Coffee, Tea and Colonialism
"The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World" by Ross W. Jamieson, in Journal of Social History (Winter 2001), George Mason Univ., Fairfax, Va. 22030.
"The Essence of Commodification: Caffeine Dependencies in the Early Modern World" by Ross W. Jamieson, in Journal of Social History (Winter 2001), George Mason Univ., Fairfax, Va. 22030.
It’s astonishing to consider how much of early European colonialism had to do with the acquisition of "drug foods": sugar, tobacco, and, in all its delightfully stimulating forms, caffeine. Yet the history of caffeine shows that the transactions between colonizer and colonized did not run only in one direction, writes Jamieson, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver. Coffee, for example, was not even cultivated until the mid-15th century, when Arab growers in Yemen domesticated the wild Ethiopian plant and Muslim Sufi devotees began using the potent little beans in all-night religious ceremonies. Coffee’s popularity quickly spread throughout the region. Istanbul boasted more than 600 coffeehouses by the 1560s. When Europeans became involved in the trade in the 1610s, they competed with Arab traders for markets in the Near East and Asia rather than export coffee to Europe. By contrast, in the 16th century, the Spanish conquerors of the New World found a crop, cacao or chocolate, that the Maya, Aztecs, and others had esteemed and cultivated for centuries. The colonists soon developed their own taste for the drink, and they established cacao plantations and an extensive local trade in the bean—but for a century, none of that trade crossed the Atlantic. Then, in the mid-17th century, caffeine drinks suddenly achieved enormous popularity in Europe. Jamieson thinks the craze sprang from social changes within Europe rather than shrewd marketing. Europe was urbanizing, and the old hierarchical social order was giving way to something new and as yet undefined. What better way to establish your social standing than to sip an exotic and expensive brew? Along with caffeine, the Europeans imported social customs and habits from the colonial world. With coffee, for example, came the Arab coffeehouse, an exclusively male preserve, generally open to various social classes. Oxford had such an institution in 1650; within a few decades there were thousands throughout England. The coffeehouse "replaced the alehouse as a place for men to meet to discuss business and politics . . . and the caffeine beverages were associated with [bourgeois] sobriety and virtue." Cacao, however, was consumed by both men and women, as it was in the New World. Today’s latte lovers would find themselves quite at home with the special tools and rituals involved in its preparation— most of them borrowed from the Aztec aristocracy. (Cinnamon and vanilla were often mixed in, as were chili peppers.)
Tea has a different history. China managed to maintain a monopoly on tea production until the 1830s, when the Dutch planted the first successful crop in Java. (Britain’s Indian tea plantations were started two decades later.) Even so, business boomed. By the 1740s, Jamieson reports, "afternoon tea was an important meal in England, the Netherlands, and English America." Women monopolized the drink and presided over the tea ritual, which brought families together and provided opportunities to teach children good manners and to demonstrate the decorum and respectability that were essential to status in the new social order. All of which makes one wonder what some archaeologist a hundred years hence will make of the sudden American passion for Starbucks.