The strongest blast against the London coffeehouses came from women, who unlike their Continental counterparts were excluded from this all-male society (unless they were the proprietors). In 1674 The Women’s Petition Against Coffee complained, “We find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour. . . . Never did Men wear greater Breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.” This condition was all due to “the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called Coffee, which . . . has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Crippled our more kind gallants. . . . They come from it with nothing moist but their snotty Noses, nothing stiffe but their Joints, nor standing but their Ears.”
The Women’s Petition revealed that a typical male day involved spending the morning in a tavern “till every one of them is as Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-house to drink themselves sober.” Then they were off to the tavern again, only to “stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee.” In response, the men defended their beverage. Far from rendering them impotent, “[coffee] makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme.”
On December 29, 1675, King Charles II issued A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee Houses. In it he banned coffeehouses as of January 10, 1676, since they had become “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons” where tradesmen neglected their affairs. The worst offense, however, was that in such houses “divers false malitious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the Defamation of his Majestie’s Government, and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm.”
An immediate howl went up from every part of London. Within a week, it appeared that the monarchy might once again be overthrown—and all over coffee. On January 8, two days before the proclamation was due to take effect, the king backed down.
Ironically, however, over the course of the eighteenth century the British began to drink tea instead of coffee. Most of the coffeehouses turned into private men’s clubs or chophouses by 1730, while the huge new public tea gardens of the era appealed to men, women, and children alike. Unlike coffee, tea was simple to brew and did not require roasting, grinding, and freshness. (It was also easier to adulterate for a tidy additional profit.) In addition, the British conquest of India had begun, and there they concentrated more on tea than coffee growing. The British Honourable East India Company pushed tea through its monopoly in China, and smugglers made tea cheaper. While the black brew never disappeared entirely, its use in England diminished steadily until recent years.
The Legacy of the Boston Tea Party
As loyal British subjects, the North American colonists emulated the coffee boom of the mother country, with the first American coffeehouse opening in Boston in 1689. In the colonies there was not such a clear distinction between the tavern and the coffeehouse. Ale, beer, coffee, and tea cohabited, for instance, in Boston’s Green Dragon, a coffeehouse-tavern from 1697 to 1832. Here, over many cups of coffee and other brews, John Adams, James Otis, and Paul Revere met to foment rebellion, prompting Daniel Webster to call it “the headquarters of the Revolution.”
By the late eighteenth century, as we have seen, tea had become the preferred British drink, with the British East India Company supplying the American colonies with tea. King George wanted to raise money from tea as well as other exports, however, and attempted the Stamp Act of 1765, which prompted the famous protest, “No taxation without representation.” The British parliament then repealed all the taxes—except the one on tea. Americans refused to pay the tax, instead buying tea smuggled from Holland. When the British East India Company responded by sending large consignments to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charles-ton, the Boston contingent rebelled in the famous “tea party” of 1773, tossing the leaves overboard.
From that moment on, it became a patriotic American patriotic duty to avoid tea, and the coffeehouses profited as a result. As Benjamin Woods Labaree noted in The Boston Tea Party, an “anti-tea hysteria” ensued, engulfing all of the colonies. The Continental Congress passed a resolution against tea consumption. “Tea must be universally renounced,” wrote John Adams to his wife in 1774, “and I must be weaned, and the sooner the better.” Average coffee consumption in the colonies climbed from 0.19 pounds per capita in 1772 to 1.41 pounds per capita in 1799—a sevenfold increase.
Of course, the pragmatic North Americans also appreciated the fact that coffee was cultivated much nearer to them than tea and was consequently cheaper, while the Yankees profited from the slave trade that made the coffee less expensive. Increasingly, over the course of the nineteenth century they would rely on coffee grown due south in their own hemisphere.
Coffee Goes Latin
In 1714 the Dutch gave a healthy coffee plant to the French government, and nine years later an obsessed French naval officer, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, introduced coffee cultivation to the French colony of Martinique. After considerable court intrigue, he obtained one of the Dutch offspring plants from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and nursed it during a perilous transatlantic voyage, later referring to “the infinite care that I was obliged to bestowe upon this delicate plant.” After avoiding capture by a corsair and surviving a tempest, de Clieu’s ship floundered in windless doldrums for over a month. The Frenchman protected his beloved plant from a jealous fellow passenger and shared his limited supply of water with it. Once it finally set down roots in Martinique, the coffee tree flourished. From that single plant, much of the world’s current coffee supply probably derives.4
Then, in 1727, a mini-drama led to the fateful introduction of coffee into Brazil. To resolve a border dispute, the governors of French and Dutch Guiana asked a neutral Portuguese Brazilian official named Francisco de Melo Palheta to adjudicate. He quickly agreed, hoping that he could somehow smuggle out coffee seeds, since neither governor would allow the seeds’ export. The mediator successfully negotiated a compromise border solution and clandestinely bedded the French governor’s wife. At Palheta’s departure, she presented him with a bouquet of flowers—with ripe coffee berries disguised in the interior. He planted them in his home territory of Para, from which coffee gradually spread southward.
Coffee and the Industrial Revolution
Coffee’s growing popularity complemented and sustained the Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain during the 1700s and spread to other parts of Europe and North America in the early 1800s. The development of the factory system transformed lives, attitudes, and eating habits. Most people previously had worked at home or in rural craft work-shops. They had not divided their time so strictly between work and leisure, and they were largely their own masters. People typically ate five times a day, beginning with soup for breakfast.
With the advent of textile and iron mills, workers migrated to the cities, where the working classes lived in appalling conditions. As women and children entered the organized workforce, there was less time to run a household and cook meals. Those still trying to make a living at home were paid less and less for their work. Thus, European lacemakers in the early nineteenth century lived almost exclusively on coffee and bread. Because coffee was stimulating and warm, it provided an illusion of nutrition.
“Seated uninterruptedly at their looms, in order to earn the few pennies necessary for their bare survival,” writes one historian, “[workers had] no time for the lengthy preparation of a midday or evening meal. And weak coffee was drunk as a last stimulant for the weakened stomach which—for a brief time at least—stilled the gnawing pangs of hunger.” The drink of the aristocracy had become the necessary drug of the masses, and morning coffee replaced beer soup for breakfast.
Of Sugar, Coffee, and Slaves
By 1750 the coffee tree grew on five continents. For the lower class it provided a pick-me-up and moment of respite, although it replaced more nutritious fare. Otherwise its effects seemed relatively benign, if sometimes controversial. It aided considerably in the sobering of an alco
hol-soaked Europe and provided a social and intellectual catalyst as well. As William Ukers wrote in the classic All About Coffee, “Wherever it has been introduced it has spelled revolution. It has been the world’s most radical drink in that its function has always been to make people think. And when the people began to think, they became dangerous to tyrants.”
Maybe. Yet increasingly, as the European powers brought coffee cultivation to their colonies, the intensive labor required to grow, harvest, and process coffee came from imported slaves. Captain de Clieu may have loved his coffee tree, but he did not personally harvest the millions of its progeny. Slaves from Africa did.
Slaves had initially been brought to the Caribbean to harvest sugarcane, and the history of sugar is intimately tied to that of coffee. It was this cheap sweetener that made the bitter boiled brew palatable to many consumers and added a quick energy lift to the stimulus of caffeine. Like coffee, sugar was popularized by the Arabs, and its popularity rose along with tea and coffee in the second half of the seventeenth century. Thus, when the French colonists first grew coffee in San Domingo (Haiti) in 1734, it was natural that they would require additional African slaves to work the plantations.
Incredibly, by 1788 San Domingo supplied half of the world’s coffee. The coffee, therefore, that fueled Voltaire and Diderot was produced by the most inhuman form of coerced labor. In San Domingo the slaves lived in appalling conditions, housed in windowless huts, underfed, and overworked. “I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe,” wrote a French traveler of the late eighteenth century, “but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America [the Caribbean] has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.” Years later a former slave recalled treatment under French masters: “Have they not hung men with heads downward, drowned them in sacks, crucified them on planks, buried them alive, crushed them in mortars? Have they not forced them to eat shit?”
It is little surprise, then, that the slaves revolted in 1791 in a struggle for freedom that lasted twelve years, the only major successful slave revolt in history. Most plantations were burned to the ground and the owners massacred. By 1801, when black Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture attempted to resuscitate coffee exports, harvests had declined 45 percent from 1789 levels. Louverture instituted the fermage system, which amounted to state slavery. Like medieval serfs, the workers were confined to the state-owned plantations and forced to work long hours for low wages. At least they were no longer routinely tortured, however, and they received some medical care. But when Napoleon sent troops in a vain attempt to regain Haiti from 1801 to 1803, the coffee trees were once again abandoned. Upon learning of his troops’ final defeat in late 1803, Napoleon burst out, “Damn coffee! Damn colonies!” It would be many years before Haitian coffee once more affected the international market, and it never regained its dominance.
The Dutch jumped into the breach to supply the coffee shortfall with Java beans. Though they did not routinely rape or torture their laborers, they did enslave them. While the Javanese pruned trees or harvested coffee cherries in the sweltering tropical heat, “the white lords of the islands stirred only for a few hours every day,” according to coffee historian Heinrich Eduard Jacob.
Little had changed by the early 1800s, when Dutch civil servant Eduard Douwes Dekker served in Java. He ultimately quit in protest to write the novel Max Havelaar, under the pen name Multatuli. Dekker wrote:Strangers came from the West who made themselves lords of his [the native’s] land, forcing him to grow coffee for pathetic wages. Famine? In rich, fertile, blessed Java—famine? Yes, reader. Only a few years ago, whole districts died of starvation. Mothers offered their children for sale to obtain food. Mothers ate their children.
Dekker excoriated the Dutch landowner who “made his field fertile with the sweat of the labourer whom he had called away from his own field of labour. He withheld the wage from the worker, and fed himself on the food of the poor. He grew rich from the poverty of others.”
All too often, throughout the history of the coffee industry, these words have rung true. But small farmers and their families, such as Ethiopians tending their small coffee plots in the highlands, also make their living from coffee, and not all coffee workers on estates have been oppressed. The fault lies not with the tree or the way coffee is grown, but with how those who labor to nurture and harvest it are treated.
Napoleon’s System: Paving the Way for Modernity
In 1806, three years after going to war against Great Britain, Napoleon enacted what he called the Continental System, hoping to punish the British by cutting off their European trade. “In former days, if we desired to be rich, we had to own colonies, to establish ourselves in India and the Antilles, in Central America, in San Domingo. These times are over and done with. Today we must become manufacturers.” Tout cela, nous le faisons nous-mêmes! he proclaimed: “We shall make everything ourselves.” The Continental System spawned many important industrial and agricultural innovations. Napoleon’s researchers succeeded, for instance, in extracting sweetener from the European sugar beet to replace the need for cane sugar.
The Europeans could not, however, make coffee and settled on chicory as a substitute. This European herb (a form of endive), when roasted and ground, produces a substance that looks somewhat like coffee. When brewed in hot water, it produces a bitter-tasting, dark drink without the aroma, flavor, body, or caffeine kick of coffee. Thus, the French developed a taste for chicory during the Napoleonic era, and even after the Continental System ended in 1814 they continued to mix the herb root with their coffee. The Creole French of New Orleans soon adopted the same taste.5
From 1814 to 1817, when Amsterdam once more resumed a central place in coffee trading, the price ranged from 16 cents to 20 cents a pound in U.S. money—quite moderate compared to the $1.08 a pound it had been in 1812. Growing consumer demand throughout Europe and the United States, however, jacked the price back up to 30 cents or more for Java. As a result, coffee farmers planted new trees, and in areas such as Brazil entirely new coffee areas were carved from the rain forests.
A few years later in 1823, just when these new plantations were coming into production, war between France and Spain appeared imminent. Coffee importers throughout Europe rushed to buy, assuming that the sea routes would be closed. The price of the green bean rose sharply. But there was no war, at least not immediately. “Instead of a war,” wrote the historian Heinrich Jacob, “something else came. Coffee! Coffee from all directions!” For the first time, a major Brazilian harvest loomed. Prices plummeted. There were business failures in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. Overnight, millionaires lost everything. Hundreds committed suicide.
Henceforth coffee’s price would swing wildly due to speculation, politics, weather, and the hazards of war. Coffee had become an international commodity that, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, would completely transform the economy, ecology, and politics of Latin America.
2
The Coffee Kingdoms
You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugarcane nor coffee trees there.
—Karl Marx, 1848
When Marx uttered these words, coffee cultivation in the West Indies was declining. However, over the next half century—before 1900—nonnative coffee would conquer Brazil, Venezuela, and most of Central America (as well as a good portion of India, Ceylon, Java, and Colombia). The bean would help shape laws and governments, delay the abolition of slavery, exacerbate social inequities, affect the natural environment, and provide the engine for growth, especially in Brazil, which became the dominant force in the coffee world during this period. “Brazil did not simply respond to world demand,” observed coffee
historian Steven Topik, “but helped create it by producing enough coffee cheaply enough to make it affordable for members of North America’s and Europe’s working classes.”
Yet coffee did not make much of an impression in Brazil or Central America until the colonies broke away from Spanish and Portuguese rule, in 1821 and 1822. In November 1807, when Napoleon’s forces captured Lisbon, they literally drove the Portuguese royal family into the sea. On British ships the royal family found its way to Rio de Janeiro, where King John VI took up residence. He declared Brazil to be a kingdom and promoted agriculture with new varieties of coffee, grown experimentally at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Rio and distributed as seedlings to planters. When a revolution in Portugal forced John VI to return to Europe in 1820, he left behind his son, Dom Pedro, as regent.
Most Latin American countries, sick of the colonial yoke, soon broke away, led by Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico, followed by Central America, and finally, in 1822, by Dom Pedro in Brazil, who had himself crowned Emperor Pedro I. In 1831, under pressure from populists, Pedro I abdicated in favor of his son Pedro, who was only five. Nine years later, after a period of rebellion, chaos, and control by regents, Pedro II took over by popular demand at the age of fourteen. Under his long rule, coffee would become king in Brazil.
Brazil’s Fazendas
What happened in Brazil exemplifies the benefits and hazards of relying heavily on one product. Coffee made modern Brazil, but at an enormous human and environmental cost.
At over 3 million square miles, Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country. Beginning just south of the equator, it occupies almost half of South America. The Portuguese, who discovered, exploited, and subjugated Brazil, were initially enchanted with the country. In 1560 a Jesuit priest wrote, “If there is paradise here on earth, I would say it is in Brazil.”
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World Page 4
