Coffee: A Brief History

Ina Baghdiantz McCabe (Tufts University)

The consumption of coffee is a global phenomenon today, whose nature has been explained by several social theorists. Globalization of consumer culture, the increase in high-quality coffee, associations with the internet and internet cafés and popularity of casual coffee venues have all led to the increased popularity and prevalence of coffee around the world. [1] Today petroleum is the most valuable commodity traded on world markets, and coffee is the second one. [2] Presently, the United States is the world’s largest coffee consumer, accounting for about twenty percent of the world’s total intake [3] (though small population figures may mask the fact that it is the Finns who drink the most coffee per day, an average of four to ten cups daily). The fact that coffee is now ubiquitous, with the prevalence of large brands such as Starbucks, obscures the long history of coffee-consumption. In earlier times, archaic consumption was essentially the collection of diverse cultural goods by people who then became agents of the globalization of those goods. The historian C. A. Bayly argues that proto-globalization started with the trade of what many, like Kenneth Pomeranz, have called the ‘drug foods’: sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea, and opium. In his definitions of globalization, the consumption of exotic goods is key. [4] Coffee was one of the most important commodities to travel the globe from its origins in Africa.

Coffee’s origins lie by all accounts in Ethiopia. Coffee was therefore African before it became an Ottoman drink: the Ottomans themselves only came to drink it in the sixteenth century after their conquest of the Egyptian Mamluk dynasty. Cairo was the chief market for coffee, and though Yemen was the chief source, Ethiopia had long served as its primary producer before demand exceeded the area’s capabilities. Nonetheless, the first Europeans to encounter coffee were sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travelers who visited coffee houses in the Middle East in regions which were under Ottoman rule (see, for example, The Journal of John Jourdain, 1608-1617, Describing his Experiences in Arabia, India, and the Malay Archipelago). They circulated stories in Europe that led to a popular perception that the drink was an exotic Oriental luxury. This discourse about coffee completely erased its African origins. [5] The consumption of commodities, such as coffee, has religious and cultural aspects that vary as they travel through time and space. In coffee’s case these social incarnations varied tremendously as it traveled the world.