Conquest and the Great Reversal

Goal: After this lesson you can explain how chocolate went from a sacred drink to a colonial commodity, and how the value and production of cacao shifted away from its homeland. Subject: Social Studies | Run time: about 8 minutes

Quick recall

Last time we covered cacao as sacred money. Two quick questions. One: how did the Aztecs use cacao beans in daily life? As money; for example, about 100 beans bought a turkey and about 8,000 bought a canoe (Coe & Coe, 2013). Two: how much cacao did the emperor Moctezuma II reportedly drink? 50 or more cups a day, while commoners drank it only at festivals (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Why this matters

In 1519 a Spanish soldier named Cortes walked into Tenochtitlan and the Spanish tasted xocolatl for the first time (Coe & Coe, 2013; Cortes, 1520). They did not love it. It was bitter. But they noticed it was valuable, and within a few years they would do something that flipped the whole system upside down. They kept the drink and threw away almost everything that made it sacred.

The idea

Here is the sequence. Cortes arrived in 1519. Two years later, in 1521, Tenochtitlan fell, and with it ended the indigenous control of cacao (Coe & Coe, 2013). The conquest did not just take the city. It took the crop. In 1528 cacao reached Spain, and someone added sugar (Coe & Coe, 2013). That one change rewrote chocolate. The bitter, spiced, sacred drink of Mesoamerica became a sweet European luxury. By around 1585 the first European chocolate house opened, and chocolate was now a product to be bought and sold rather than a sacrament to be poured (Coe & Coe, 2013). Then the map moved. In the early 1900s, colonial powers established cacao plantations in West Africa, shifting the center of production from the Americas, cacao's homeland, to Africa (Coe & Coe, 2013). The tree that the Olmec found in the Amazon was now grown an ocean away, by people who had no part in its sacred history, to feed factories somewhere else. Industrial chocolate companies rose to turn those beans into bars at massive scale. Now look at what the data calls the great reversal, the before and after of conquest. Before, indigenous communities controlled the growing and the processing, and 100 percent of the value stayed local. After, that locally captured value fell to about 3 to 6 percent (Coe & Coe, 2013). Read that again. Out of every dollar of value, the place that grew the crop went from keeping all of it to keeping a few cents. The meaning reversed too. Sacred became sweet commodity. And the labor reversed, from community cultivation to forced or indentured labor (Coe & Coe, 2013). Same plant, opposite world.

Picture it

Picture two cups of the same drink. The first is poured in a temple in Tenochtitlan before 1521, bitter and spiced, sacred, and every bit of its value belongs to the community that grew it. The second is poured in a European chocolate house after 1585, sweetened with sugar, sold for profit, and grown on a plantation an ocean away by forced labor. The drink looks similar in the cup. Almost everything around it has been turned inside out.

Remember this

The fact to carry out: conquest reversed chocolate. After Cortes arrived in 1519 and Tenochtitlan fell in 1521, cacao reached Spain in 1528 and was sweetened with sugar, production later shifted to West African plantations in the early 1900s, and the value kept locally fell from 100 percent to about 3 to 6 percent (Coe & Coe, 2013; Cortes, 1520). A sacred drink became a colonial commodity. Next time we look at who picks the cacao today.

Quick check

Quick check. After conquest, how much of cacao's value was captured locally, compared to before? It fell from 100 percent before to about 3 to 6 percent after (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Key Takeaways

Cortes arrived in 1519, the Spanish tasted xocolatl, and Tenochtitlan fell in 1521, ending indigenous control of cacao (Coe & Coe, 2013; Cortes, 1520).
Cacao reached Spain in 1528, where sugar turned a bitter drink into a sweet luxury, and the first European chocolate house opened around 1585 (Coe & Coe, 2013).
In the early 1900s, colonial powers built cacao plantations in West Africa, shifting production from the Americas to Africa (Coe & Coe, 2013).
In the great reversal, locally captured value fell from 100 percent to about 3 to 6 percent, sacred meaning became sweet commodity, and community cultivation became forced or indentured labor (Coe & Coe, 2013).

Sources

Coe, S. D., & Coe, M. D. (2013). The true history of chocolate (3rd ed.). Thames and Hudson.
Cortes, H. (1520). Letters from Mexico (A. Pagden, Trans., 1986). Yale University Press.