Conclusion

Throughout its history, coffee has stimulated ideas, debates, commerce, and development, not to mention numbing people to routine and exposing them to vice and exploitation. And it has helped to subvert cultures, social systems, and governments. In the consuming countries, coffee moved from the mystical and mercantile to become one of the most traded bourgeois products in the world. Coffeehouses operated as centers of a bourgeois lifestyle for literati and businessmen alike, as well as meeting places for those who agitated for democratic politics. Coffee became the fuel of the industrial age.

In the fields of Latin America, however, European and North American demand led first to an intensification of slavery and then, in various places, to the appropriation of village lands, the expulsion of native peoples, and coerced labor. But, although there were large planters, there were also plenty of smallholders.

The story of coffee is clearly one of diversity. Geography, history, and local resistance combined to create a wide variety of social arrangements. To trace the history of coffee is to trace the path of the world economy over the last six centuries. From an. Asian monopoly, to a European colonial product, to a global commodity grown on four continents, coffee has linked the different worlds of the producer and the consumer, the underdeveloped and the developed, the free and the enslaved, the rich and the poor, and the bourgeois and the archaic. Sufi Sheikh, sitting in the shade in Mocca, had no idea what a global force he was putting into motion when he sipped the first cup of coffee.

Steven C. Topik

The author would like to thank Gervase Clarence-Smith for his insightful comments.