The present-day patterns of coffee production and consumption are rooted in the legacies of
colonialism and slavery but surprisingly the global history of the relationships between this
commodity and slavery and other forms of asymmetrical dependencies has not been written yet. In
this short monograph Rafael de Bivar Marquese presents a proposal on how to do so. In its
first part it argues that historically specific forms of asymmetrically dependent labor that
were mobilized for coffee production from the mid-sixteenth century to the late nineteenth
century can be better understood from how they were situated in three different global coffee
economies that overlapped in this longue durée. The monograph presents an overview of each
highlighting their main characteristics and in particular the relationships between different
labor regimes within each one of them. In its second part it discusses the three main
theoretical and methodological axes that guide the proposal.
