The hacendado is a man of progress, which for him is synonymous with unrestricted access to a ‘free’ labour supply, better roads, cheap railways, and free exports. He is Europe-centric. His desire is to impose civilization in the hollows of the Andes, through growing coffee. He was once a capitalist entrepreneur, but he became an ‘oligarch’ – in the Colombian social meaning, not the wider political meaning of the term. He got land and credit, and did business on the bases of trust and honour, business in which family and social relationships and political contacts were often all-important. The family, the politico-social connection, sends out its pioneers. Once the haciendas are founded, the commission agents of foreign houses appear and offer funds at low interest and secure market for the product. If he is a Liberal, he emphasizes his faith in the common cause of international capitalism, rebaptizing his properties with names like Java, Ceilán, Costa Rica, Brasil, Liberia, Arabia, remote countries which had also ascended, or were ascending, through coffee in the scale of a universal civilization.

But the internal structure of the hacienda was far from capitalist. It rested on colonial origins. The coffee hacienda as an economic and social construct, as the concrete expression of relations between the hacendado – urban in his origins and vocation – and the peasant, is the subject of this chapter. The background is a country which at the same time is developing two defining characteristics: it is gradually becoming a monoexporting economy, and outside the coffee sector the latifundio – in cattle, sugar, and bananas – is expanding and consolidating.

General characteristics of coffee production, 1930–70.

Since its beginnings, coffee cultivation has developed with other kinds of cultivation and with cattle. Of the 4.5 million hectares contained in Colombia's coffee zones in 1970, a little less than one-fourth were planted with coffee, which clearly reflects land usage within the productive units of the coffee belt: while the mean farm size was 15.05 hectares, the mean coffee-grove size on each finca was barely 3.53 hectares. These figures show the inherent limitations in a treatment such as the one I undertake in this final chapter: to treat coffee cultivation separately from its immediate agricultural environment. To understand the changes in the organization of the production of coffee in Colombia during the twentieth century, one must of course also analyse the relationship between these changes and the tendencies and events of the world coffee market, together with the role which is assigned to coffee in the liberal model of development.

My intention is first to outline the more general trends which have become apparent in the productive sector. I shall consider then to what extent such tendencies may have been responses to changes in the structure of the international coffee market.

For the student of Colombian coffee history, 1932 stands out as the year which marks the shift from the ‘pre-statistical’ to the ‘statistical’ period, with the publication in that year of the Coffee Census. Naturally there was no sharp break between the two periods, rather a gradual process dating back to the nineteenth century and arising out of the various attempts to organize agricultural statistics on a more scientific basis.

The aim of this book is to describe and explain the conditions under which Colombia, by becoming an important mono-exporting country of a product characteristic of tropical agriculture, coffee, managed to link its economy solidly with the world market. At the same time the book attempts to show the full effects of such an integration on the structure of contemporary Colombia.

My purpose is a study of the changes which the diffusion of coffee cultivation in Colombia and its hegemonic role in Colombian exports brought about in production, and in the class structure, in the balance of regional forces and in parts of the machinery of state.

In undertaking this task I have found particularly appropriate the advice of Karl Marx to those seeking to understand the situation in Spain during the middle of the last century: reject the fallacious belief that national life can be followed in the ‘almanacs of the Court’, in ‘the activities of that which we are accustomed to call the state’ instead ‘discover the resources and the strength of such countries in their provincial and local organization’.

Great importance is given in this book to the links between the world market and the rhythm and direction of regional and local changes. It is argued that such links were maintained and even strengthened without the presence and involvement of the central state. The first five chapters show how coffee renewed the vitality of the regional picture, with its demographic and ethnic idiosyncrasies and peculiarities, with the blessings and curses inflicted on the inhabitants by the particular environment.