Stuart McCook

• PhD
• Professor at University of Guelph

The quantitative growth of coffee production and consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced qualitative transformations along every step of the coffee commodity chain. The economic integration of the global coffee market in this period triggered major east-west biological exchanges between the world s coffee regions. The global...

Coffee has played complex and diverse roles in shaping livelihoods and landscapes in Latin America. This tropical understory tree has been profitably cultivated on large estates, on peasant smallholdings, and at many scales in between. Coffee exports have fueled the economies of many parts of Latin America. At first, coffee farmers cleared and burn...

The global coffee industry, which fuels the livelihoods of farmers, entrepreneurs, and consumers around the world, rests on fragile ecological foundations. In Coffee Is Not Forever, Stuart McCook explores the transnational story of this essential crop through a history of one of its most devastating diseases, the coffee leaf rust. He deftly synthes...

The Cambridge History of Science - edited by Hugh Richard Slotten April 2020

During the Cold War, coffee became a strategically important crop in the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. The economies of many US allies in Latin America depended upon coffee. In the Cold War context, then, the coffee leaf rust ( Hemileia vastatrix) became a geopolitical problem. Coffee experts in Latin America, which...

Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in a more globally focused era, but also because of agriculture’s potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. History is replete with stories of armies standing or falling as a result of thei...

Social Impact Statement Central America is renowned for producing some of the world's finest coffee, prized for its quality and flavor. With coffee being a major export crop for many countries, the region's economic, social, and cultural well‐being is closely linked to the success of its coffee industry. Coffee breeding supports the industry's long...

O trabalho do historiador canadense Stuart McCook vem se tornando cada vez mais conhecido pelos historiadores ambientais brasileiros. Nascido em Vancouver, na Columbia Britânica, o professor McCook trabalha desde 2003 na University of Guelph, Ontário, Canadá, onde recebe e acompanha um importante número de professores, estudantes e pesquisadores br...

Before the nineteenth century, the global transfer of live plants was quite challenging. The developmennt of a simple yet innovative technology —the Wardian Case — made these transfers much easier. This chapter traces the history of global plant transfers from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth century, showing how the Wardi...

Since 2008, there has been a cluster of outbreaks of the coffee rust (Hemileia vastatrix) across the coffee-growing regions of the Americas, which have been collectively described as the Big Rust. These outbreaks have caused significant hardship to coffee producers and laborers. This essay situates the Big Rust in a broader historical context. Over...

The importance of training well-rounded engineers has been discussed by engineering educators since the end of the Second World War. For decades now, the humanities and social sciences have been used to encourage engineering students to develop social competency, ethical awareness, and the ability to express themselves with ease, both orally and in...

The "global turn" in the history of science offers new ways to think about how to do national and regional histories of science, in this case the history of science in Latin America. For example, it questions structuralist and diffusionist models of the spread of science and shows the often active role that people in Latin America (and the rest of...

The landscapes of the Greater Caribbean have been undergoing a process of ecological globalization since the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the late fifteenth century. The character of this ecological globalization has changed over time. Models of commodity-led economic development drove, directly or indirectly, the neo-Columbian exc...

Many of the field sciences aim to study a nature that is pristine-at least rhetorically pristine. Field scientists would-quite literally-climb the highest mountains and plumb the deepest oceans in the quest of pure, pristine nature. They would travel great distances from cities and settled areas, deep into the forests in pursuit of an undisturbed f...

The history of tropical crops in the second half of the twentieth century is, in large part, a history of innovation. An analysis of this history of innovation allows us to glimpse the environmental history of these crops. Much of the innovation in this period was done to counter an unprecedented wave of crop diseases and pests. Recovering the hist...

Crop epidemics provide a portal into the global and transnational environmental history of commodities. The coffee rust epidemic, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, is one of the most serious diseases to have afflicted the global coffee industry. In the nineteenth century, it devastated the coffee plantations in the Old World. It sharply curt...

There has recently been a small boom in both academic and popular writing on commodities. These works are often written as a way to explore and contextualize the neoliberal globalization of the past several decades. But there are many different ways to approach commodities. In a critical review of the genre, the literary scholar Bruce Robbins asks,...

The Role of Geographer and Natural Scientist Henri François Pittier (1875-1950) in the Evolution of Geography as a Science in Costa Rica. By Yacher Leon I. . Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004. pp. xx, 291. Illustrations. Maps. Appendices. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $119.95 cloth. - Volume 62 Issue 4 - Stuart McCook

Sociedad y medio ambiente: Contribuciones a la sociología ambiental en América Latina. Edited by Ramírez Alfonso López and Hernández Pedro F. . Mexico: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, BUAP 1996. Pp. 175. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. No Price. - Volume 61 Issue 4 - Stuart McCook

The Struggle for Water in Peru: Comedy and Tragedy in the Andean Commons , by Paul Trawick. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003. xiv, 351 pp. $75.00 US (cloth), $27.95 US (paper).

Plants and Empire Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. By Londa Schiebinger . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004. 318 pp. $39.95, £25.95, €36.90. ISBN 0-674-01487-1. The author examines the factors that influenced how and to what extent knowledge of plants used by indigenous and African inhabitants of the Caribbean moved into--...

La historia de la investigación agrícola en América Latina nos puede ofrecer una vista nueva de la historia de las ideologías de desarrollo en la época liberal. Buscando “orden y progreso”, las elites liberales de América Latina querrían racionalizar la vida política, social y económica nacional. En la mayoría de los países latinoamericanos, la agr...

The Americas 59.3 (2003) 419-420 Winner of the American Society for Environmental History's George Perkins Marsh Prize in 2001, this book is a pioneering environmental history of Cuba during the long nineteenth century. Only a handful of works in Latin American environmental history deal with this period of critical transformation in the relationsh...

In a 1924 essay, the botanist Henri Pittier worried that many of Latin America's tropical products—particularly its plants—lacked a ‘civil status.’ By this, Pittier meant that they had not yet been identified and named scientifically. He likened the plants’ lack of a botanical ‘civil status’ to a person's lacking a passport or credentials that prov...

De 1870 a 1930, les compagnies d'Amerique Latine ont connu une expansion economique rapide due a l'exportation de leur production agricole. Cette hausse des exportations eut des repercussions sur les ecosystemes en milieu tropical. Une baisse de la productivite s'en suivit ainsi que des problemes d'ordre ecologique ce qui necessita une modernisatio...

During the late nineteenth century, many countries in tropical Latin America organized research institutions for the study of natural history. The political and economic élites who sponsored these institutions hoped to find new natural resources that could be sold to Europe and North America's expanding markets. The coffee, sugar and banana industr...

François de Loys (1892-1935), a geologist from Lausanne, was one of the pioneers of oil exploration in the remote rain forests south west of Lake Maracaibo, Venezuela. As a field geologist, he participated in expeditions to Europe, Africa and America during the golden age of great oil discoveries. However, Dr de Loys is less known for his geologica...

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L'experience de Du Chaillu illustre les differences existantes entre les recherches scientifiques au laboratoire et les recherches sur le terrain. En effet, lors de son voyage en Afrique Equatoriale, Du Chaillu rapporta des crânes de gorilles qui permirent a Owen (R.) de differencier les gorilles de negres et ainsi legitimer sa recherche scientifiq...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1996. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 278-312). Photocopy.