Black Gold. Antony Wild
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century. It was first consumed in the late fifteenth century as a sacred ritual amongst the Sufis in Yemen, whence it quickly spread through Islam. In that religion, despite some initial opposition, it was considered an acceptable stimulant because, unlike the reviled alcohol, it never left the drinker ‘incapable of distinguishing a man from a woman or the earth from the heavens’. The popular coffee houses of Cairo and Constantinople attracted the attention of the first European visitors to the Orient, and eventually coffee itself appeared in most of Europe at the same time as merchants, sailors, and adventurers from that continent were starting to establish, largely through superiority of arms and technology, their fledgling trading empires. Coffee was amongst a number of valuable and desirable oriental goods that they sought, but its supply was effectively under the monopolistic control of Ottomans. By the early eighteenth century the Dutch, the French, and the British had managed to obtain coffee seedlings to take to their own tropical colonial possessions, there to be cultivated under the plantation system worked by slave or near-slave labour. Slavery, with its attendant horrors, persisted as the preferred method of coffee production in many colonies until abolition, or in the case of Brazil until as recently as 1888, by which time coffee had become a thoroughly globalized commodity. The so-called benefits of the colonial plantation system were mainly experienced by the consumers in the home countries of these various European empires, who responded with alacrity to the low price and ready availability of what had formerly been a rare luxury.
Coffee had become universally consumed in the nations of Europe and in the USA, much of it in coffee houses that became meeting places for men of commerce, politics, and culture. The effect of caffeine itself ensured that there were always likely to be lively, well-informed debates and intense, original exchanges, in contrast to the only other public meeting places of the time, the tavern or the church. The coffee house played a pivotal role in the creation of many of the financial institutions that in turn supported the expansionist trading empires that had led to the growth of coffee consumption in the first place. Lloyds of London, the maritime insurance company, emerged from the interests of the clientele of Lloyds Coffee House who gathered there to exchange news and gossip concerning the movement of ships. Coffee was an important commodity shipped from afar, and thus the fledgling insurance business conducted at Lloyds in part provided the financial structure whereby the risks of the coffee trade itself could be mitigated. This feedback loop of cause-and-effect, fuelled by caffeine, underpinned the dramatic rise of capitalism and its most successful offspring, globalization. Coffee lay at the very heart of the triumph of free-market economics in our times: that it is now suffering the awful consequences of that same ethos is ironic, but horribly apt.
With the dieback of former European imperialism, and the increasing assertion of the hegemony of the USA over the western hemisphere, the many coffee-producing countries of Central and South America have found themselves overtaken by US neocolonialism. Many of those countries are deeply dependent on coffee for export income, and because their northern neighbour consumes 25 per cent of the world’s supplies but chooses to buy 75 per cent of its needs from their southern neighbours, inevitably coffee became a significant factor in hemispherical geopolitics. Economies that are historically coffee-based have created the ground rules by which a ruling oligarchy can impose its will on the unrepresented masses. The sweatshop economies of much of Central America and the Caribbean depend upon the political élite’s control of the media and the military apparatus, and the structure of the coffee trade provided the working model. El Salvador, for example, a country which until recently was dependent on coffee for over half its export income, now derives 57 per cent of that from the ‘garment industry’. Arguably, along with the world economy as a whole, the coffee trade has reverted to a paradigm that more closely resembles the height of the European colonialism, albeit now under US domination, than the protectionism that prevailed during the era when strong, liberal, democratic Western nation states allied against the threat of Communism. The fact that the date of the dissolution of the International Coffee Agreement broadly coincided with that of the fall of the Berlin Wall is by no means coincidental: the USA, having vanquished its most serious rival, no longer saw the need to humour its more liberal allies.
The catalytic effect of coffee-house culture on the emergence of those financial and cultural institutions that underpinned the rise of Western capitalism should not be underestimated. The coffee houses of the City of London were the progenitors of such global institutions as the Stock Exchange and Lloyds, and those of Covent Garden and St James’s were the seedbeds of the Royal Society and the Enlightenment. Coffee gradually gave way to tea in England, but the imposition of taxes on tea in the American colonies precipitated the Boston Tea Party, the actual as well as the ideological rejection of tea, and the triumph of coffee in America, where coffee houses became the foremost meeting places for merchants, politicians, and businessmen. The Declaration of Independence was first read publicly outside the Merchant’s Coffee House in Philadelphia, and President-elect George Washington was ceremonially welcomed to New York in front of (another) Merchant’s Coffee House – which had, amongst other things, formerly hosted slave auctions – a week before his inauguration. If he had been able to walk from there but a few hundred yards and a couple of centuries in time he would have come to the Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange in 4, World Trade Center, which was to be destroyed in the 9/11 attacks masterminded by Osama bin Laden, whose forbears came from Yemen, itself the original home of the coffee trade. One of the purported reasons why the World Trade Center was targeted was because the towers were a symbol of the Western financial institutions that were accused of destroying traditional Islam: coffee played a significant role in the evolution of both.
Coffee is now falling victim to globalization: then, it played an intimate part in its rise.
All theory is grey. Green is the golden tree of life.
GOETHE
Although it is enjoyed daily by a good proportion of the world’s population, very little is generally known about the origins of coffee. There are a number of myths that are ritually aired by the coffee trade to keep the curious at bay, but nothing in the way of substantiated fact is usually presented to the public. To build a satisfactory picture of what happened in the time before coffee bursts upon the historical stage in the sixteenth century requires piecing together disparate elements of anthropology, archaeology, and even theology. Indeed, the search for coffee’s roots takes us back to the roots of man himself.
In 1974, at Hadar in the Afar desert of northern Ethiopia, palaeontologists unearthed the fossil remains of a group of Australopithecus afarensis, mankind’s oldest known ancestor. Despite earlier discoveries of Java Man, Peking Man and others, it seems that Ethiopia is mankind’s original location; genetic research suggests that all modern humans are directly descended from a group of about a hundred and fifty Homo sapiens sapiens who lived in the Ethiopian Highlands some 120,000 years ago. Even the Holy Grail of anthropology, the so-called Missing Link, may well have been found there, for the recent discovery of a fossilized toe of Ardipithecus ramidus kadabba offers the first tentative evidence of the species’ separation from the chimpanzee some six million years ago. Despite its highland forest environment, Ardipethecus ramidus kadabba appears to have walked upright. Previously it had been conjectured that man’s need to stand upright was forced upon him by the evolutionary process to enable him to peer over the high grass of the plains in pursuit of prey. The fact that he appears to have stood upright whilst still confined to the forest has fatally undermined this theory.
One of the other abiding mysteries of anthropology is the so-called brain explosion that probably took place about 500,000 years ago, the result of which was that man’s brain size increased by 30 per cent, principally in the cerebrum, the upper brain where most conscious thinking purportedly takes place. Various theories have been put forward for this, but the development of language would seem to provide the most credible explanation, as language requires a great deal of thought and in turn generates a great deal to think about. Its arrival put mankind in a position, at least in part, to determine the course of his own evolution, allowing