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Would life be possible without coffee. Would
our modern society cease to function if we
could no longer drink our dark piping hot
caffeine elixir? Well, the history of coffee
is a fascinating one. One connected to mystical
Muslim Sufi’s, French revolutionaries, slaves,
soldiers, constipation and alcohol soaked
toddlers. So what is the history of coffee?
Well. Let’s find out!
Our story begins in a dark, scary time in
human history. The Precaffazine.
The ancient land of Ethiopia, may be the cradle
of all humankind. But more importantly it
is the birthplace of coffee. Here in the mountainous
rainforests near Kaffa, coffee has grown wild
for millenia.
We don’t exactly know when humans first
began consuming coffee. But the most popular
story involves some happy goats.
One afternoon an Ethiopian goat herder, named
Kaldi, noticed his goats hopping around excitedly,
some were even dancing. The goats were eating
leaves and berries from a small shrub. Kaldi
now curious decided to eat some too.
Soon his heart was pounding, his mind was
racing and he was dancing with his goats.
The magical energetic properties of caffeine
had been discovered.
Now this is just a story. Kaldi probably wasn’t
the first coffee addict. The world’s first
coffee lovers were most likely the Oromo people.
They’ve probably been chewing on coffee
beans and leaves for thousands of years. They
crushed it up and mixed it with fat to create
ancient coffee power bars.
Coffee leapt across the Red Sea with Oromo
slaves, sometime in the mid-15th century to
the port city of Mocha, in modern day Yemen.
There the Sufi mystics found that the drink
could keep them awake during their long night-time
prayers.
It was in Yemen that drinking coffee, made
from roasted beans, is first documented. The
most popular species of coffee was born here,
Coffea arabica, which now makes up 60% of
the world coffee supply.
They named the drink Qahwa the Arabic word
for wine, from which the word Coffee probably
comes from.
By the end of the fifteenth century, coffee
had spread throughout the Islamic world and
the café was soon born.
Cafés found a niche in Islamic society. Devout
Muslims can't really head down to the pub.
So cafés provided the Islamic world with
a secular social space outside the home. Where
Muslim men could engage in lively conversation
about politics, business, and religion.
Coffee soon became so important that in Turkey
the inability to provide coffee was grounds
for divorce.
But some rulers thought people were enjoying
the cafés a bit too much. Their actual concern
was that people were discussing politics in
the cafés and informing themselves, which
rulers tend not to like.
Coffee would find itself banned in Mecca and
Constantinople for a time during the 1500’s
and 1600's. But coffee drinking continued
in secret until the bans were lifted.
While the Muslims were sipping away in their
fancy cafés to the west of them lay a small,
divided, and violent backwater, called Europe.
Since coffee and tea hadn't reached Europe
yet and the drinking water was sometimes unsafe,
beer was Europe's favourite beverage.
A Professor of Medicine in 1551 stated “People
subsist more on this drink than they do on
food”
On average every man, woman, and child in
England drank over 350 liters of beer per
year up to the 17th century while Germans
were putting away 400-600 litres.
Europe wobbled about under this depressive
and confusing alcoholic haze. Until Dutch,
Venetians, and Italian merchants began importing
coffee in the 17th century and a new, stimulating
social space opened up.
Oddly enough it was firstly in England that
cafe culture captivated Europeans.
London's first café opened in 1652, by 1700
there were more than 2,000 cafes in London.
Called penny universities, because for the
price of a cup of coffee you could sit and
listen to the country's most intelligent people
chat.
You see, pubs were not the safest place to
discuss politics or religion. People were
drunk. or armed. Usually drunk and armed.
Whereas cafés provided a sober and caffeine
enhanced environment for debate and discussion.
Which was why King Charles II tried to ban
them in 1675, before being forced to back
down.
English cafes fostered early capitalism. Some
of the world’s largest businesses, like
Llyod’s Of London, The East India Company,
and the London Stock Exchange, began as cafes.
Not everyone loved coffee though. Especially
women, who were excluded from cafes. In 1674
they complained:
we find of late a very sensible Decay of that
true Old English Vigor; our Gallants being
every way so Frenchified…...we can Attribute
to nothing more than the Excessive use of
that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor
called COFFEE, which has so Eunucht our Husbands...and
spend their Money, all for a little base,
black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking, nauseous
Puddle-water…...We Humbly Pray, that henceforth
the Drinking COFFEE may on severe penalties
be forbidden and that instead thereof, Lusty
nappy Beer and Cock-Ale......be Recommended
to General Use.
Cock Ale by the way is beer with a dead rooster
in it. The link for their full 6 page complaint
is linked below and I highly recommend you
read it for a good laugh.
By 1777 coffee was so popular in Prussia that
Frederick the Great, complained “My people
must drink beer. His Majesty was brought up
on beer, and so were his ancestors.” In
1781 he banned citizens roasting coffee. And
created a secret anti-coffee police force,
nicknamed coffee smellers, to sniff out illegal
coffee dealers. But like elsewhere the bans
were soon reversed.
The Viennese soon became Europe’s next big
coffee lovers. Their great idea was adding
sugar and milk to coffee. Creating the Kapuziner,
named after the colour of a Capuchin monks’
robe. Which became known in Italian as a cappuccino.
In 1669 a Turkish ambassador introduced Paris
to coffee. The French originally didn't like
the taste.
But no matter how much they disliked the stuff
they were deeply moved by its unique ability
to deeply move them. Or in the words of Paludanus,
to “breaketh wind and openeth any stopping.”
Soon French doctors were prescribing coffee
enemas.
Now the bowels weren't the only things coffee
was stimulating in France. It also tickled
the mind. Soon after the 1689 opening of the
stylish Café Procope, it attracted the likes
of Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Benjamin
Franklin. Soon thousands of Parisian cafés
were fuelling the Enlightenment.
On July 12, 1789 Camille Desmoulins delivered
a passionate speech from a café table and
whipped the crowd up into an anti-aristocracy
rage. Two days later they stormed the Bastile,
igniting the French Revolution.
Over in British North America, Washington,
Hamilton, and Jefferson used cafés as the
headquarters of the American revolution.
The now caffeine addicted Europeans were desperate
to find coffee supplies not controlled by
the Ottoman Turks. In the mid 17th century
the Dutch brought coffee from India to grow
in Ceylon, Java, Sumatra, and across Southeast
Asia. Dutch colonists would drown Europe in
Asian coffee using enslaved natives.
In the 1860, Dutch civil servant Eduard Douwes
Dekker quit in disgust and wrote the novel
Max Havelaar. Which documented the terror
taking place on Java and attacked the Dutch
landowners who “grew rich from the poverty
of others.”
In 1720 Frenchmen, Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu,
brought a coffee plant to the colony of Martinque.
During a harrowing journey where his ship
was attacked by pirates, storms, and dehydration.
During the trip he shared his daily ration
of half a cup of water with the tiny coffee
plant.
His sacrifice paid off. Within 50 years there
were 18 million coffee trees on the island.
The offspring of his plant are now responsible
for a huge part of the world coffee supply.
William Ukers wrote about coffee “Wherever
it has been introduced it has spelled revolution.
It has been the world’s most radical drink
in that its function has always been to make
people think. And when the people began to
think, they became dangerous to tyrants.”
The irony was that while coffee was seen as
helping to free Europe and the US from tyrants,
it brought tyranny elsewhere.
De Clieu almost sacrificed his life for his
coffee plant. But he never thought of actually
harvesting it himself. Slaves from Africa
would do that.
By the 1780s, 60 percent of all the coffee
consumed in Europe came from the tiny French
colony of Saint-Domingue. Harvested by over
500,000 African slaves.
So the coffee that nourished Voltaire and
the Enlightenment involved the most barbaric
form of forced labour.
J.H.B De Saint Pierre, noted while travelling
in the Caribbean in 1773 “I do not know
if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness
of Europe....but I know well that these two
products have accounted for the unhappiness
of two great regions of the world: America
has been depopulated so as to have land on
which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated
so as to have the people to cultivate them.”
The 1789 French Revolution inspired the slaves
in Saint-Domingue to rebel and demand their
own freedom. Creating the slave-free nation
of Haiti in 1804.
When it comes to the quantity of slaves though,
Brasil takes the awful cake. Just in the first
half of the 19th century 1.5 million African
slaves were shipped here to work on coffee
plantations, known as latifundia. Which made
coffee men some of the wealthiest in Brasil.
This led to Brasil keeping slavery longer
than any other nation in the Western Hemisphere,
it only outlawed it in 1888.
Brasil conquered the coffee world. It produced
such an extraordinary amount that it helped
increase demand by making coffee cheap enough
for members of North America’s and Europe’s
working classes. It democratised coffee....through
slavery.
By the 1920's Brasil was producing 80% of
the world's coffee. It's been the world's
leading coffee producer for 150 years and
in 2017 it produced over 2.5 million tonnes.
That's a 1/3 of the global supply.
Coffee made modern Brasil, but at an enormous
cost. Brasil was according to Eduardo Galeano
“ruined by a plant whose destructive form
of cultivation left forests razed, natural
reserves exhausted, and general decadence
in its wake,”.
At the same time that Brazil led the coffee
boom, Central America also came to rely on
the same trees.
The history of Guatemala is an example of
what happened to the entire region. After
gaining independence from Spain the government
turned to coffee cultivation as a potential
source of wealth. Prime coffee growing land
was however occupied by indiginous peoples
such as the Maya. This land was confiscated
by rich coffee growers. Then indiginous peoples
were forced to work on the new massive coffee
plantations.
They were watched over by an enormous army.
Jeffrey Paige wrote in Coffee and Power, “Guatemala
had so many soldiers that it resembled a penal
colony because it was a penal colony based
on forced labor.”.
This system dominated Central America. The
only local exception was Costa Rica. Most
of Costa Rica’s indiginous people had been
killed off centuries before by Spanish settlers
and disease. So when Costa Ricans began growing
coffee in the 1830s, they couldn't run large
slave plantations like Brasil and Guatemala.
They still enslaved some, there just weren't
as many. Instead small farming families, working
together did the physical labor. By not relying
on slave labour Costa Rica was able to develop
into a more united and stable nation.
In 1906, while in Guatemala, George Washington,
an oddly named Belgian, mixed refined coffee
crystals with water to brew coffee instantly.
He wasn't the first to invent instant coffee,
but he was the first to mass produce it.
His invention came just in time for The First
World War and it's massive demand for “instant”
coffees.
In 1918, the U.S. Army bought the entire G.
Washington instant coffee output. By the time
the war ended, the U.S. Army was preparing
over 40 million cups of coffee daily.
Let’s head back to Asia for a bit. In 1869
an outbreak of leaf rust caused by the fungus
Hemileia vastatrix began. It first appeared
in British controlled Ceylon and wiped out
all their Coffea Arabica plants along with
India, Java, Sumatra and the rest of South
East Asia’s. Many switched to growing tea,
and turned Britain into a tea drinking nation.
This started a panicked search for other species
of coffee.
Enter, Coffea canephora, better known as Robusta.
Native to Central Africa and discovered just
as the fungus ruined Asian crops. It turned
out to be disease resistant, twice as caffeinated
as Arabica and grew essentially anywhere in
the coffee belt.
Its only disadvantage was that robusta beans
well...they taste like arse. They need to
be blended with some Arabica to be drinkable.
In 1938, Nestlé launched Nescafé, a new
and improved powdered instant coffee and took
over the global instant coffee market. The
taste of instant coffee was so bad that it
didn’t matter if cheap Robusta beans were
used.
Leading to a cheap instant-coffee industry
boom in the post WWII period.
Now Robusta makes up 40% of global coffee
production.
Competing with instant coffee were the Italians.
In 1884 Angelo Moriondo invented the first
espresso machine which was then improved upon
in 1901 by Luigi Bezzera.
This new "Espresso" was made by forcing almost
boiling water under high pressure through
very fine grounds. Before this, coffee would
take up to five minutes to brew. Espresso
cut this down to thirty seconds and produced
a more consistent cup.
By the 1930s espresso was in cafés all over
Europe and the United States.
The speed of espresso and espresso made drinks
made it the ideal beverage to grab before
work and during newly invented coffee breaks.
It became the perfect drug to fuel the rise
of capitalism.
Now much of the world orders their coffee
in Italian, espresso, cappuccino, latte, macchiato,
sure even Americano, a drink invented for
American soldiers, is ordered in Italian.
All remnants of Italy’s espresso revolution.
Except frappuccino, that’s not a word. That’s
nonsense.
The espresso revolution soon moved into the
home and fuelled the creation of dozens of
espresso spurting household appliances.
Within the coffee industry up until now all
the focus had been on creating the perfect
and or cheapest cup. But the beans that produced
people's lattés were harvested by near starving
peasants.
So Fairtrade International began in 1997 to
try to guarantee a certain fair standard for
products such as coffee.
To be labelled Fairtrade the production chain
must follow Fairtrade standards, such as workers’,
environmental, and childrens' rights. Along
with the payment of the Fairtrade Minimum
Price.
Fair Trade coffee sales have soared since
it's launch. But it has garnered it's fair
share of critics. It is not a perfect system,
but has done much to improve some lives and
working conditions.
Caffeine is now the world's most popular drug
and coffee is its most popular agent. We now
brew about 1.4 Billion cups of coffee a day.
From mystical Muslim drink, to colional commodity,
to revolutionary beverage, and to the fuel
of capitalism, this small African bean has
transformed our world. Coffee is one of the
many foods that changed human history. If
you’d like to know more about how food has
transformed our world I’d recommend you
check out The History of Food over on CuriosityStream.
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So that’s the history of coffee. It isn't
even close to covering everything. I probably
only covered about 1%. One video simply can't
cover everything. These videos are meant as
introductions. Check out the sources below
to learn more. I hope you enjoyed the video.
If you liked this content please subscribe.If
you have any questions leave them below. If
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store also in the description. I’m off to
go get a coffee.
Thanks a lot for watching
