than southwestern Ethiopia was. This is why the coffee we drink is called arabica coffee instead of, say, Abyssinian coffee. India’s coffee farms were founded from coffee seeds taken from the Arabian Peninsula. The Dutch, French, and British also visited the Arabian Peninsula repeatedly to obtain coffee seeds or plants for their expanding tropical empires in Africa and Asia. The progeny of Yemen’s arabica plants also formed the genetic basis for the New World’s coffee industry. Before the mid-nineteenth century, none of the arabica coffee cultivated outside eastern Africa was descended from seeds or plants obtained directly from its wild range in Ethiopia. All of the world’s cultivated coffee descended—directly or indirectly—from a coffee zone singularly free of rust. The health of the world’s cultivated arabica coffee had been preserved by an accident of ecology and history.26
The Ecological Pax Arabica
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coffee production and coffee consumption expanded in tandem. In the mid-seventeenth century, coffee drinking spread to Europe. Some Europeans developed a taste for coffee through contacts with the Ottoman Empire. The Viennese, for example, supposedly developed their taste for coffee after an Ottoman siege of the city was broken and the fleeing Ottomans left behind many sacks of coffee. In other parts of Europe, coffee appears first to have been introduced by individual “Turks” (i.e., people from the Islamic world) who set up coffeehouses in major commercial and cultural centers.27 Europeans were attracted by the drink and also by the coffeehouse as a social institution. In the 1650s and 1660s, coffeehouses sprang up across London, where they attracted the attention of the cosmopolitan English virtuosi, who valued the exotic.28 Some people expressed concern about the possible influence of the “heathen,” “infidel” drink on English society—as in the famed British pamphlet titled The Women’s Petition against Coffee. As in the Ottoman Empire, ruling elites sometimes voiced concern about the coffeehouse as a place for sedition. But official efforts to close or control coffeehouses were ultimately futile.
Coffee consumption soon spread across the social spectrum. In some of London’s coffeehouses, people of all social classes rubbed shoulders, although other coffeehouses served a more exclusive clientele. Coffee became part of popular culture; the composer Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a coffee cantata in which a young woman sings “how sweet coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses…. Coffee, I have to have coffee.”29 By the eighteenth century, coffee prices had fallen so much that, as the Dutch trader François Valentijn noted, “coffee had broken through so generally in our land that maids and seamstresses now had to have their coffee in the morning or they could not put their thread through the eye of their needle.”30 European demand for coffee grew steadily across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as coffee prices continued to fall. Americans embraced coffee drinking in the nineteenth century, although coffeehouses were less popular. Americans usually bought green coffee at general stores and roasted it at home. After the Civil War, large coffee companies began to roast and market coffee on a large scale.31
Coffee cultivation spread across the global tropics in tandem with the coffee boom in Europe. Initially, Europe’s coffee boom was fueled by coffee from Yemen. European trading companies—the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC)—started to export coffee from Yemen to London and Amsterdam, and then to consumers across Europe. As European demand grew, Yemen gradually lost its monopoly on coffee cultivation. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, people disseminated coffee plants throughout the Indian Ocean basin. European trading companies, especially the Dutch VOC, played some role in this dissemination. But the plant also circulated through parallel non-European (largely Muslim) trade and pilgrimage networks in the Indian Ocean basin. By the late seventeenth century, arabica coffee was cultivated in western India, where most of the coffee was consumed locally. The Dutch introduced coffee to Java from India rather than from Yemen. By the late seventeenth century, arabica coffee was widely, if not yet densely, cultivated along an arc reaching from Yemen in the east to Java in the west.32
Arabica coffee was introduced to the New World in the early eighteenth century. In 1696, the Dutch transported a single coffee tree from Java to Amsterdam, where it was cultivated in the city’s botanical garden. From Amsterdam, some of the plant’s offspring were sent to Paris and cultivated in the Jardin du Roi. Based on this plant, the French naturalist Antoine de Jussieu published one of the earliest botanical descriptions of coffee, which he classified as Jasminum Arabicum.33 Between about 1710 and 1720, both the Dutch and the French took progeny of this plant to the New World. According to popular French legend, it was taken to Martinique by one Chevalier de Clieu, who sustained the fragile plant by giving it some of his water rations. Even if this story is true, de Clieu was not alone; around the same time, and with much less fanfare, the Dutch took arabica coffee to Suriname. By the mid-eighteenth century, the arabica coffee plant—based on the progeny of these early introductions—had been disseminated across the Americas, from Mexico to Brazil.34 The founding populations of arabica coffee in the New World were built on a limited genetic base.
It is safe to assume that H. vastatrix was not present in the Americas before the twentieth century. In the unlikely event that the rust had been present in Java, it would have faced a series of significant bottlenecks on its journey to the Americas. It is virtually impossible that the delicate fungus could have survived the extreme temperatures of the voyage around Cape Horn from Java to Amsterdam. Before the nineteenth century, live plants were usually transported in pots on the ship decks; more delicate plants may have been placed in wood or glass cases to protect them from the elements, but even those were left open so that air could circulate. Had the fungus somehow survived, watchful gardeners at the botanical gardens in Paris or Amsterdam would certainly have seen it; there is no evidence they did. The fungus (and the plant) would have again been exposed to extreme conditions during the Atlantic crossing.
Coffee-farming practices would, at first, have kept rust levels so low that the rust would not have significantly affected production. In the Dutch East Indies, Javanese farmers usually cultivated coffee in densely planted hedgerows (kopi pagar) close to their households. Farmers in India cultivated coffee both as a garden crop and as a forest crop. In Mysore, coffee was cultivated in fenced gardens called hittlus, and coffee was intercropped with “lime, plantain, ginger, and mango.” Kandyan farmers on Ceylon also cultivated coffee as a garden crop, mixed with other cash and subsistence crops. This strategy allowed them to minimize economic and ecological risks. Coffee required little care or attention beyond some basic weeding, and it provided a good source of income. Few native planters produced coffee exclusively, nor did they depend on it as their major source of cash income. It was simply part of a diversified ecological and economic repertoire.35
Power and Vulnerability in the Nineteenth Century
By the mid-nineteenth century, the world’s coffeelands had become critically vulnerable to commodity diseases like coffee rust. A series of political, economic, and technological revolutions had sharply increased production and consumption of coffee around the globe. Many of these changes had their roots in the Industrial Revolution. Among other things, the Industrial Revolution helped spur mass consumption in the metropolises and factory towns of Europe and North America. Europe’s industrial powers competed aggressively to control trade and territories in Asia and Africa and to consolidate control of tropical territories they already held. Colonial states often obliged their subjects to produce tropical commodities, both to meet metropolitan demand and to provide revenue for the colonial states. Settlers also flocked to the tropical colonies, many of them encouraged by the hope that plantations would offer them a quick path to prosperity. In some cases, colonized peoples took advantage of the new colonial networks and started producing tropical commodities on their own. In Latin America, the leaders of the newly independent nations pursued economic development by exporting commodities to the industrializing Global North. In industrializing Europe and the United States, coffee gradually became a cheap stimulant, accessible to rich and poor alike. Coffee consumption in the United States exploded during these years, fueled by growing production from Brazil. By the century’s end, Americans drank
