In the beginning, "Indian" coffee was inferior to Turkish coffee; because it was the refuse, or what remained after the Turkish merchants had taken the best. But after the European merchants began to make their own purchases at Bettelfukere, the character of the "Indian" product as sold in the London and other European markets was vastly improved. Doubtless the long journey in sailing vessels over tropic seas made for better quality. It was estimated that Arabia in this way exported about a million bushels a year of "Turkish" and "Indian" coffee.
The coffee houses became the gathering places for wits, fashionable people, and brilliant and scholarly men, to whom they afforded opportunity for endless gossip and discussion. It was only natural that the lively interchange of ideas at these public clubs should generate liberal and radical opinions, and that the constituted authorities should look askance at them. Indeed the consumption of coffee has been curiously associated with movements of political protest in its whole history, at least up to the nineteenth century.
Coffee has promoted clear thinking and right living wherever introduced. It has gone hand in hand with the world's onward march toward democracy.
As already told in this work, royal orders closed the coffee houses for short periods in Constantinople and in London; Germany required a license for the sale of the beverage; the French Revolution was fomented in coffee-house meetings; and the real cradle of American liberty is said to have been a coffee house in New York. It is interesting also to note that, while the consumption of coffee has been attended by these agitations for greater liberty for three centuries, its production for three centuries, in the Dutch East Indies, in the West Indies, and in Brazil, was very largely in the hands of slaves or of forced labor.
Since the spread of the use of coffee to western Europe in the seventeenth century, the development of the trade has been marked, broadly speaking, by two features: (1) the shifting of the weight of production, first to the West Indies, then to the East Indies, and then to Brazil; and (2) the rise of the United States as the chief coffee consumer of the world. Until the close of the seventeenth century, the little district in Arabia, whence the coffee beans had first made their way to Europe, continued to supply the whole world's trade. But sprigs of coffee trees were beginning to go out from Arabia to other promising lands, both eastward and westward. As previously related, the year 1699 was an important one in the history of this expansion, as it was then that the Dutch successfully introduced the coffee plant from Arabia into Java. This started a Far Eastern industry, whose importance continues to this day, and also caused the mother country, Holland, to take up the rôle of one of the leading coffee traders of the world, which she still holds. Holland, in fact, took to coffee from the very first. It is claimed that the first samples were introduced into that country from Mocha in 1616—long before the beans were known in England or France—and that by 1663, regular shipments were being made. Soon after the coffee culture became firmly established in Java, regular shipments to the mother country began, the first of these being a consignment of 894 pounds in 1711. Under the auspices of the Netherlands East India Co. the system of cultivating coffee by forced labor was begun in the East Indian colonies. It flourished until well into the nineteenth century. One result of this colonial production of coffee was to make Holland the leading coffee consumer per capita of the world, consumption in 1913, as recorded on page 290, having reached as high as 18.8 pounds. It has long been one of the leading coffee traders, importing and exporting in normal times before the war between 150,000,000 and 300,000,000 pounds a year.
Pre-War Average Annual Production of Coffee by Continents
Fiscal years: 1910–1914
Total pounds: 2,311,917,200
The introduction of the coffee plant into the new world took place between 1715 and 1723. It quickly spread to the islands and the mainland washed by the Caribbean. The latter part of the eighteenth century saw tens of millions of pounds of coffee being shipped yearly to the mother countries of western Europe; and for decades, the two great coffee trade currents of the world continued to run from the West Indies to France, England, Holland, and Germany; and from the Dutch East Indies to Holland. These currents continued to flow until the disruption of world trade-routes by the World War; but they had been pushed into positions of secondary importance by the establishing of two new currents, running respectively from Brazil to Europe, and from Brazil to the United States, which constituted the nineteenth century's contribution to the history of the world's coffee trade.