The coffee hacienda was the result of the entry of urban merchants into rural society. On a yet more general plane, it was the product of emphasis on agricultural exporting, of the urge and the need to form links with the world market and ‘bring to the country the civilization that is overflowing in Europe’. Investment in coffee did not penetrate the rural world in order to create new types of social or productive relations. By the end of the century, for all its dynamism, commercial capital had only scratched the rude surface of the older social formations. The traditions, habits, and customs of the little worlds of a few square kilometres in which most lived out their lives showed a persistent rigour, despite the expectation that the old patterns would dissolve in contact with the new economy which the coffee entrepreneur wished to impose. In part it was a problem of quantity: coffee investment was heavily concentrated in relatively few areas. Even there, the phenomenon of specialization that occurred with tobacco in Ambalema was not repeated. Within the old haciendas of colonial origin there was a peasant stratum accustomed to the degree of independence that came from producing its own food. The coffee hacienda of Santander, Cundinamarca, Tolima, and Antioquia was founded within an existing social structure, to which it had to adapt itself, while at the same time it introduced new elements of the monetary economy which, simple and weak at first, would produce effects that disturbed the old order. In Cundinamarca, for example, the coffee municipios were old centres of colonial production and commerce.