is currently finishing a book: La­bour, land and Capital in Rural Asante, I807-I956.

Gwyn Campbell is the author of numerous articles on the economic history of South East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean, and of a book, An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750-I895 to be published by Lit Verlag, Hamburg. His current research interests include trans-Indian Ocean migration, the Indian trading network in East Africa and the Islands, and South African economic relations with Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean Rim. He is currently em­ployed at the Universite d'Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse, France.

Jean-Pierre Chauveau is Directeur -de Recherche at ORSTOM and co-author of Bodiba en Cote d'lvoire; du terroir a l'etat (1983). He is co-editor of the forthcoming Agronomie et sciences sociales face aux innovations dans les societes rurales en voie de developpment and Sciences sociales et peches artisanales africaines and is writing a book on the micro-sociology of social change and development in Cote d'lvoire.

William Gervase Clarence-Smith is Reader in Economic History in the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and author of Slaves, Peasants and Capitalists in Southern Angola, I840-I926 (1979) and The Third Portuguese Empire, I825-I975 (1985). He has edited The Economics of the Indian Ocean Slave Trade in the 19th Century (1989). He now works on tree crops, plantations and Asian commer­cial diaspora in the Third World since 1800.

X

Notes on the Contributors XI

Andreas Eckert is a research fellow at the Humboldt-Universitat Ber­lin. He is the author of Die Duala und die Kolonialmiichte ( 1991) and several articles on the history of Cameroon and problems of historiography in Africa. A second book, entitled Grundbesitz, Landkonjlikte und kolonialer Wandel: Douala, 1880-1960 is about to be published.

Pierre Ehret is an agronomist from the French Ministry of Agricul­ture. He took part in the initial CIRAD/ASKINDO surveys of cocoa farming in Sulawesi under the direction of Fran~ois Ruf. He is cur­rently based in Dominica, conducting a study on the island's farming systems.

Robert G. Greenhill teaches economic history at London Guildhall University, UK. He is the co-author (with Professor Edmar Bacha) of 150 Anos de Caje, which has been translated into English as One Hundred and Fifty Years of Coffee (1992). His latest article appeared in the January 1995 issue of Business History.

Nikita Harwich Vallenilla teaches Latin American history at the University of Paris X (Nanterre), France. He is the author of Asfalto y revolucion. La New York & Bermudez Company (1992) and of Histoire du chocolat ( 1992). He is currenty doing research on positivism and the formation of the state in Latin America.

Eric Leonard is an agro-economist working for ORSTOM. He has carried out research on problems of small-scale dry farming in Mexico and cash crop agriculture in Cote d'lvoire. He has published 'Appro­priation et gestion de Ia rente forestiere en Cote d'lvoire', in Politique africaine 53, and has two articles forthcoming on agriculture in the forested zones of Cote d'Ivoire.

Juan Maiguashca teaches Latin American history at York Univer­sity, Toronto. He edited Historia y region en el Ecuador, 1830-1930 (1994), and is editing Creacion de las republicas y formacion de La nacion, the fifth of an eight-volume Historia de America Andina, spon­sored by the Andean Pact states. He is also writing an economic his­tory of Ecuador in the nineteenth century.

Yvette D. Monga is affiliated with the University of Aix-en-Provence in France and her doctoral dissertation was on Duala cocoa producers

XII Notes on the Contributors

during the German and early French colonial periods in Cameroon. She currently teaches African history at the department of History, Harvard University.

Kathleen Phillips Lewis is currently Assistant Professor in Carib­bean History at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia. She taught for­merly at the Department of History, University of the West Indies, Trinidad. She has written several articles on the Trinidad cocoa in­dustry and is currently revising her thesis on that topic for publication.

Fran~ois Rnf does research on cocoa and coffee economies for CIRAD. He was based in Cote d'Ivoire from 1979 to 1985, then conducted short surveys in all the major cocoa-producing countries, and is now living in Indonesia. He is the co-editor of Cocoa Cycles: The Econ­omics of Cocoa Supply (1995), and author of Booms et crises du cacao; les vertiges de l'or brun (1995)

Ibrahim K. Sundiata is Beinfield Professor of African and Afro­American Studies at Brandeis University and author of three books, the latest of which is Between Slaving and Neoslavery ( 1995). His specialisms are comparative race relations and African history.

Yoddang is an agronomist at Hasanuddin University (Ujung Pandang, Indonesia). Since 1990 he has worked as research assistant on the CIRAD/ASKINDO joint research programme 'Cocoa economy in In­donesia'. He is co-author of 'The Spectacular Efficiency of Bugis Small­holders: Why? Until When?' in F. Ruf and P. S. Siswoputranto (eds), Cocoa Cycles: The Economics of Cocoa Supply (1995).