September 13, 2021

Eat This Podcast: How coffee ties Italy, Brazil and Italian East Africa to one another

Hello

And we’re back, after a terrific summer break.

Diana Garvin, an historian, recently published a paper that examines what she calls the Italian coffee triangle. She explains how Italy’s belated land grab in Africa sought to transform the colonos of Brazil, the 2.7 million immigrant Italian labourers who effectively tripled Brazilian production in a decade, into respectable colonialisti in Ethiopia, Italians who owned and oversaw coffee plantations in Ethiopia.

Although their Fascist-inspired duplication of Brazilian methods utterly failed, still, Africa had a powerful hold on the Italian imagination.

Take a listen.

All the best

Jeremy