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The Dutch East India Company was the first to import coffee on a large scale.[21] The Dutch later grew the crop in Java and Ceylon.[22] The first exports of Indonesian coffee from Java to the Netherlands occurred in 1711.[23]

Through the efforts of the British East India Company, coffee became popular in England as well. John Evelyn recorded tasting the drink at Oxford in England in a diary entry of May 1637 to where it had been brought by a student of Balliol College from Crete named Nathaniel Conopios of Crete.[24][25] Oxford's Queen's Lane Coffee House, established in 1654, is still in existence today. Coffee was introduced in France in 1657, and in Austria and Poland after the 1683 Battle of Vienna, when coffee was captured from supplies of the defeated Turks.[26]

When coffee reached North America during the Colonial period, it was initially not as successful as it had been in Europe as alcoholic beverages remained more popular. During the Revolutionary War, the demand for coffee increased so much that dealers had to hoard their scarce supplies and raise prices dramatically; this was also due to the reduced availability of tea from British merchants,[27] and a general resolution among many Americans to avoid drinking tea following the 1773 Boston Tea Party.[28] After the War of 1812, during which Britain temporarily cut off access to tea imports, the Americans' taste for coffee grew.

During the 18th century, coffee consumption declined in England, giving way to tea-drinking. The latter beverage was simpler to make, and had become cheaper with the British conquest of India and the tea industry there.[29] During the Age of Sail, seamen aboard ships of the British Royal Navy made substitute coffee by dissolving burnt bread in hot water.[30]

The Frenchman Gabriel de Clieu took a coffee plant to the French territory of Martinique in the Caribbean in the 1720s,[31] from which much of the world's cultivated arabica coffee is descended. Coffee thrived in the climate and was conveyed across the Americas.[32] Coffee was cultivated in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) from 1734, and by 1788 it supplied half the world's coffee.[33] The conditions that the slaves worked in on coffee plantations were a factor in the soon to follow Haitian Revolution. The coffee industry never fully recovered there.[34] It made a brief come-back in 1949 when Haiti was the world's 3rd largest coffee exporter, but declined rapidly after that.

Meanwhile, coffee had been introduced to Brazil in 1727, although its cultivation did not gather momentum until independence in 1822.[35] After this time massive tracts of rainforest were cleared for coffee plantations, first in the vicinity of Rio de Janeiro and later São Paulo.[36] Brazil went from having essentially no coffee exports in 1800, to being a significant regional producer in 1830, to being the largest producer in the world by 1852. In 1910–20, Brazil exported around 70% of the world's coffee; Colombia, Guatemala, and Venezuela exported half of the remaining 30%; and Old World production accounted for less than 5% of world exports.[37]

Cultivation was taken up by many countries in Central America in the latter half of the 19th century, and almost all involved the large-scale displacement and exploitation of the indigenous people. Harsh conditions led to many uprisings, coups and bloody suppression of peasants.[38] The notable exception was Costa Rica, where lack of ready labor prevented the formation of large farms. Smaller farms and more egalitarian conditions ameliorated unrest over the 19th and 20th centuries.[39]

Rapid growth in coffee production in South America during the second half of the 19th century was matched by growth in consumption in developed countries, though nowhere has this growth been as pronounced as in the United States, where a high rate of population growth was compounded by doubling of per capita consumption between 1860 and 1920. Though the United States was not the heaviest coffee-drinking nation at the time (Nordic countries, Belgium, and Netherlands all had comparable or higher levels of per capita consumption), due to its sheer size, it was already the largest consumer of coffee in the world by 1860, and, by 1920, around half of all coffee produced worldwide was consumed in the US.[37]

Coffee has become a vital cash crop for many developing countries. Over one hundred million people in developing countries have become dependent on coffee as their primary source of income. It has become the primary export and backbone for African countries like Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and Ethiopia,[40] as well as many Central American countries.

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