Coffee

Few other commodities are so deeply entrenched with the history of consumer culture as coffee. In different societies and cultures, men and women have consistently constructed their class, gender, and ethnic identity around the ritual consumption of coffee. The intrinsic qualities of the product—the green bean from a plant of the Rubiaceae family, which is typically roasted, ground, and brewed into a dark drink—may well have something to do with it. The taste for coffee is ostensibly culturally acquired. Children dislike it, lab rats hate it, but millions of drinkers who have grown to love it cannot live without it. Coffee contains an active ingredient, caffeine, whose principal effect on the human body is to induce stimulation, alertness, and drive.

Along with other colonial commodities, such as tea, sugar, cocoa, and tobacco, which similarly produce inebriation and energy through ingredients such as glucose and nicotine, coffee enormously contributed to the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century that preceded the Industrial Revolution. The quality of its powerful stimulant also partly explains why—in different places and times—the social consumption of coffee has been associated with the formation of spaces of energetic public debate, sometimes conducive to political unrest and revolutions. Finally, coffee consumption has historically been loaded with political meanings because it has consistently been one of the most internationally traded agricultural crops, characteristically linking producers in poorer parts of the world to consumers in some of the richest. Coffee has continued to appeal to consumers and to be a key international trade good over the last four centuries, mostly because of its plastic adaptability to significant changes in the societies of the dominant buying countries.

Originating in the highlands of what was then called Abyssinia, in the fifteenth century coffee spread to Egypt, Yemen, and Arabia, where beans were first roasted and brewed, similar to the modern preparation. The word coffee derives, in fact, from the Arabic word kahwah, or wine. This indicates how the original use and understanding of coffee was that of a nonintoxicating, and indeed sobering, substitute for an alcoholic beverage, which Muslim religious law forbids. The distinct social nature of coffee consumption also developed in the Arab world, where most coffee drinking was and is confined to coffeehouses. The first coffeehouse opened in 1555 in Constantinople, and hundreds more followed suit. Intense patronizing of coffeehouses soon transformed coffee drinking into a daily ritual of Muslim male socialization and conversation.

Coffee first arrived in Europe in the sixteenth century as an oddity reserved to the aristocratic elite, its status [Page 184]deriving from being a scarce, expensive, and exotic product. As soon as the end of the following century, though, European colonialism and its global plantation system made coffee available and affordable to a much wider consumer base. The Dutch were successful in planting coffee in their colony of Java in the 1690s, thus replacing the early, less effective, import route from Mocha in Yemen. The French were responsible for the development of coffee plantations in the Western Hemisphere as they first brought plants in Martinique and Saint-Domingue (today Haiti). Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, as production spread from Dutch Indonesia and the French Antilles to Brazil and Spanish America, and later (in the twentieth century) back to Africa and Southeast Asia, coffee stimulated capitalist investments and the exploitation of slave, indentured, and migrant labor.

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