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Our goal at the end of this enterprise is to propose bounded generalizations that are sensitive to variation and that avoid essentialized categories. Coffee was not an all-powerful master that demanded that its subjects follow a specific life-style and mindset. Our findings are often made in opposition to grand theories, such as dependency and modernization, and we are thus cautious about putting forward alternative models, especially at a time when comprehensive metanarratives are suspect. However, we also believe that we should not lapse into the nihilistic belief that every case is unique, every time different. We have to start with empirical work, based on realistic and historically sensitive categories. From these we can inductively create generalizations, which can allow us to attempt deductive reasoning. Despite our stress on variation and agency, we believe that useful conclusions can be drawn from all this, stimulating comparisons that look for patterns as well as for differences. Indeed, we hope that this volume might even help guide a minister of development in a contemporary coffee-producing country. He or she would consider consulting producers' associations, pickers' organizations, women's groups, ethnic clubs, processors, marketing boards, commercial intermediaries, internal transporters, exporters, and shippers, rather than dictate a “one-size-fits-all” policy from above. Such an enlightened minister would see that variation is determined not just by happenstance and contingency, and that local conditions and experiences affect the forces and consequences of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sub-Saharan Africa remained isolated from the main currents of world trade far longer than most of the rest of the Afro-Eurasian landmass. Even though Asian sailors reached much of the eastern coast by about 200 B.C., North Africans regularly crossed the Sahara by about 800 A.D., and European sailors reached the western coasts in the fifteenth century, much of the interior remained comparatively isolated until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – cut off by the aridity of the Sahara and its own patterns of disease environment. Tsetse flies and the trypanosomes they carried made pack animals useless through much of the African tropics, thus impeding long-distance trade. Other diseases, especially falciparum malaria and yellow fever, were so fatal to humans from other disease environments that Africa remained the continent least known to outsiders until the second half of the nineteenth century. Textbooks and other summary treatments of African economic history sometimes illustrate the “penetration” of Africa with maps showing arrows leading from the coasts into the interior – from Egypt up the Nile valley, from the east coast into the highland lake region, from the Maghrib across the Sahara to the western Sudan, from the Atlantic coast into the Congo basin. Such maps are accurate enough to show the flow of foreign goods. Arrows in the opposite direction could also show how African goods and people moved along trade routes to the outside world. But intercontinental trade was only part of the whole. In Africa, as elsewhere in the world, local exchange was more important than long-distance trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]