Lecture: A Short History of Coffee

LECTURER: Good morning. Today we're going to look at the global history of coffee — a drink that began as a local curiosity and became one of the world's most valuable traded commodities. The story begins in the highlands of Ethiopia, where the coffee plant grows wild. According to a popular legend, a goat herder named Kaldi noticed that his goats became unusually energetic after eating the red berries of a particular shrub. Whatever the truth of that tale, we know that by the fifteenth century coffee was being deliberately cultivated across the Red Sea, in Yemen. It was in Yemen that coffee first became a drink as we would recognise it — the beans roasted, ground, and brewed. The port city of Mocha gave its name to the coffee trade, and for a long time Arab merchants guarded their monopoly carefully, exporting only roasted or boiled beans that could not be planted. That monopoly could not last. In the early seventeenth century, fertile beans were smuggled out, and cultivation spread first to India and then, crucially, to the Dutch colonies in Indonesia. The island of Java became so closely associated with the drink that its name is still used as a slang word for coffee today. From there, coffee travelled to the Americas. A single plant, presented to the French king and later carried across the Atlantic, is often credited as the ancestor of the vast plantations of the Caribbean and, above all, Brazil. By the nineteenth century, Brazil had become — and still remains — the largest coffee producer in the world. The social impact was just as significant as the economic one. The coffee house, which appeared in cities across Europe in the seventeenth century, became a place where people gathered to read, argue, and do business. In London, these establishments were nicknamed 'penny universities', because for the price of a cup — one penny — a customer could join the conversation and learn a great deal. Some of the world's great financial institutions can trace their origins to these very rooms. In the next lecture, we'll examine how the economics of coffee production affect farmers today.