excerpt from Ross W. Jamieson's The Essence
of Commodification: Caffeine dependencies in the early modern world. Journal
of Social History, Winter 2001
Yerba mate and the Jesuits
Not all the caffeine drinks encountered in the course of European colonial
expansion came to be accepted for consumption in Europe. In the Americas there
were several plants besides cacao that contained caffeine and were known to
the indigenous inhabitants, none of which ever reached commercial distribution
in Europe. The most economically important of these exclusively New World caffeine
drinks was yerba mate. This is a tea made from the leaves of a holly (Ilex paraguariensis)
harvested in prehispanic times along the Parana-Paraguay river system.
Early Spanish settlers along this river system had taken up the pre-Columbian
practice of drinking wild yerba mate as a tea. As with cacao, they acquired
the habit from the people they had conquered. Unlike cacao and coffee, yerba
mate was not a domestic plant when first encountered by Europeans. Instead it
was harvested from wild stands. Initial Spanish colonization of the Parana-Paraguay
system was tied closely to Jesuit missionization efforts. Jesuit policy encouraged
large-scale plantation agriculture on the seventeenth century South American
missions, as a method of using indigenous labor to produce marketable commodities,
and make the missions both self-sufficient and profitable. The Jesuits realized
the great economic potential of yerba mate, and from the 1650s to 1670s successfully
founded yerba mate plantations at their missions.
When Europeans arrived in the Parana-Paraguay there was no existing market
for yerba mate beyond the local region. With the domestication of the plant
as a plantation crop the Jesuits also contributed to the creation of a commercial
market for it. By 1700 the drink was popular throughout the Andes and the Rio
de la Plata. As with cacao, yerba mate was developed as a plantation crop to
serve a consumer market within the colonies, rather than for shipment to Europe.
The product was shipped down the Parana-Paraguay system, then either to Santa
Fe, where it was hauled overland to Chile, Upper Peru, and Lima or continued
by river to markets in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
Yerba mate was never introduced to the European market--perhaps because it
only gained commercial prominence in Spanish America after 1700, long after
tea, coffee and cacao had become available in Europe. The expulsion of the Jesuits
from the Spanish colonies in 1767 ended the cultivation of yerba mate on the
mission plantations. The European Enlightenment criticism of the Jesuits that
led to their expulsion was in itself partly based on their successful plantation
economies worldwide. When they were expelled from all Spanish dominions their
missions on the Parana-Paraguay were abandoned. This caused huge changes in
yerba mate production, as the missions were transferred into royal and private
hands. Massive exploitation and near-slavery of the local Guarani population
led to their abandonment of the missions, and the temporary end of yerba mate
as a plantation crop.
It was fairly simple for commercial growers to transplant cacao and coffee
to new plantations, but yerba mate proved to be a finicky crop. Spaniards apart
from the Jesuits had little success in growing it, so production after the Jesuit
expulsion came largely from the harvest of wild stands in Paraguay. The town
of Concepcion, founded in 1773, became the northern mate port, with land access
to the stands of wild plants in the hinterland. Yerba mate was the only caffeine
crop ever harvested commercially from wild stands in large quantities. Harvesting
of the plant was a speculative enterprise, with Indian debt peons spending months
in the forest harvesting, drying and bailing the crop. Many members of these
work parties died.
The crop was sold regionally in South America, never gaining European markets.
The Bourbon reforms massively increased the volume of the yerba mate trade in
South America, as it did with the cacao trade from the Guayas region. The creation
of the Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata in 1776 meant that the merchants of Buenos
Aires took control of both the yerba mate production zones in Paraguay, and
one of the major consumer markets, in Alto Peru. Free trade and tax reforms
in 1778 and 1780 made exports far more profitable.
By the 1770s yerba mate was a popular social drink throughout the Andes, served
at all hours of the day. The tea (or yerba) was traditionally drunk from a gourd
(or mate), sipped through a straw known as a bombilla. By the 1770s this market
had penetrated as far north as Cuenca, where the traditional gourd with silver
straw began to appear on elite tables in this tertiary northern Andean city.
Several examples of mate gourds mounted in silver with a silver straw have been
encountered in late eighteenth century inventories from Cuenca. There was a
female association with this form of Andean consumption, a contemporary observer
stating that "... there is no house, rich or poor, where there is nor always
mate on the table, and it is nothing short of amazing to see the luxury spent
by women on mate utensils." The gendered nature of the consumption of caffeine
drinks in the early modern world has not been extensively studied outside Europe,
but in the case of yerba mate in the Andes the association is with female, and
domestic, consumption.
Yerba mate thus provides us with an example of a caffeine beverage crop with
a unique historical trajectory. Developed as a plantation crop by the Jesuits
to supply a South American market, it reverted to a system of commercial harvesting
of wild plants after the Jesuit expulsion. The difficult transplantation of
the wild plants meant that domestic plantations were not easily founded, and
the wild plant harvest remained important for much of the commercial history
of yerba mate. This situation continued until the 1890s, when large yerba mate
plantations were successfully developed in the southern Mato Grosso to serve
the modern regional market.