The Dutch, who brought some arabica trees to Amsterdam’s botanical garden, assisted coffee in its move westward by planting it in Surinam; later some seedlings were transported to Brazil. Another early Dutch contribution to the dissemination of coffee in the Americas was even more circuitous. An arabica tree, given by the mayor of. Amsterdam to Louis XIV, was cultivated in Paris’s botanical garden. One of its seedlings, however, made its way to the Americas early in the eighteenth century when the Frenchman Gabriel de Clieu carried it across the Atlantic to a New World home in Martinique. From there it spread to St. Domingue (today Haiti) and later the mainland.
On St. Domingue, colonial production was perfected when slaves, already imported to grow sugar on the island, were also employed in the coffee fields. European consumption grew tenfold in the 50 years between 1739 and 1789, with French colonies supplying three-quarters of the total. In fact, relatively inexpensive Caribbean coffee was already displacing Yemeni beans even in the Cairo market, demonstrating, among other things, the competitive advantage of slave labor and plantation agriculture over the garden plots of Yemen and the peasant farms of Java. Nonetheless, the arabica remained a rather exceptional specialty product under mercantilism. In 1800, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, Europeans consumed on average only about three-quarters of a pound per year.
By the end of that century, however, coffee had become the world’s third most important traded commodity in terms of value, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and its transformation of transportation systems and markets. Perhaps fittingly, it was also during the nineteenth century that coffee was grown for the first time on an industrial scale. This occurred in the fields of Latin America where, unfortunately, coffee helped to sustain slavery - even to resurrect it.
The slave revolution in St. Domingue severed the colonial tie with France, abolished slavery, gave birth to modern Haiti, and sent the island’s coffee economy into an irreversible decline. But rather than ending slavery, French and Spanish planters made Cuba the next great slave-operated coffee system. Its reign, however, was short-lived because the profitability of sugar overshadowed that of coffee. Meanwhile Brazilians, who were having difficulty competing with Cuban sugar, switched to coffee growing, and Brazil in the 1830s began a domination of world coffee production that has endured to this day. For most of the nineteenth century, Brazil owed that domination to the toil of slaves.
World History
