Neither coffee nor tea had to overcome a similar taint of colonial impurity. Quite the opposite: the exotic was an asset for them. That these beans and leaves came from Arabia and China surrounded them with an aura of esoteric civilization for European travellers. Coffee spoke to learned virtuosi such as the English philosopher Francis Bacon and the Italian botanist Prospero Alpino, with their interest in the natural world in all its variety. Europeans found in the Turkish coffee house a model of fellowship and conversation, and borrowed freely from Arabic medical knowledge. One of the earliest and most influential accounts of coffee drinking was by the French doctor and antiquarian Jacob Spon. In 1671, he described how the Turks took ‘a pound and a half of the Kernels of this Grain’, and after ‘peeling off the skin roast it before the fire . . .[and then] boyl it in twenty pintes of water’, before serving it in ‘little dishes of porcelain’. Spon repudiated those who criticized coffee, like tea, for effeminizing body and mind. In its defence he cited not only ‘an eminent Arabian Physician’ but also Galen, who continued to influence European medical thinking. Hot coffee, Spon explained, maintained the balance of the four bodily ‘humours’, or fluids, by preventing the ‘boyling of the blood, and the decaying of the strength’. He also noted how Arabs used it against indigestion, catarrhs and as a popular remedy against the ‘stoppage of Women’s courses’.17 Back home, Spon and fellow physicians prescribed coffee to women suffering from painful periods.
Coffee’s initial advance across Europe, however, was far from smooth. Imports and prices fluctuated greatly. Coffee made more profitable ballast than stones, but its original route from Yemen to Britain was treacherous. East India Company ships were easy prey for Red Sea pirates. In the years 1691 and 1693, no coffee reached British shores at all. Nor had Galen suggested that hot drinks were always beneficial. At the School of Paris, some physicians warned that hot things shortened life. In England, a Dr Willis sent patients with a ‘cold heavy Constitution’ to the coffee house to clear up headaches and lethargies. Patients with a hot temperament, by contrast, were advised to stay clear of the black drink because ‘it may dispose the Body to inquietudes and leanness’. Too much coffee risked leaving such men ‘paralytick, and does so slacken their strings, as they become unfit for the sports, and exercises of the Bed, and their Wives recreations’.18 Indeed, the seventeenth-century German geographer Adam Olearius, who had been sent to Persia and Muscovy by Frederick III in 1633–5, observed that Persians drank coffee as a form of birth control. Chocolate, by contrast, was known as an aphrodisiac. Whether Britain’s spectacular population growth would have slowed if it had become a nation of coffee instead of tea drinkers, we must leave to the reader’s imagination.19
By the late seventeenth century, these drugs still enjoyed flexible uses and associations. Samuel Pepys, after a hard night’s drinking, sipped chocolate to settle his stomach and cure his hangover. Many coffee houses served the whole range of hot beverages. It was coffee, however, that took the lead as a ‘wakeful and civil drink’.20 In expanding commercial societies, its sobering qualities set it apart from both aristocratic excess and the plebeian frenzy associated with sailors and prostitutes smoking marijuana. Coffee was recommended for clerks whose morning ale and wine, ‘by the Dizziness they cause in the Braine, make many unfit for business’.21 Coffee meant reason, control and moderation.
The early coffee houses attracted two groups of customers in particular: businessmen and scholars. The first coffee house in the West, The Angel, opened in Oxford in 1650. Venice and Amsterdam followed suit, in 1663, as did Bremen (1673), Boston (1690) and Prague (1705). By then, London had several hundreds of them. Immigrants and mercantile minorities played a decisive role in their diffusion. Oxford’s was founded by a Jewish immigrant, the one in rue de Bussy, Paris, by an Armenian; it catered to the Knights of Malta. Unlike chocolate, coffee flaunted its exotic side. At Don Saltero’s in London – real name: James Salter – visitors were able to sip their coffee while marvelling at crocodiles, turtles and other natural curiosities staring down at them from the ceiling. Countless establishments called themselves The Turk’s Head.
Later commentators sometimes drew a sharp contrast between a sober, coffee-drinking commercial culture and that of a hedonistic court. This must not be overdone. In European principalities like Dresden, courts acted as magnets for exotic goods, attracting Italian and Levantine merchants who brought with them coffee, accessories and know-how. The coffee house was newsroom, business counter and university rolled into one. Here, one picked up one of the early newspapers, clinched a commercial deal and learnt of the latest scientific discovery. In the 1960s, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas celebrated the coffee house as a prototypical bourgeois public sphere governed by reason. At the time, however, few lived up to this lofty ideal. Most served brandy as well as coffee. Some served Turkish sherbets, others offered bagnios, Turkish baths complete with masseurs and barbers, and an opportunity to meet one’s mistress. Reasoned conversation was interrupted by gossip, the occasional fight and illicit sexual encounters (see Plate 11). The public character of the coffee house had its limits. In Dresden, the authorities imposed a stiff tax on coffee to drive out plebeian establishments. In Prussia, Frederick the Great banned coffee altogether in 1769 to keep money in the country and protect domestic chicory against the colonial beverage. Such responses to coffee drinking were not just an assault on civil society by absolutist states. They also came from within civil society itself. In England, early coffee-house regulars worried that too much openness would corrupt the young and undermine order and respect for intellectual authority.22 Drinking coffee required the right cultural disposition. Luxury, not democracy, was the animating spirit. In a discourse on coffee in 1764, one Italian writer concluded that all authorities were agreed that ‘the virtue of sociability, humanity, and sweetness, the perfection of arts, the splendour of nations, and the cultivation of intelligence’ always grew with luxury.23 These were still virtues of the few, not the many.
The popular breakthrough came in the private, not the public sphere. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were growing signs of coffee and tea’s invasion of the home. New daily routines and domestic sociability sprang up. In bourgeois families, husband and wife began the day with a joint morning coffee and returned home to drink tea or coffee with the family in the afternoon. For gentlewomen, the tea party was a ritual of female sociability but also an occasion to do business with traders and tenants’ wives.24 The beverages’ conquest of the home was important, not least because it triggered a secondary wave of pots, tables and accessories. A court official in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, was recorded in 1745 as owning a coffeepot, milk jug, teapot, sugar caddy and eleven teaspoons – all in silver; a brass tea urn, with spirit stove; a pewter chocolate pot; and eleven blue-and-white porcelain cups, a sugar bowl in the same style, six small coloured cups, three chocolate mugs and six brown coffee cups.25
In 1715, the traveller Jean de La Roque, famous for his voyage to Arabia, noted in his treatise on the progress of coffee in Europe that in addition to ‘men of quality’, an ‘infinite Number of Persons’ had become ‘accustom’d to Coffee . . . who are not in a Condition to appear handsomely at the publick Coffee-Houses’.26 Diffusion was fastest in the heart of the commercial empires, Britain and the Netherlands. Inventories are especially numerous for these two countries, and they provide snapshots of how quickly the habit spread. Just north of Amsterdam, for example, lay the small town of Weesp, home to linen weavers, gin distillers and small farmers. In 1700, inventories recorded no tea or coffee wares at all. By the end of the 1730s, virtually every household had some cups and a pot. In Aalst, in Flanders, two thirds of the poorest quintile drank tea at the end of the eighteenth century, one third also coffee. The main difference was that the rich had porcelain pots, the poor only copper ones. In Antwerp, even people living in single rooms brewed their own tea or coffee. In London lodging houses, teapots for lodgers were a must by the end of the century.27
Coffee and tea were sold by booksellers and mercers as well as grocers and chemists. And exotic goods were offered in a growing variety, for every taste and budget. In 1683, an ironmonger in Cheshire, England, sold four grades of tobacco; two generations later, Alexander Chorley in Manchester offered ten different types of sugar. Dealers advertised tea ‘for the benefit of the poor’ at ‘reduced prices in small quantities not less than 2 ounces’.28 How strong a hold these new tastes had on habits is suggested by the case of Samuel Bauer, a Dresden wine merchant. At his home he had built up a modest tea and coffee service, including pewter cans and six coffee cups, in red and white, from the local Meissen manufactory. When the burgher fell on hard times, he took his caffeine habit with him to the poorhouse. He ordered coffee in the morning and afternoon, spending as much on the black brew as on all his other food and beer combined, until his death in 1787.29
Bauer’s modest Meissen set was tangible proof of the expanding market for tableware that was simultaneously fashionable, affordable and durable. Yet Meissen and contemporaries like Wedgwood were resourceful beneficiaries of the demand for semi-luxuries rather than its instigators. A century earlier, no prophet could have foreseen the dominance of European-made chinaware. No European cup or bowl could rival porcelain from China (see Plate 4). The Dutch had produced tin-glazed Delftware since the sixteenth century, but it easily cracked. Earthenware did not agree with hot beverages. Europe was behind in techniques of production, glazing and painting: a continent of brass and rough pewter, not fine china. Ehrenfried von Tschirnhaus discovered how to produce hard-paste porcelain in Saxony in 1704, but the process was kept secret and was initially so expensive that only Augustus the Strong and his court could afford his wares. Meanwhile, the Chinese of Jingdezhen fired many hundred kilns that supplied 4,000 local factories. It was a truly global centre of production, not only providing Europe with several hundred tons of chinaware a year by the 1740s, but shipping even larger volumes to Japan and across South-east Asia. Novelty, fashion, adaptation and innovation – the fuel of consumer societies – were the product of East–West exchange.
Chinese porcelain was a hybrid thing. On the inside, a bowl carried liquids; on the outside, stories and dreams. In Asia, pottery painting evolved in tandem with woodblock printing and calligraphy.30 One popular motif of late Ming porcelain was the ‘Red Cliff’, a scene of a wine-drinking boating party inspired by a story from the eleventh century. Such bowls circulated in Asia but also found their way to seventeenth-century Paris and Istanbul. Some European writers like the poet Alexander Pope and the essayist Joseph Addison worried that women were selling their soul for a porcelain cup: porcelain dishes transported their beholders into a virtual pleasure-dome. Yet, overall, European respect for Chinese civilization was still strong enough to surround chinaware with an air of refinement and virtue. In addition to their technical expertise and capacity, Chinese producers were adaptive. They responded to the evolving craze for chinoiserie, giving Europeans the Orient they wanted; these were often second-best articles as far as the Chinese were concerned. In Canton, European merchants began to arrive with their own patterns, but in the early eighteenth century their execution was still entirely in the hands of local decorating shops. Patterns and fashions changed quickly. What was the latest craze one year was ‘old’ China the next. Markets segmented. European dealers offloaded unwanted stock on the American colonies.
The demand for Chinese semi-luxuries set in motion a feverish wheel of imitation and innovation. At first, Europeans were little more than copycats. In the middle of the century, the tide turned. In Bow, east London, a factory started to produce bone china, making it Britain’s ‘New Canton’. In the 1760s, Wedgwood found a way to cover earthenware with a shining glaze that was both attractive and strong enough to withstand sudden changes of temperature, crucial for hot beverages. Creamware was born, a cheap yet smooth substitute for porcelain, ideally suited for the growing middle-class market. Porcelain manufactories mushroomed across Europe, benefiting from princely subsidies but also from a European network of painters and designers, who took their inspiration from the New Book of Chinese Design (1754) and similar pattern books. Transfer printing enabled manufacturers to move illuminations from engraved copperplates to paper and then on to ceramics. Innovation extended to marketing. Wedgwood opened showrooms and distributed catalogues of his patterns across Europe from Nice to Moscow. Qinghua under-glaze of blue and white now faced competition from home-grown ‘Egyptian black’. Fashion was a fickle master. Porcelain was a Chinese monopoly in 1700. By 1800, tableware was firmly in European hands. In 1791, the East India Company had stopped bulk imports from China altogether.31
The diffusion of beverages and tea ware was in part a trickle-down process. Servants were introduced to the new hot drinks by their masters and, in turn, asked for a few grams of tea or coffee in addition to their pay. In 1757 the philanthropist Jonas Hanway, a friend of foundlings, the sick and the poor and the first Englishman to carry an umbrella, complained that servants and labourers had become ‘enslaved by [the] foolish customs’ of the rich and would rather give up a loaf of bread than a cup of sweetened tea. As far as Hanway was concerned, the ‘national frenzy’ was a ‘criminal excess’. It was bad for ‘national welfare’ (China had to be paid in silver), bad for character and enterprise (sipping tea wasted precious time) and bad for health (tea was ‘unnatural’ for people in a cold northern climate, ‘unwholesome’ and close to ‘poison’). Worst, it added to the ‘beggary and distress’ of the poorest, for ‘the more wants the poor have, the more discontented they will be if they are not gratified.’32 In Paris a few years later, the historian Legrand d’Aussy wrote, ‘there is absolutely no shop girl, cook, or chambermaid who does not have coffee with milk for breakfast.’33 In alleys and markets, he added, female vendors served the lower orders with café au lait made from used coffee grounds and sour milk.
Emulation, however, was only part of the story. For people in cities with little money and less time, tea and coffee offered a cheap substitute for a hot meal. The addition of sugar shifted their appeal further from exotic medicine to nutritious pleasure. Initially, most coffee was probably drunk without or with very little sugar. By 1715, La Roque noted that there were those who drank coffee no longer for the sake of health but to ‘please their pallats’, loading it ‘excessively with Sugar’ until it turned into a syrup.34 By the end of the century, tea and coffee were recognized as ‘vehicles of nourishment’ for sugar; still, even then champions of coffee advised moderation, because ‘it is apt to become acid, if made sweet: and this is the one reason why many people forbear drinking Coffee.’35
The engine of expansion was empire. It was in the eighteenth century that European empires began the large-scale exploitation of their tropical colonies and intensified their trade in tea from China. In the 1720s, the various East Indies companies still brought only 770 tons of tea a year back to Europe. By the 1760s, it was ten times that, accompanied by millions of pieces of chinaware; by the 1820s, it had doubled again. At a time when the price of wheat and other domestic foods was rising, tea became cheaper and cheaper. In Amsterdam, the wholesale price of coffee plummeted from 10 gulden per kilo at the beginning of the eighteenth century to 1 gulden at its end. In the same period, Britain increased its sugar consumption almost ten times, to 20 pounds per person a year. This was the peak of the Atlantic slave trade that was so crucial for coffee and sugar plantations. On the eve of the abolition of the slave trade, in 1807, the West Indies supplied a quarter of Britain’s total imports. Never again would the colonial world play such a large role in the imperial centre. Malachy Postlethwayt, who worked as a publicist for the Walpole government and the Royal Africa Company, acutely perceived the architecture of the British empire: it was, he wrote in the 1750s, ‘a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation’.36
By the late eighteenth century, the human cost of slave sugar started to cause public
outrage, as we shall see in the next chapter. Meanwhile, in economic terms, the costs and benefits of empire continued to be the subject of debate. In a strict sense, mercantilism was bad for consumers, certainly when compared to its successor, the liberal empire of free trade and cheap food. Sugar, tea and especially coffee bore heavy taxes, which encouraged smuggling, especially from France via the Isle of Wight. Similarly, sound economics tell us that free labour is more productive than slave labour. The whip does not encourage efficiency or ingenuity. But history is bloodier and messier than economics. The new order of consumption was built on the backs of slaves. China showed that it was possible to grow sugar on small farms, but there were not many European labourers eagerly waiting to embark for Jamaica or Haiti, nor many plantation owners willing to pay the high wages that would have been necessary to attract them. If Britain had opened her colonies to the rest of the world, it would have prompted a French takeover, not a free market. Clearly, this mercantilist empire enriched traders and plantation owners at the expense of slaves and ordinary people back home. British consumers paid through the nose for the British navy and the Atlantic colonies. Yet the reality was that, without the navy and slaves, they would have had even fewer tropical goods.37
Consumption is not a simple function of either economics or culture. Fluctuating prices and changing tastes can reinforce each other. Britons’ growing preference for tea over coffee is a case in point. In the 1710s – the golden age of the coffee house – coffee still had the edge. A century later, the tables had turned. A Briton now consumed almost 2 pounds of tea per year, but only two thirds of a pound of coffee. As 1 pound of tea makes as much beverage as 3 pounds of coffee, Britons thus drank around eight cups of tea for each cup of coffee. Price helped.38 Duties on coffee were raised in 1724 but lowered on tea in 1745. Some historians have suggested that tea was favoured by the convenience of preparation – just add hot water, no roasting required – and built-in economy; tea leaves can be reused, as the poor and adulterators knew. Evidence from other countries urges caution. Americans switched to coffee after Independence and apparently did not mind the extra fuss and utensils. Coffee beans, too, were reused. La Roque advised that the ‘same Coffee, which has been once us’d, retains still Vertue enough to serve a second and even a third Time’, a recommendation echoed in German advice books.39 More decisive was that ordinary Britons liked the affordable Bohea tea grown in northern Fujian while mercantilism drove up the price of good coffee. British taste reflected the political economy of the British empire: a sweet alliance between the sugar lobby of the West Indies and the East India Company, which imported tea from China. Empire left its mark on quality as well as price. West Indian planters used prime land to grow the crop that was most profitable: sugar. Coffee was treated as second class. The quality told. Even the champions of Jamaican coffee conceded the ‘smell, the rankness in the taste, and disgusting return’, which made it ‘unpleasant’ for anyone accustomed to beans from Mocca or the French islands.40 For British coffee it was a vicious circle: high taxes meant low consumption, which, in turn, depressed investment, quality and taste. The failure of British coffee offers a history lesson that is easily forgotten: some new tastes were acquired thanks to mercantilist empire; others were spoiled by it.
Empire of Things Page 12
