Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  a large fire is kept going [to keep the coffee hot] and little porcelain bowls are kept by it ready-filled with the mixture; when it is hot enough there are men entrusted with the office who do nothing else but carry these little bowls to all the company . . . also giving each person a few melon seeds to chew to pass the time. And with the seeds and this beverage, which they call kafoue, they amuse themselves . . . for a period of seven or eight hours.14

  Any commodity popular in Constantinople soon found its way to the rest of Europe via Venice, which had by then repaired its relations with the Ottomans.15 Italy’s Catholic theologians, like their Muslim counterparts, harbored suspicions about the brew’s moral properties, but Pope Clement VIII spared Europe the caffeine controversy when, around 1600, he sampled a cup and blessed coffee as a Christian beverage. The French physician Pierre de La Roque brought coffee to Marseille in 1644, and his son Jean would later write A Voyage to Arabia Felix, a popular book describing his journeys as a merchant and the early history of coffee.

  In 1669, the Turks sent an ambassador, Suleiman Aga, to Versailles. Insolently wearing a simple wool coat and refusing to bow before the bejeweled Louis XIV, he addressed the Sun King as an equal and was instantly banished to Paris. His embassy may have failed, but his coffee succeeded. In Paris, he rented a large house in a fashionable neighborhood. Aristocratic women, drawn by rumors of the residence’s exotic, perfumed atmosphere, eagerly sought audiences inside, where Nubian slaves served them coffee in exquisitely gilded eggshell porcelain. Their tongues loosened by caffeine, they revealed to Suleiman that Louis had invited the Turks to Paris for the sole purpose of making the Austrians anxious that he might not support them during the expected Ottoman siege of Vienna. This further soured relations between Versailles and the Turks.

  The fashion soon spread throughout Paris as Armenians, costumed as Turks in turbans and caftans and carrying trays of pots and cups, sold the beverage from street to street. These roving peddlers gave way to stalls at fairs, and these ultimately evolved into cafés. One of the best known was the Procope, established in 1686 and named after the Italian waiter of one of the first Armenian stall owners. A century later, Robespierre and Marat would conspire at the Procope, and it still serves customers today, as does Venice’s even more famous and overpriced Café Florian, founded around the same time.

  Brought not by merchants but by soldiers, coffee also came to Vienna from Constantinople. In 1683, the Ottomans surrounded and besieged Vienna for two months before being driven back by an Austrian army largely made up of Poles, among whom was Franz George Kolschitzky. Having previously served as an interpreter with the Turks, he was ideally suited for the dangerous courier duty between the defenders within the city and their Polish allies waiting outside. He cheated death several times by bluffing his way through enemy lines with his Turkish uniform and linguistic ability.

  When the Poles finally relieved the city, the Turks left behind not only their hope of conquering Europe, but also large stocks of oxen, camels, tents, and gold that were distributed among the victorious troops. Vienna’s defenders also inherited bales of coffee, but they found no takers. Hearing of this, Kolschitzky said, “If nobody wants those sacks, I will take them.”16 Having lived among the Turks, he knew just what to do with the beans. Retracing the beverage’s Parisian history, Kolschitzky first began selling the drink on the street and door to door. Later, he rented a small house, which became the first Viennese café.

  By 1700 most coffee served in Europe came not to Venice, Paris, or Vienna, but to the banks of the Thames. That the British were now consuming the lion’s share of one of the era’s great luxury commodities hints that European commercial supremacy had shifted to London, and no group welcomed coffee’s pharmacological boost to stamina and mental sharpness more than England’s new merchant class. Wherever it spread, the beverage became the “drink of commerce.”17

  England’s rapid commercial ascent followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Dutch Protestant stadholder Willem III, along with his royal English wife, Mary, overthrew the last Catholic monarch, James II. Willem, now King William, had sought the English crown to unite Britain and Holland in a Protestant alliance against Louis XIV. In order to accomplish this, he willingly dealt away the ancient divine right of kings and elevated Parliament to governmental supremacy. In exchange, Parliament gave William a robust tax base of excise levies (especially on luxury commodities such as coffee) to pay for his war against France.

  This grand bargain—the Revolutionary Settlement of 1689—had far-reaching effects. First, the transfer of power from an absolute monarch to a representative legislative body invigorated the rule of law, the essential soil in which nations thrive economically.18 Second, the establishment of a crown excise tax made it easier for the government to pay off debts, thus making it a better credit risk and dramatically lowering interest rates. As a bonus, lenders perceived that a dominant legislature made up of wealthy bondholders and businessmen was less likely to default on its loans. Between 1690 and 1727, prime interest rates in England plummeted from over 10 percent to 4 percent.19 Third, after the events of 1688–1689, the Dutch financiers deduced that the commercial wind had shifted and decamped en masse for London. One of the émigrés was Abraham Ricardo, father of the economist David Ricardo, about whom we shall hear more later.

  The Revolutionary Settlement turbocharged England’s economy. It also made the British the most avid coffee drinkers in Europe, as the nation’s merchants, financiers, and stockbrokers congregated in London’s coffeehouses. In these establishments, situated by the city’s wharves, where news from foreign markets first arrived, the movers and shakers of England’s new trading economy met to do business, their wits not dulled by wine and beer as in days of old, but rather sharpened by the elixir of enterprise.

  As long as only Yemenis grew the berries, coffee remained scarce and expensive. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, an increasing number of European traders converged on Yemen, first at Mocha, then at the dusty highland town of Beit-el-Fakih in the growing district north of the port. Agents of the VOC and EIC were joined by representatives of French, Flemish, and German trading companies, and an even larger number of Muslim merchants.

  The Europeans were Johnny-come-latelies to the trade. In the mid-eighteenth century, most coffee was still going north to its traditional markets in Egypt, Turkey, and Mesopotamia, or east to Persia and India. During the 1720s, for example, Yemen exported about sixteen million pounds (forty thousand bahars, or camel loads) annually to the Muslim world, as compared with only about six million to Europe, most of which went to England.

  The EIC agents usually ran rings around their VOC counterparts, often leaving the Dutch to purchase overpriced, mildewed beans. The VOC’s lack of success resulted from both corruption and laziness. In particular, the Dutch traders were unwilling to leave the relative comforts of Mocha and venture to Beit-el-Fakih, as their competitors were increasingly doing.20

  As the coffee craze spread in Europe after 1700, more ships appeared in Mocha, as well as in Hodeida and Lohaya, two smaller ports closer to Beit-el-Fakih. The European agents dreaded the entrance of any trading vessel into these harbors, even from their own company, as this invariably raised prices. At one point, beans at their Yemeni source sold for as much as 0.8 guilder per pound, or about $12 in modern value; at such a cost, only the wealthiest could frequent Europe’s coffeehouses.21

  By about 1725, cutthroat competition among the European companies at both ends of the supply chain had squeezed the profit out of the business. The most noteworthy aspect of the Yemeni coffee trade was an event that didn’t occur. While the British, Dutch, French, Flemish, and German companies competed viciously, this time they avoided outright war. For their part, the Yemenis greedily savored the frantic bidding among the Europeans. When Parliament rashly directed the EIC to arrest all British subjects in Mocha outside its employ, the local factor recommended against it, as this would anger th
e sultan, “who we believe would interfere to protect the people of any ship that came to the port as they show an equal respect without distinction to Europeans.”22

  Coffee-Growing Area and Ports of Late-Medieval Yemen

  If the Dutch could not outtrade their British and French rivals, they could at least out-cultivate them by transplanting coffee bushes to Surinam, Sri Lanka, and the Malabar Coast. After some initial setbacks, bushes originally transplanted from Yemen to the Malabar Coast were successfully cultivated in the Javanese highlands near Batavia. By 1732, Indonesia grew about 1.2 million pounds of coffee annually, and bales of beans from Surinam and Brazil joined those from the Indies on Amsterdam’s wharves. The increase in supply broke the Yemeni monopoly and finally lowered prices. Growers in the new areas could produce coffee more cheaply than in Yemen, assuring the Dutch of healthy profits.23

  The plunge in prices brought about by the new growing areas in Indonesia and the New World changed European drinking habits. Suddenly, everyone could afford the odd cup. In 1726 a Dutch clergyman complained that seamstresses would not so much as pass a thread though a needle until they had consumed their morning coffee, and in 1782, one French aristocrat sarcastically sniffed:

  There is no bourgeois household where you are not offered coffee, no shopkeeper, no cook, no chambermaid who does not breakfast on coffee with milk in the morning. . . . There is usually a wooden bench near the merchant’s stall or shop. Suddenly, to your surprise, you see a woman from Les Halles or a porter arrive and ask for coffee. . . . These elegant people take it standing up, basket on back, unless as a sensuous refinement they want to place their burden on the bench and sit down.24

  The quality of Javan beans was not up to that of the real thing from Mocha. While Europeans could generally not tell the difference (except, perhaps, for the fact that the transplanted coffee contained 50 percent more caffeine than coffee from Yemen), more discerning Muslim consumers could, and they would not touch the cheaper Indonesian brew. Nothing better demonstrated the complacent obstinacy of the eighteenth-century VOC than the response of its directors—the Heeren XVII—to reports of the Muslim’s disdain for the cup of Java. This august group solemnly reported that they had sampled coffee from both Javan and Mochan beans and could not distinguish between them. They could not believe that “a bunch of boorish Turks and Persians should have so much tastier tongues than we and others like us.”25

  That England was able to achieve primacy in the coffee trade (and later, in tea) did not augur well for its European competitors. These products, after all, originated in places—Yemen and China—where the Dutch and French had a long head start on the British. The worst-case scenario for England’s rivals, then, would be a new commodity that grew in many locations and for which there was widespread demand.

  Cotton filled the bill precisely. This fabric so pervades modern life that it is easy to lose sight of its unique biological and geographic properties. First and foremost, Gossypium hirsutum—the plant species responsible for more than 90 percent of global production today—contains four complete sets of chromosomes, instead of the two sets in most plants and animals. (In scientific terms, it is a tetraploid organism, as opposed to the usual diploid configuration.) Many varieties, including G. hirsutum, contain one pair of chromosomes of Asian origin and another of American origin.

  Amazingly, recent scientific studies using DNA “molecular clocks” suggest that this hybridization between Old and New World strains occurred about ten million years ago, long before human beings evolved. For the past several million years, various species have grown in places as diverse as Peru, India, eastern and southern Africa, Egypt, New Guinea, Arabia, the Cape Verdes, Australia, the Galápagos, and Hawaii.

  How did cotton develop this unique ability to spread, and even crossbreed, across the face of the earth without human help? The answer seems to lie in two unusual properties of its seeds: first, their ability to survive immersion in salt water for up to several years; and second, their natural buoyancy and their propensity to attach themselves to flotsam.

  Ancient cotton plants produced fibers only a fraction of an inch long, in contrast to the modern domesticated agricultural product, which yields fibers up to several inches long. Most commercially important plants and animals were domesticated just once, but ancient farmers in both the Old World and the New World independently turned this trick on at least four separate occasions—twice in the Americas (G. hirsutum and G. barbadense), once in Asia (G. arboreum), and once in Africa (G. herbaceum).26

  India’s highly varying soils yielded different varieties of cotton, which in turn produced the rich diversity of Indian manufactured cloths, such as fine muslin from Dacca in east Bengal and sateens and printed chintz from the Gujarat. Just as today’s automobile, movie, and software industries crystallized around the technical expertise that accumulated in Detroit, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley, respectively, in the sixteenth century Indian cities such as Kasimbazar and Ahmadabad attracted spinners, weavers, and finishers, and their products became world famous. Of India’s four major textile centers—the Bengal, the Punjab, the Coromandel (southeast) Coast, and Gujarat—the last was by far the most important and supplied the Muslim empires of the Middle East with both common cloth and the finest luxury fabrics, via the Red Sea and Persian Gulf routes.

  Until well into the modern era, textiles were the world’s primary manufactured product. Often woven with silver, gold, and silk, they were also the chief form of stored wealth for both rich and poor; most families wore their estate on their backs and hung it on their walls and windows. More to the point, people inherited these textile treasures from their parents; fashions would remain relatively unchanged for centuries, and all but the wealthiest possessed only a few items.27 Styles not only were static over time but were also rigidly segregated by class. An inflexible social structure, reinforced by sumptuary laws, determined just who could wear what. In the mid-seventeenth century, the EIC disrupted this age-old state of affairs, turning the worlds of English industry, trade, fashion, and social rank upside down in just a few decades. The Company’s instrument in this commercial revolution was cotton.

  The fabric’s evolution into a major trade commodity bears a striking resemblance to that of sugar. At the EIC’s birth in 1600, cotton was a high-end product on a par with silk; that it was affordable at all, even as a luxury item, depended on the cheapness of Indian labor. Like sugar, cotton is easy to grow but requires an enormous amount of labor to process. At the dawn of the industrial age, growing a hundred pounds of the crude mixture of fibers and seeds—the bolls—consumed only about two person-days of work. Removing the seeds from the bolls (ginning), arranging the fibers in parallel order (carding), and packing (bailing) took another seventy person-days and yielded just eight pounds of raw cotton (“cotton wool”).28 Female spinners (whence “spinster”) required another thirty-five person-days to transform this amount of cotton wool into thread. Thus, about thirteen days labor were needed to produce each pound of cotton thread, compared with one or two per pound of wool, two to five for linen, and six for silk.29

  India had not only a large and inexpensive workforce, but also centuries of expertise with cotton textiles. The assembly of millions of short, fragile cotton fibers into a durable thread is no mean task. Before 1750, English spinners could not produce cotton thread strong enough to use in the lengthwise fabric warp, so domestically made cloth was usually a mix of linen or wool warp and cotton weft; only the more highly skilled Indian spinners manufactured thread adequate for bolts of pure cotton fabric. Thus, before the invention of practical spinning machines in the eighteenth century, almost all of the West’s cotton cloth came from thread spun in India.

  In the early 1600s, the EIC commanded only a small portion of the all-important spice trade; its major business was in Persian silks, shipped by camel over the Syrian desert to Turkish ports. Before long, the EIC began tapping the Indian fabric markets as well. At that early stage, no one could imagine t
hat the trade in these textiles would eventually ignite the Industrial Revolution, destroy Indian textile manufacturing, spark a controversy over free trade in Britain as contentious as any seen in today’s globalized economy, and, last but not least, give birth to the British Empire.

  Within several decades of the Company’s chartering by Elizabeth I on the last day of the sixteenth century, England was gazing at a kaleidoscope of fabrics, colors, and patterns the like of which had never been seen before in Europe. England’s traditional heavy, monochrome woolens could not compete with clothes, drapery, and upholstery made of the light, gaily colored printed Indian fabric. Nor did it hurt that one of the world’s most efficient commercial organizations now ran the cotton trade.

  The EIC was not content to let mere market demand drive its sales and imports. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Company began to actively manipulate consumer tastes, and in the process invented both the fashion industry and consumer society as we know them today.

  The EIC realized that if “fashion leaders” wore Indian chintz and hung calico drapery, others would quickly follow. In a corrupt and class-obsessed monarchical society, it was relatively easy to identify and seduce these fountainheads—the royal family. If they adopted a given style, the aristocracy would follow, and the aristocrats would in turn be aped by the minor nobility, who would in turn be slavishly copied by the commercial elites, and so on down the line to the humblest peasant with a few shillings to spare.

  By the late seventeenth century, Indian chintzes had already found limited favor among small numbers of the English middle class because they mimicked the more expensive silks, satins, and taffetas worn by the aristocracy. The royals themselves, however, shunned the new imitators from the subcontinent, preferring the “real thing.” Sir Josiah Child, governor of the EIC, set out to change things. The Company had previously made a “gift” of silver tableware worth £3,000 to Charles II in 1660, but the directors decided that it was useless to dole out such small change. In 1684 they extended to the monarch “voluntary contributions” of £324,250, and in addition both the king and the Duke of York were granted company shares. The birth of constitutional monarchy in 1689 did not stop such favors. In 1698 one courtier observed that in the queen’s chamber “all [the] Indian Embroidery on white satin [was] presented to her by the Company.”30 Other members of the nobility were not forgotten; to them went not only calicoes and shares, but also committee memberships and free freightage on EIC ships.31