Coffee as a trade commodity

Timeline

1. 1400–1500Ethiopia and Yemen · Ethiopian HighlandsThe coffee plant (Coffea arabica) is native to the Kaffa region of southwestern Ethiopia, where locals had long known the stimulating effects of its fruit. Around the fifteenth century, Sufi monks in Yemen began roasting and brewing coffee beans to stay awake for nighttime prayers, establishing coffee drinking in Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen's port of Al-Mukha became the earliest coffee distribution and export hub; after the Ottoman Empire conquered Yemen in 1517, the coffee trade spread rapidly along Ottoman trade routes to Cairo, Istanbul, and the wider Mediterranean world, where coffeehouses (Qahvehane) flourished.
2. c. 1600–1650Port of Mocha and Amsterdam · Western EuropeIn the early seventeenth century, Venetian merchants were the first to bring coffee to the European market, and around 1600 coffee began circulating in small quantities in Venice and Marseille. The Dutch East India Company (VOC, founded 1602) recognized coffee's commercial value and began trading through the port of Mocha in Yemen with Arab merchants. In 1616, the Dutchman Pieter van den Broecke brought coffee plants back from Mocha, and over the following decades Dutch merchants gradually established dominance in European coffee distribution. The English East India Company also participated in Mocha's coffee trade during the same period.
3. 1651–1660Indian Ocean trade routes (Mocha to Amsterdam) · Western EuropeIn the 1650s, with the rapid expansion of coffeehouses in London, Oxford, and elsewhere, European demand for coffee beans grew sharply. The Yemeni port of Mocha reached its peak of coffee exports in this period; VOC fleets called regularly at Mocha, buying large quantities of coffee beans to ship to Amsterdam for resale to Britain, France, and other countries. Coffee was by then a high-value commodity, priced far above ordinary foodstuffs and regarded as a fashionable stimulant drink and social medium. The English East India Company also competed for a share of the Mocha trade, and the merchants of the two countries sometimes clashed on the Yemeni coast. In 1657, London coffee merchants began publishing advertisements promoting coffee's benefits, further stimulating consumer demand.
4. c. 1660–1720Java and the Caribbean · CaribbeanIn 1696 the Dutch successfully trial-planted Arabica coffee in Java (present-day Indonesia), and by the 1710s Javanese coffee began supplying the European market in volume, breaking Yemen's monopoly on coffee exports. France subsequently introduced coffee cultivation to Martinique (1720s), and Britain introduced it to Jamaica (Blue Mountain coffee). The geographic structure of the coffee trade shifted from a single Indian Ocean Mocha system to a multipolar colonial plantation system spanning the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, profoundly influencing the modern global pattern of agriculture and colonial economies.