Harvesting the Tropics: Representing the Climate and Topography of Brazil's Nineteenth-Century Coffee Plantations

Published in his popular 1836 travel book, Johann Moritz Rugendas’s lithographed version of Coffee Gatherer’s, Rio depicts an orderly and productive coffee plantation. Overseen by their white master, a group of African... [ view full abstract ]

Published in his popular 1836 travel book, Johann Moritz Rugendas’s lithographed version of Coffee Gatherer’s, Rio depicts an orderly and productive coffee plantation. Overseen by their white master, a group of African slaves harvest and dry coffee beans amid the lush Tijuca Forest of coastal Brazil. A distant view of Rio’s port in Guanabara Bay alludes to the country’s rapidly growing international coffee trade. Rugendas and other traveler artists were drawn to the tropical climate and exotic landscape of Brazil. This same tropical climate that attracted artists to the mountainous regions of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest was ideal for coffee harvesting. This paper examines representations of the climate and land as commodity within an increasingly global coffee economy. I argue that these plantation scenes reveal the essential qualities of the climate, soil, and topography that made the coffee industry possible in this region. Yet the concurrence of deforestation with sunny, warm weather resulted in severe environmental consequences including droughts in the nineteenth-century Imperial capital of Rio de Janeiro.