Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

THE COFFEE COMMODITY CHAIN IN THE WORLD-ECONOMY:
ARRIGHI’S SYSTEMIC CYCLES AND BRAUDEL’S LAYERS OF ANALYSIS
John M. Talbot
Department of Sociology
University of the West Indies, Mona
john.talbot@uwimona.edu.jm
ABSTRACT
This article presents a history of coffee in the modern world-economy, using an analytical
framework synthesized from Arrighi’s concept of systemic cycles of accumulation and Braudel’s
notion of three levels of economic analysis: material life, the market economy, and capitalism. It
takes the commodity chain as the unit of analysis, and argues that this choice helps to illuminate
the causal connections between Braudel’s three layers. The method of incorporated comparison
is used to compare restructurings of the coffee commodity chain with the restructurings of the
larger world-economy during each of Arrighi’s systemic cycles.
INTRODUCTION
In this paper, I use Arrighi’s four “systemic cycles of accumulation” as a framework to describe
and explain transformations of the world coffee economy, focusing on the use of coffee in
everyday life and the global trade in coffee. 1
I link these changes to the recurrent pattern that
Arrighi identifies for each systemic cycle, moving through alternating periods of “material” and
“financial” expansion. I attempt to explain how the changes in material life and the market
economy were shaped by, and in turn helped to shape, the development of each systemic cycle of
accumulation as a whole. I employ a variation of McMichael’s (1990, 1992) method of
incorporated comparison to compare changes in the structure of the coffee commodity chain with
changes in the world-economy, because the former is a part of the latter. When a hegemonic
power restructures the world-economy, it does so by restructuring the commodity chains that
comprise it. However, each commodity chain also has its own logic and history, which condition
its further evolution and render it either open, or resistant, to restructuring at particular historical
conjunctures. Instances where the evolution of the commodity chain does not correspond exactly
with the evolution of the world-economy may provide important clues about the dynamics
1 Arrighi describes each systemic cycle as beginning in the financial expansion of the preceding cycle,
running through the material expansion, and including the subsequent financial expansion. This yields a
series of overlapping systemic cycles which is probably truer to the development of capitalism as the top
layer of the system (1994: 214-15). For this analysis, I have dated the beginning of each cycle at the
beginning of the material expansion to obtain a series of non-overlapping cycles, which makes it easier to
deal with events in the two lower layers of the system.
Copyright ©2011, American Sociological Association, Volume XVII, Number 1, Pages 58-88
ISSN 1076-156X