by Marie Louise Krogh
The history of those commodities that populate everyday life is very often one of connections between seemingly disparate contexts. For most of us, it is commonplace knowledge that a large part of the goods we consume have traveled great distances and been manufactured, packed, and shipped by people unknown to us in places whose precise location we do not know either. Perhaps we could even say that being a consumer in a global market is to be aware of the existence of these intricate connections across our planet yet ignorant of their precise shape and form. The explicit study of commodity chains—the many steps that cut across geographical locations and national borders while linking sites of extraction or cultivation to sites of manufacture, commerce, and consumption—elucidates these connections and the contours of labor conditions and infrastructural demands, of value production and extraction and of their societal as well as environmental consequences (Bair 2009).
From a historian’s point of view, the additional appeal of centering those commodities that came to be known as “colonial goods,” has been that to “follow the thing,” as Ian Cook has phrased it, in these instances constitutively linking together the histories of imperial peripheries and centers, the lifeworld’s of colonial trade posts and plantations with those of shops, salons, and dinner tables in the metropole (Curry-Machado and Stubbs 2023). Unsurprisingly therefore, both scholarly and popular commodity histories are often narratively structured as stories of how the material ligaments of globalization came to envelope our planet. As Sidney Mintz put it in Sweetness and Power, his now canonical study of the trajectory of sugar in from luxury good to household staple in the modern world, to focus on commodities is a way to uncover “the mystery of people unknown to one another being linked through space and time—not just by politics and economics, but along a particular chain of connection maintained by their production” (1986, xxiv). This, in many respects, parallels the global approach in Sven Beckert’s more recent Empire of Cotton (2014). To provide the “biography of a product” in these instances is to show how the modern world was born not out of territorially delimited dynamics of accumulation and industrialisation on the British Isles, but also in multiple and globally distributed instances of what Marx called “so-called primitive accumulation.” Beckert calls this “war-capitalism”: that union of state and capital through which “imperial expansion, expropriation and slavery became central to forging a new global economic order and eventually the rise of capitalism” (Beckert, 36–37).
After the so-called “imperial turn” in the history of political thought (Pitts 2005; Muthu 2012; Bell 2019) and in response to calls to “bring the economy back in” to intellectual history (Ince 2018; Flohr 2024), it therefore seems timely to ask what—if anything—commodity history might contribute to these fields? At first glance, the interdisciplinary materialism of this type of historical work might seem to place it at odds with intellectual history. What would it mean to “follow the thing,” when immersed in research of theoretical formations and conceptual mutations? To be sure, one great strength of intellectual history has been its always attentive (and critical) eye on how the relevant context for a given set of texts is constructed (in terms of discursive communities or socio-economic conditions as well as in terms of their respective national, international, or transnational delimitations). And yet, my contention is that a detour into commodity history might serve as a way to show that such contexts rarely are as self-contained as they may at a first glance appear to be. Rather than make this point in the abstract, I will provide an example that places us in the specific context of one enthusiastic coffee-drinker residing in the German territories during the Napoleonic wars, namely, G.W.F. Hegel.
A surprising amount of G.W.F. Hegel’s letters to friends and family touch on the subject of coffee. The best manner and machinery for brewing it (e.g., a Rumford coffee maker produced in Munich), the correct way to spell the word in Vienna (“Kaffeh”), its beneficial qualities as a way to sharpen one’s mind (necessary when one wants to write philosophy and not mere journalism), and, most passionately of all, how poorly all substitute brews compare to that coffee which is made from real coffee beans. Chicory and carrot-based replacements, the primary offenders discussed by Hegel, are described as “deceptive” and compared to “bear shit” (Hegel 1984, 148–49, 625, 168, 528, 225).
These musings even make their way into the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, wherein a parallel is drawn between what might currently pass for philosophy (good common sense and claims to possess immediate revelation of the divine) and what passes for coffee (chicory root). In both instances Hegel seems to imply two things: that the surrogate simply is not up to snuff, and that too many people are willing to treat it as if it were the real deal (Hegel 2018, 42). Though the finer grains in the history of how coffee and its ersatz products made it to German territories is too complex to be recounted in full here, let me provide a broad sketch of the context for Hegel’s commentary as well as present the case for why it provides an entry point for a further discussion of Hegel and the colonial world.
Native to Ethiopia, coffee first became a staple drink in the Islamic world before passing through Vencie to the European markets in the seventeenth century (see Clarence-Smith and Topik 2003). When the Dutch East India Company (VOC) began shipping coffee beans from Mocha to Amsterdam, coffee houses proliferated in France, Germany, England, and Italy. By the eighteenth century, a growing taste for the drink and the reputation of the bean itself as an easily portable commodity saw the Dutch, French, and British merchant companies shift from commerce and transport to full-fledged production (Ciccantell, Smith, and Topik 2024, 28). This, of course, required access to the kind of terrain and climate in which coffee could grow: typically, in a sub-tropical or tropical zone where higher altitudes and a fertile soil would provide ideal conditions for plantations. In his entry on “Commerce” in the Encyclopedia of Diderot and d’Alembert, François Véron de Forbonnais (1722–1800) describes the rationale for the acquisition of such land in the following (somewhat simplified and significantly de-brutalized) manner:
Resourceful nations which have not found within their boundaries what they require for the three types of needs [necessity, comfort, and luxury] have acquired land in climates suited for the commodities they lacked. They have sent their own subjects to cultivate these commodities, at the same time compelling them to consume the products of the mother country. Such establishments are called colonies. (Forbonnais,“Commerce,” 1753)
Famously, none of the German municipal states possessed any such colonies during this period. That they did not appear to be one of those “resourceful nations” has indeed been one of the enduring paradoxes for post-colonial readings of German philosophy from the late Enlightenment. For while the philosophies of history that found their epitome in Hegel’s Philosophische Weltgeschichte are seen as emblematic of Eurocentric arrogance in justifications of colonial violence, these justificatory machinations do not neatly line up with any national interests in colonial projects. Instead, it has been argued that in drama, literature and philosophy, the idea of a (fictitious) colonial Empire might, in the German territories, have served as a “screen on to which ideas about national unity and national greatness could be projected” (Conrad 2008, 17). Perhaps the best known example of such an approach is Susan Zantorp’s Colonial Fantasies (1997)—a study of “colonialism without colonies” in pre-unified Germany—wherein she showed how the fantasy of overseas territories may have sustained and consolidated nationalist identity construction, even among those states that did not possess any.
As the case of coffee demonstrates, however, it was not only fantasies of overseas imperial grandeur that travelled across the boundaries of actual empires. The goods that came from colonies also made their way abroad and had to be managed within local economies. Seeking both to stem the amount of money flowing to foreign merchants and to tap into them, Fredrick II experimented with several mercantilist regulatory measures in Prussia: both a state monopoly on coffee roasteries—with former soldiers employed as “coffee sniffers” to catch those who sought to circumvent it—and a high tax of coffee beans as a luxury good (Zeuske and Ludwig 1995, 281). Another strategy of economic management was to encourage the cultivation of local tastes for ersatz products that could also be sourced locally. Already in 1769, an official seal of authenticity (a trademark) was granted to Major von Heine for his chicory-powder factory in Braunschweig. The seal (the featured image above) shows a local farmer planting chicory seeds while a ship sails past tropical islands in the background. The text reads: “Healthy and Wealthy without You.” Chicory was, in other words, marketed as a healthier, more affordable, and patriotic alternative to coffee made on coffee beans. (For further discussion of the trademark and the politics of chicory coffee as “German Coffee,” see Brauner 2022.)
Hegel’s specific comment about the deceptive character of chicory root stems from a letter to his wife from 1822, in which he narrated precisely his passage through Braunschweig, where he had found the entire countryside covered with fields of this crop (Hegel 1984, 582). On earlier occasions, his scornful reference to so-called “patriotic coffee” seems to indicate a fairly low regard for the idea that one had an obligation to consume in accord with the perceived economic interests of one’s country (Hegel 1984, 225). The notion that consumption might be with or against national interest was of course not particular to the early nineteenth century, but it did become both especially poignant and complex during the time in which Hegel wrote the preface to the Phenomenology, in the winter of 1806–7, after Napoleon had captured Jena during the war of the fourth coalition (October 13, 1806). During this period, Napoleon also enacted the Berlin Decree, which in November 1806 inaugurated the Continental Blockade, a large-scale embargo imposed on the British Empire. With little hope against the British navy, Napoleon instead sought to starve the coffers of the British state with economic warfare, by locking their merchants out of markets on the European continent. Paradoxically, this strategy also locked in European consumers (especially when the British in 1807 adopted a policy of seizing the content of all neutral ships carrying goods from enemy colonies to their mother countries). Though there is some debate over the effectiveness of the blockade—and the extent to which smuggling operations were able to undercut it—what is certain is that the price on those “colonial goods” that previously had been traded to the German territories via Amsterdam and Hamburg now skyrocketed (O’Rourke 2006, Ulff 2022). Even if you could get your hands on it, the “real deal” quickly became prohibitively expensive (O’Rourke 2005, 138). As a consequence, replacement products became ever more dominant. This is the context for the most striking of all Hegel’s musings on coffee in The Letters. After Napoleon’s enemies entered Paris on March 30, 1814, Hegel wrote to his friend Niethammer to reflect both on the fall of Napoleon and on the consequences of this fall for those with a penchant for coffee:
Great events have transpired about us. It is a frightful spectacle to see a great genius [Napoleon] destroy himself. There is nothing more tragic. The entire mass of mediocrity, with its irresistible leaden weight of gravity, presses on like lead, without rest or reconciliation, until it has succeeded in bringing down what is high to the same level as itself or even below. The turning point of the whole, the reason why this mass has power and—like the chorus—survives and remains on top, is that the great individual must himself give that mass the right to do what it does, thus precipitating his own fall.
[…]
From the streams of blessings necessarily flowing from these great events, just as showers must follow lightning, that brown rivulet of coffee already flows from the pot for the likes of us and indeed does so with more taste and perk than ever. For we have now been liberated from substitute drink, and from our supplementary income as Councillors we can now procure real Java coffee. May God and kind friends preserve it for us ….
While there is little evidence that the coffee which flowed into German territories actually came from “Java” (the name seems to have been a mark of authenticity rather than of exclusive geographic origin), what this and other such passages illustrates well is the deep imbrication of the colonial world, even in the material lifeworld’s of those who lived in states without colonies. Pierre-Franklin Tavares, Susan Buck-Morss, and many others have sought to demonstrate the “subterraneous” links between Hegel and Haiti and reconstructed those contemporary intellectual and textual venues, which carried a certain meaning that the slave revolts and Haitian revolution could be understood speculatively as the “hidden” socio-political context for the master-slave dialectic (Tavares 1992, Buck-Morss 2000).[1] What the “brown rivulet of coffee” does, thus, is concretely and non-speculatively place Hegel in a world wherein the politics of colony and metropole extends far beyond any specific intra-imperial relation. It thereby also provides a new opening from which we might approach Hegel’s writings on colonization, political economy, “the system of needs,” in Elements of the Philosophy of Right (and elsewhere). When Hegel notes that “the fully developed civil society” is driven to colonization (1991, §248, 269), this passage has typically, with good reason, been understood exclusively as a response to the “social question” and the production of “the rabble” in a society that “despite an excess of wealth … is not wealthy enough” (1991, §245, 267). With a mind on Hegel’s coffee consumption, we can now ask if these passages might not only be a matter of people who move but also of goods that are cultivated to satisfy the needs of a population with evolving yet, at times, stubborn tastes. Ultimately, what commodity history might bring to intellectual history in this instance, is a clearer sense of the dialectic of nearness and distance at play in the imperial and nascent capitalist formations that shaped Hegel’s context. Following the “thing” in this way provides a lens through which different contextual scales can be refracted against one another: the nearness of everyday life in the German territories in the early nineteenth century and the broad trans-national stakes of imperial formations and trade links across the globe.
[1] See Pierre Franklin Tavares, “Hegel et Haiti, ou le silence de Hegel sur Saint-Domingue,” in Chemins Critiques 2 (May 1992): 113-31.
Marie Louise Krogh is an Assistant Professor of Continental Philosophy at Leiden University and an incoming visiting scholar in The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. This piece is part of her project The Empire of German Idealism,funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) with file number VI.Veni.231F.072. of the research programme Veni SGW.
Edited by Jacob Saliba
Featured image: Official chicory coffee trademark found in “Serenissimi gnädigste Verordnung, das dem Major von Heine behuf seiner Cichorienpulver-fabrik,” Braunschweig 1769. Image courtesy of Göttingen State and University Library, shelf mark (8 J STAT V, 7033:1767-1778 (39).
This think piece is part of a JHI Blog forum: “The Return of Political Economy in Intellectual History.”
