The social role of coffee

Coffee’s role in key moments in history 

More than five centuries ago one of the first recorded uses of coffee was when Arab Sufi monks used it to stay awake for midnight prayers. 

Since then it has been instrumental in the slave trade, in public debate and in fuelling both the industrial revolution, cultural society, world wars and various revolutions. 

Interesting fact: 

In Saudi Arabia failing to supply your wife with coffee was grounds for divorce. 

The Slave Trade 

The coffee trade reached Europe in the 17th Century. Empires began to realise that they could grow their own coffee using peasant and enslaved labour in their far-flung colonies. 

As colonisation grew the English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch realised coffee’s potential as a cash crop alongside sugar, cotton and tobacco. 

The need for manpower to farm these crops was a primary driver of the slave trade. The French Caribbean colony of St. Dominique grew two-thirds of the world’s coffee in the late 1700s until the island’s plantations were burned and owners were massacred during the Haitian Revolution in 1791. The Portuguese used slaves to develop coffee growth in Brazil. The British also developed a trade in slaves throughout their empire. 

Fuelling public debate 

We have mentioned the growth of the London coffee houses in our exploration of coffee history and indeed as the founding location of Lloyds of London, the London Stock Exchange and the East India Company. (see blog “Coffee Houses”)

Coffee houses were the only communal places where men could gather and discuss news, religion, politics and gossip away from the watchful eyes of religious or state authorities. In December of 1675, Charles II went as far as ordering the closure of all coffee houses in London. The ban lasted just 11 days. 

The defining feature of English coffee houses were communal tables covered with newspapers and pamphlets where guests would gather to consume, discuss and even write the news. 

At Jonathan’s Coffee House in Exchange Alley, stockbrokers crowded around to trade shares after official trading hours had closed… giving birth to the London Stock Exchange. 

Principally male-only establishments coffee houses also developed throughout the Ottoman Empire in the 16th Century, although the Ottoman Turks did try to close them down with little success. Sultan Murad IV decreed death to coffee drinkers in the Ottoman Empire. 

Frederick the Great of Germany was so against coffee that he attempted to outlaw the drink outright in favour of beer on September 13, 1777. 

In America, Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern and coffeehouse became famous as a place where leaders of the Sons of Liberty met to hatch the 1773 Boston Tea Party and foment their revolutionary ideas that led to America’s war for independence. 

In New York, Merchant’s Coffee House was known for its gatherings of patriots eager to break free from George III. In the 1780s, it became the site where merchants organized to create both the Bank of New York and reorganize the New York Chamber of Commerce. 

Parisian Cafés, with their social egalitarianism, were an ideal location for Republican agitation and organization during the French Revolution. The Paris’s Café de Foy hosted the call to arms for the storming of the Bastille. 

The Industrial Revolution in England 

By the 18th Century, coffee’s stimulant and energy-boosting properties had been realised. Coffee became the “drink of the masses” once this was realised as it enabled factory owners to keep workers awake and alert throughout all hours of the day and night. 

World Wars 

Once instant coffee had been developed due to the difficulty of sourcing and transporting coffee beans, it became possible to supply it to soldiers based overseas. 

In World War I American inventor George C.L. Washington found a way to scale production and sell to the military, to give soldiers’ combat rations a boost. 

By the time the Americans became involved in World War II in 1941 the Army was ordering 140,000 bags of coffee beans a month. 

Civil wars in Latin America 

rural poverty and widespread exploitation of labourers working to harvest coffee, bananas and other global commodities sparked regional pockets of communist activism. 

The first were in Guatemala, followed by Nicaragua and El Salvador. 

In 1985 American roasters formed Equal Exchange, which sourced coffee from the pro-worker Sandanista party in Nicaragua. 

America, fearful of Soviet influence in its backyard during the Cold War and working to protect corporate financial interests, intervened in several Central American countries, supporting coups and escalating bloody civil wars.