Cacao
He also attended a Pan-African meeting in Ghana, among
other international anticolonial conferences.
In 1959 Cabral and Aristides Pereira (b. 1923), Lus
Cabral (b. 1931), Julio de Almeira, Fernando Fortes, and
Elisee Turpin founded a new political party called the
African Party for Independence and Union of Guinea
and Cape Verde (PAIGC). This underground organiza-
tion acquired legal status four years later.
Between 1960 and 1962, the PAIGC operated out
of the Republic of Guinea with the objective of preparing
armed militants and obtaining international support.
War broke out against the Portuguese in 1962 with the
aim of attaining independence for both Portuguese
Guinea and Cape Verde. Cabral adopted guerrilla tactics
and led one of the most profound revolutionary move-
ments in Africa. Over the course of the conflict, the
PAIGC gained land.
In 1972 Cabral began to form a peoples assembly in
preparation for independence, but a disgruntled former
associate, Inocencio Kani, and other members of the All
Guineans Party assassinated him in January 1973. Cabral
provided the military and intellectual leadership for the
anticolonial movement for over a decade before his assassi-
nation. When Guinea-Bissau became independent in 1974,
Cabrals brother, Lus, became president (19741980).
SEE ALSO Anticolonialism; Portugals African Colonies.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bienen, Henry. State and Revolution: The Work of Amilcar
Cabral. Journal of Modern African Studies 15 (4) (1977):
555568.
Chabal, Patrick. Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and
Peoples War. New York and Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
Chailand, Gerard. Armed Struggle in Africa: With the Guerrillas in
Portuguese Guinea. New York: Monthly Review Press,
1969.
McCollester, Charles. The Political Thought of Amilcar
Cabral. Monthly Review 24 (March 1973): 1021.
Chima J. Korieh
CACAO
Cacao (Theobroma cacao), known as the food of the
gods, and its main byproduct, chocolate, come from
the seeds, or nibs, of a pod, the fruit of a tree native to
tropical America. The cacao tree usually requires shade
trees, often the so-called madre de cacao (mother of
cacao), also an American native. Experts disagree about
the number of cacao types.
172
The criollo or native cacaos are often held to be the
best. They are more delicate and low-yielding, and grow
traditionally in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean.
Forastero cacaos are more robust and prolific, but of
lower quality. Cultivated in colonial Ecuador and
Venezuela, this variety was also carried from Brazil to
West Africa by the Portuguese, and is now a leading crop
in several countries there, including the Ivory Coast and
Ghana. Forastero is also cultivated in Southeast Asia. The
third variety, trinitario, so named because it was appar-
ently first cultivated commercially in Trinidad, is prob-
ably a crossbreed of the original varieties and is now
grown worldwide.
Cacao trees are slow growing, sensitive to cold and
drought, and require constant water from rain or irriga-
tion. The nibs are extracted from the shell and the pulp,
then fermented and dried. The beans are then bagged
and shipped to markets, where they are manufactured
into hard chocolate, cacao powder or cocoa, cacao
butterfat, and other products.
Cacao is generally considered Amazonian in its
wild state, although some dispute this. The nibs have
a short fertility after being picked, and so transplantation
was difficult before the availability of rapid modern
transportation, causing wide distances between areas of
cultivation and the emergence of different varieties.
Cacao has obviously been modified by human interven-
tion for many centuries.
It is in Mesoamerica that the first recorded histories
of the plant and its fruit are found. Cacao was part of
very ancient mythologies. The word itself may be Olmec,
possibly dating to before 1000 BCE. Cacao was also of
great importance to the Maya and other Mesoamerican
cultures, including the city-centered states of the Valley
of Mexico. Chocolate drinks are mentioned frequently in
Mayan hieroglyphics, and elite tombs often hold pottery
containing the residue of liquid chocolate. Some scholars
have claimed that in some parts of Mesoamerica, choco-
late drinks were a privilege limited to the nobility, but
others find this unlikely because the widespread cultiva-
tion of the tree in the lowlands suggests general con-
sumption by all classes. Certainly the drink was very
much part of public ceremony and ritual.
The beans or nibs were an important trade and
tribute item for centuries before the Spanish invasions.
The plants strict climatic requirements, and the elabo-
rate, long-distance trade and taxation networks that
developed, encouraged regional specialization. In coastal
Guerrero, Colima, Veracruz, and Tabasco in Mexico, as
well as the Gulf of Hondurasto use modern geogra-
phical nomenclaturecacao was grown intensively for
export to population centers before the arrival of
Europeans. Christopher Columbus (14511506), on his
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WESTERN COLONIALISM SINCE 1450

The Cacao Plant. Cocoa and its main byproduct, chocolate,
come from the nibs of a pod, the fruit of a tree native to tropical
America. Cocoa beans were an important trade and tribute item
among indigenous Americans for centuries before the Spanish
invasion. BETTMANN/CORBIS. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
fourth voyage in 1502, seized a large seagoing canoe in
the Gulf of Honduras carrying cacao beans as part of its
cargo.
The great centers of cacao cultivation around the time
of the first European invasions of America were Soconusco
(today the Pacific coast of Chiapas in Mexico) and the
coast running all the way from Chiapas to present-day
El Salvador. From these plantations, beans found their
way to the highland centers. Soconusco, a Culhua-Mexica
outlying colony, sent cacao as tribute to the Aztec
emperor Montezuma (ca. 14661520) in Tenochtitlan
(now Mexico City). The beans were stored in great
warehouses in the cities of the central valley.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WESTERN COLONIALISM SINCE 1450
Cacao
In pre-Columbian Mexico, cacao beans served as
coinage; it might be said, then, that money grew on
trees. Cacao beans were used as a rudimentary means of
exchange from ancient times, and at least as far south as
highland Costa Rica during the colonial period, espe-
cially when there were shortages of official metal coinage.
What we know of pre-invasion cacao coinage is scanty,
but in western Nicaragua, a Mesoamerican periphery,
there may well have been standard equivalencies recog-
nized by officialdom. Certainly such tables relating cacao
beans to other coinages can be found sporadically during
the three Spanish colonial centuries. Cacao beans also
entered the numerical systems of measures based on serial
numbers of beans. In the same way, there is some evi-
dence of the counterfeiting of beans, certainly a sign of
their monetary and symbolic value.
As far as we know, hard chocolate was not con-
sumed. Still, the people of Mesoamerica had many
recipes for cacao. The ground beans were mixed with
hot or cold water and with maize, ground chilies,
annatto, and vanilla, as well as seeds, roots, and flowers
of a great variety. A favorite method was to beat these
mixtures to a froth. Many of the dishes were soups, and
the liquid chocolate, poured over other ingredients, may
be the ancestor of modern mole sauces. The aristocracy
and the pochteca, a kind of official merchant class, drank
huge quantities of these libations at festivals and public
banquets. The first Europeans to taste these native
recipes, however, found them to be unpalatable. One
early Italian visitor described them as fit only for pigs.
The conquistadors of central Mexico captured ware-
houses of cacao, which they used as money. Other invad-
ing bands found groves in Soconusco and Izalcos in
todays El Salvador. Soon these groves were exploited
by powerful Central American encomenderos. These
Spaniards usually did not seize ownership of the groves,
because cultivation was a specialized business and
required hard work in a humid subtropical climate.
Instead, they coerced labor and tried to extract surpluses
and taxes for trading. Large cargoes of cacao were carried
by mule trains and small ships to central Mexico.
Within a few years, avaricious encomenderos and their
governmental allies forced native growers to intensify
planting and harvesting, which appears to have been
counterproductive. The native population was in severe
decline because of the Old World epidemiological shock,
and overwork and exploitation made the demographic
catastrophe worse. Imported labor from the highlands
did not solve the resulting labor shortage, and overplant-
ing, along with the cutting down of shade trees,
destroyed the understory needs of the cacao trees.
All this occurred at a time when market demand was
increasing. Apparently, consumption among the native
173
Calcutta
peoples of central Mexico and highland Guatemala grew
rapidly, and observers described the quaffing of almost
unbelievable quantities of chocolate drinks. Demand was
such that cacao from more distant plantations could pay
expensive freight charges and still show a profit. By the
seventeenth century, coastal Venezuela and Guayaquil in
Ecuador had begun to replace Central America, Tabasco,
and Guerrero as the main suppliers, and Mexico started
to import large cargoes of the hardier and more plentiful
forastero crops. Venezuelan growers dominated at first
using African slave labor, and eventually sent much of
their crop to Spain and to Dutch smugglers in Curacao
as the taste for chocolate developed in western Europe
and markets organized in Amsterdam and elsewhere.
Guayaquil began to export beans at about the same
time as Venezuela and was able to produce considerable
quantities of inexpensive cacaos. Guayaquil prices,
despite long and inefficient trade routes, undercut those
of Central America and even Venezuela. Central
American growers obtained a royal ban on Guayaquil
and other South American imports but contraband flour-
ished. By 1700 or so, Guayaquil chocolate began to reach
even Spain and other European centers, as well as to
supply some three-quarters of Mexican demand. New
producers such as Trinidad, Caribbean Costa Rica,
Martinique, and Saint-Domingue (Haiti) also took
minor places as suppliers to the transatlantic markets.
Europeans developed a taste for chocolate slowly,
compared to Americans of all ethnic groups. The addi-
tion of Old World sugar and New World vanilla helped
with its acceptance. Cacao beans probably reached
Europe by the 1520s, and its use as a drink spread from
Spain, first to France, where chocolate houses were fash-
ionable by mid-seventeenth century, and then to
London, Holland, and elsewhere. The Dutch, who cap-
tured Curacao from the Spanish in 1634, soon sent large
cargoes of Venezuelan contraband cacao to Amsterdam,
the great chocolate mart of Europe. The chocolate mart
in Amsterdam became so monopolistic, in fact, that even
Spanish merchants had to buy there.
By the eighteenth century, American chocolate was
being drunk throughout Europe and its colonies with
varying degrees of enthusiasm. In the late century, some
people began to add milk, wine, and cloves. Recipes
stipulated the best ways to prepare chocolate, with
emphasis on ways of heating and whipping to provide
the ideal frothy frappe. Chocolate, however, remained
quite expensive.
Gradually, intensification of production and new
technologies turned chocolate into the solid, inexpensive
bars and hard candies of today. The popularity of cho-
colate as a drink was surpassed by coffee and tea in most
places, and the product went its separate way as a
174 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WESTERN COLONIALISM SINCE 1450
confectionary. The Swiss followed the Dutch and
English pioneers. The Nestle brothers and Rodolphe
Lindt (18551909) developed the first milk chocolates,
and in the United States Milton Hershey (18571945)
took advantage of economies of scale, vertical integration
of needed products, and mass marketing to capture a
giant share of the confectionary market. The food of
the gods, produced mainly in West Africa since about
1900, had become the candy of the masses.
SEE ALSO Aztec Empire; Commodity Trade, Africa;
Empire in the Americas, Spanish.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alden, Dauril. The Significance of Cacao Production in the
Amazon Region During the Late Colonial Period: An Essay in
Comparative Economic History. Philadelphia: American
Philosophical Society, 1976.
Bergman, James L. The Distribution of Cacao Cultivation in
Pre-Columbian America. Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 59 (1969): 8596.
Coe, Sophie D., and Michael D. Coe. The True History of
Chocolate. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996.
Pinero, Eugenio. The Town of San Felipe and Colonial Cacao
Economies. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1994.
Young, Allen M. The Chocolate Tree: A Natural History of Cacao.
Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994.
Murdo J. MacLeod
CALCUTTA
Situated on the east bank of the River Hugli about 129
kilometers (80 miles) from the Bay of Bengal, Calcutta lies
close to the mouth of the two great river systems of the
Ganga (Ganges) and the Brahmaputra. Consequently, the
port possesses the advantage of excellent inland navigation
for transporting foreign imports upstream and sending
down the products of the fertile interior by the same
channel.
Already prior to the arrival of the English merchant
Job Charnock (d. 1693) in 1690, the settlements on the
east bank of the river had attracted a number of high-
caste Hindu families with literary traditions. The founda-
tion of a British settlement raised the potential of the site,
but the political events in the eighteenth century that
changed the course of history were not to be predicted in
the 1690s.
The right of fortification, obtained by the British in
1696, allowed the construction of Fort William. In 1698
the English East India Company purchased the right of
revenue and tax collection for the three villages of
Kalikata, Sutanuti, and Govindapur. In 1700 the settle-
ment received the status of a presidency. This put the