Markman Ellis, editor
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COFFEE-HOUSE CULTURE
4 volumes
1,840pp. Pickering and Chatto. £350.
978 1 85196829 9

The film Black Gold begins with a horrible sound, a nasal rasp like pigs snorting at a trough. This sound is being made by a rare breed of American coffee tasters, slurping tiny tastes of hundreds of different espressos and giving them very precise ratings – 89.5/100, for example. These experts, who are nerdish and decadent all at once, are like the Robert Parkers of coffee. They seem to labour under the impression that their palates are brilliant computers, capable of distinguishing flavour within a micropercentage. One of the tasters stops slurping for a moment and turns to the camera. “There’s one coffee here that is probably the best coffee that I’ve ever tried. Beautiful!” Halfway through the film, we hear a different sound. It is the animal wail of a child in Sidamo, Ethiopia. She has been brought to a health clinic to be treated for malnourishment. Her legs are like twigs. To her mother’s distress, the clinic refuses her treatment. Although she is indeed malnourished, there are others in a still worse state who need more urgent care. This is a coffee-growing region, and no one has enough to eat, because the farmers cannot get anything approaching a decent price for their beans.

The contrast is neither clever nor original – no Western consumer can be entirely ignorant of the iniquities of the coffee trade – but the film-makers, brothers Marc and Nick Francis, bring home the injustice of the entire economy of coffee with a force that makes it seem fresh. There is none of the visual tricksiness of Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock’s attack on McDonald’s, nor is it needed. Throughout Black Gold, affluent Western coffee drinkers are relentlessly juxtaposed with African coffee farmers, who receive less than 1p of the nearly £2 that is now the standard price for a regular (ie, gigantic) cup of coffee from the major chains in the United Kingdom. We see a worker in New York idly sipping a frappuccino, which she will probably not manage to finish, so oversized is it; and we see desperately poor African farmers begging God to raise the coffee price. Because of the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement – which regulated prices until 1989 – coffee prices in Africa have reached a thirty-year low. Twenty-two cents a kilo is now the market rate for unroasted beans. “If we could get fifty-seven cents”, says one Ethiopian, “we could soar far above the sky.” Yet it would take twice that to provide a “good life” for the farmers – which does not mean a life with such luxuries as electricity, but merely clean water, clean clothes and the ability to send their children to school.

Black Gold underlines how particularly grotesque this poverty is, given that coffee is a more valuable commodity than it has ever been – both relative to other commodities and in absolute terms. The espresso revolution of the twentieth century turned coffee into a gourmet product, which could command high prices at the point of consumption. Ernesto Illy, whose family firm drove the post-war dominance of espresso over other forms of coffee, is interviewed in Black Gold, talking about the perfect espresso, made from exactly fifty beans or seven grams of coffee: “You have chocolate, you have flowers, you have honey, you have toast”. And you also have big bucks.

Two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day, globally. Coffee is now the second most widely traded commodity, after oil (the original black gold). The total value of all coffee traded last year has been estimated at $140 billion. The farmers harvesting their Mocha beans in Sidamo are sitting on a gold mine, but one whose value they are powerless to realize.

The film lays much of the blame for this with the New York Trading market, a “destructive mechanism” for the coffee producers, since the market price of coffee is sometimes now set below the amount it cost to produce. The world economy in coffee is controlled by four big multinationals – Kraft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee – who are largely able to determine the price of coffee to their own advantage. The farmers – most of whom have tiny family farms – cannot sell direct to this market, but must go through middlemen – exporters who themselves take another sizeable chunk.

This is where Fairtrade comes in. By paying the farmers a guaranteed price set above the fluctuating values of the international commodities exchange, the Fairtrade system can slowly pump modest quantities of money back into the farming communities, allowing them to build such “luxuries” as schools, health centres and clean-water pipes. The hero of Black Gold is Tadesse Meskela, an amiable man, the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union. Meskela’s job is to fly round the world securing better prices for the 74,000 Ethiopian farmers he represents. Non-Fairtrade coffee reaches the consumer after six chains, each of which reduces the chances of the farmer getting a reasonable price. Working through cooperatives can reduce the chains by 60 per cent.

For two-and-a-half years, the film-makers followed Meskela on his journeys. “Our hope is that one day the consumers will understand what they are drinking”, he says, but not much that he sees indicates that they will. We share Meskela’s bafflement and distress at how hard it is to make Ethiopian coffee pay, despite the fact that Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, and still regarded by gourmets as producing some of the world’s best beans. Meskela is shown in a branch of Waitrose in London, in the coffee aisle, staring miserably at all the choice. Many of us have stood in just such a pose, vacantly pondering which of the many prettily designed packets we will take home and decant into our cafetières. Meskela’s problem is different. He observes the consumers with their baskets, and sees how few of them bother to buy Fairtrade coffee. Then he finds some Fairtrade coffee on the shelves – but it comes from Latin America, not Africa. Finally, he rummages, and finds a tin of Mocha Sidamo coffee hidden away where no one would see it.

Many of the farmers he represents are now switching from coffee crops to chat, a narcotic plant which is banned in the United States and much of Europe. Several bemused Ethiopian farmers are interviewed about it. They don’t like chat, they say. They know that the people who chew it are addicts. But they need cash, and chat pays far better than coffee. What can they do? The economics of coffee simply make no sense for them. The concluding section of the film shows footage from the 2003 trade talks of the WTO in Cancún, Mexico, which collapsed, amid protests from Third World countries about the refusal of the US and European Union to drop subsidies for their own farmers, when Africa was forced by the IMF to drop its own subsidies. In this context, it is virtually impossible for African trade to compete. If Africa could increase its share of world trade by just 1 per cent, it could generate $70 billion – five times more than the entire continent now receives in aid. There are no signs of this happening, however. The Ethiopian coffee farmers continue to go hungry; and we continue to line our bellies with endless milky lattes. If we should have a moment’s worry about the ethics of what we are drinking, we can appease it with the bromides which issue from the Starbucks information machine. The perky manageress of the original Seattle branch tells the camera that coffee is not the main business of Starbucks, anyway. “We’re in the people business, selling coffee”, she exclaims, before going off to sell another giant mug of foam.

The makers of Black Gold seek to depict the mindless coffee-drinking of the West as a fundamentally anti-democratic activity. The twenty-first-century coffee house has become the symbol of selfish, solipsistic, blinkered consumerism. We are a long way from the coffee culture of the eighteenth century, which, we are supposed to believe, was a model for benign democratic activity. By 1750, there were probably more than 2,000 coffee houses in London, places where men went to read newspapers, smoke tobacco, conduct business, see friends and drink a murky brown liquid which went under the name of coffee. Now that cultural history of the eighteenth century is dominated by the influence of Jürgen Habermas, the institution of the coffee house is generally treated as a prime example of the “public sphere” in action, what Habermas called “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed”.

Habermas himself categorized coffee houses as institutions offering “social intercourse” of a non-aristocratic, non-hierarchical kind, free and open debate and the inclusion of all-comers (assuming that they were men). As the cultural historian Markman Ellis writes, in Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, the British coffee house, a “heady combination of news, literature, debate and writing”, was “the central locus of newly egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation, including forms of structured discourse, such as lectures and debates, as well as unregulated discourse, such as gossip and chatter”.

Ellis, who teaches eighteenth-century literature and culture at Queen Mary, University of London, has already written a “cultural history” of the coffee house. Now he has gathered many of the original source materials from that book into four sturdy volumes of primary texts, in facsimile form. The first covers Restoration satire; the second, eighteenth-century satire; the third, drama; and the fourth, science and history writing. The reader can be left in no doubt that coffee houses were the object of debate, as well as a venue for it. Volume One includes broadsides and poems for and against the coffee house, from the years when it was still a great novelty. It is wonderful to read these texts at first hand, in the earthy language of the day, rather than filtered through the deadening lens of post-Habermasian theory.

The main arguments in favour of coffee houses, in the words of an anonymous satire of 1661, were that they were “free to all comers”, promoted intermingling of different professions, “equality”, education and free discourse, and that coffee “makes no man drunk”, unlike the drinks served in ale-houses. However, in the view of this same satire, every one of these virtues had its corresponding vice. The freedom of speech led to time-wasting and “gabbling” (“Here men carried by instinct sipp muddy water, and like Frogs confusedly murmur Insignificant Notes, which tickle their own ears, and, to their inharmonious sense, make Music of jarring strings”). The education on offer was “a school . . . without a master”. As for the proposition that “coffee makes no man drunk”, the author suggests coffee houses encouraged drunkenness, because the effects of coffee “being mixt with the more drying smoak of Tobacco makes too many run to the Tavern or Alehouse to quench their thirst, which they cannot satisfy”.

The same point was made in a mock-petition of 1674, The Women’s Petition Against Coffee. The coffee house, in truth, was:

"Only a Pimp to the Tavern, a relishing soop preparative to a fresh debauch: For when people have swill’d themelves with a morning draught of more Ale than brewers horse can carry, hither they come for a pennyworth of Settle-brain . . . and after an hours impertinent Chat, begin to consider a bottle of Claret would do excellent well before Dinner; whereupon to the Bush they all march together, till every one of them is Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-House to drink themselves sober."

The British have used coffee as a sop for drinking themselves sober ever since.

What of the other vaunted cultural virtues of the eighteenth-century coffee house? In many cases, they are not so dissimilar to those of the modern coffee chains. The eighteenth-century coffee house was undoubtedly a great vehicle for the reading of newspapers. A Continental observer in the late eighteenth century noted that, whereas the French coffee house was a place where games were played, in Britain “you neither see billiards nor backgammon tables” because people frequent coffee houses principally to read “the PAPERS”. There was a close and sometimes volatile relationship between the coffee-men and the newspaper-men, which came to a head in 1728, when the coffee-men launched an abortive scheme for setting up their own newspapers. Coffee shops had long been used as places for reading papers without having to pay for them. The coffee-men resented the high price of newspapers and the fact that there were so many of them. The newspaper-men objected that coffee houses relied on newspapers to attract custom. There is a comparable symbiosis now between cafés and information, whether in the form of newspapers (Starbucks has an exclusive deal with The Times, Costa with the Daily Telegraph) or internet connection. It is hard to see which party owes most to whom. As a pamphleteer of 1729 wrote, “Papers mutually beget company, and Company papers”.

Like their early equivalents, modern coffee shops are great vehicles and promoters of commerce. In 1699, a dealer and scholar of coffee, John Houghton, remarked that “Coffee has greatly increased the Trade of Tobacco and Pipes, Earthen Dishes, Tin wares, News-Papers, Coals, Candles, Sugar, Tea, Chocolate and what not”. By the same token, Starbucks, Costa et al have greatly boosted the trade in milk, mugs, muffins, paper cups, CDs, chocolate and what not. These are heady times for the manufacturers of nutmeg-shakers. More significantly, the coffee shops have enabled commercial activity to happen in a neutral “third place” between home and the office, just as the eighteenth-century coffee house provided a place for the stockbroking fraternity to set up deals and exchange information. In his earlier book on the subject, Markman Ellis wrote that coffee houses – both in Britain and America – “played a central role in the institutionalization of financial markets; coffee houses in Boston and New York had hosted auctions of commodities and real estate – called vendues – since the seventeenth century”. In a way, therefore, it was the coffee houses of these earlier times which paved the way for the New York commodities market, the nemesis for Ethiopian coffee farmers now.

If we asked of the eighteenth-century coffee shop the kind of questions of global ethics which are posed by Black Gold, I suspect they would come off even worse than their modern equivalents. Coffee-shop sociability was not at all the same as the kind of global citizenship which the Fairtrade movement aspires to. There are numerous references in eighteenth-century pamphlets to coffee as a “Turk’s” or “Arabian” berry, but this did not entail much sympathy with the Turkish or Arab world. True, works of Natural History may refer to the Turkish ways of making coffee in an ibrik, and sometimes to the habit of mixing in a few grains of cardamom, and using coffee, as one treatise of 1685 puts it, as “an entertainment and a past-time, making the hours to slip away merrily in conversation, intermingling with their drink several pleasant and recreative discourses, which unawares brings up on their mind \[a\] forgetfulness of sorrows”. On the other hand, in The Coffee-house, a comedy from 1664, Mahoone, the Turkish coffee-man is presented as an entirely ridiculous figure, endlessly chasing after “de hore my Vife” and proclaiming that “de Chocolet and de Coffee make a de man live forever!” In Exchange-Alley, another coffee-house comedy from 1720, a stockjobber called Africanus, who aspires to the position of a gentleman, is shown dressed in a boar’s skin and walking on all fours.

Despite the centrality of coffee to all of these texts, there is little attempt to consider those who physically produced it. Perhaps this is in part because the coffee itself tasted so bad. There are many familiar accounts here of the effects of coffee – while caffeine was not isolated until 1819, coffee was always regarded as a “wakefull” drink or a “hinderer of sleep” – but when it comes to taste, many writers describe it as “insipid” or soot-like, or as a difficult taste to acquire. Visitors to England from the Continent agreed that the coffee was badly transported, badly kept, badly roasted and badly brewed. James Lightbody’s recipe for coffee from 1695 recommended boiling the coffee up with water for a quarter of an hour, which must have made it impossibly bitter, with most of the volatile oils destroyed; such advice remained typical for well over a century. In 1789, the traveller Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz complained that the custom for drinking weak coffee was so prevalent that “even the richest people will not use it when strong; the most contemptible tradesman in all Germany drinks better coffee than they do”. The reason was partly, Archenholz said, that the import duties on British coffee were so “exorbitant”.

Behind the cultural history of the coffee house is an economic story which struggles to come to the surface in Markman Ellis’s chosen texts. It is a lot less romantic than the Habermasian tale of sociability, but may be more instructive. Throughout the eighteenth century, British excise duties on coffee were swingeing – much higher than those in France, for example.

Initially, this served as a tax on the foreign merchants of Mocha or “Arabia”. From 1730 onwards, however, British colonists planted coffee in the West Indies, and they considered it unjust that they should have to submit to the same taxes, which made it hard for coffee to compete with tea from the East India Company. By 1774, with additional competition from Dutch planters in Suriname (on the north coast of South America), and cheap French imports from Mauritius, the West Indian planters were feeling very sorry for themselves, as John Ellis recounted in his Historical Account of Coffee:

Our unhappy adventurers in Coffee, in the Ceded Islands, begin as I am told, to lose all hope of that reward for their labours, which used to support them under every disappointment, a prosperous return to their family and friends. Their credit is totally stopt by the difficulties of the times, and their produce only yields them half of what it did in 1770 . . . . their affairs are at such a crisis that, unless they have immediate relief, from the wisdom and justice of Parliament; it is scarce possible but they must sink under their misfortunes.

The complaint of the Jamaican planters was the same as the Ethiopian farmers now: give us a level playing field and a fair price for our coffee and we will make a living for ourselves. The difference was, of course, that the planters did not do their own farming, but had others do it for them. Ellis in 1774 saw those who actually farmed the coffee plants as mere appendages to the colonists; the coffee-workers’ sufferings were only to be lamented insofar as they affected their masters’ purse:

Their losses in Negroes, and mules, have been immense from the difficulties attending the cultivation of island overgrown with woods, consequently damp and unhealthy; from the want to provision, and of proper shelter for their Negroes and cattle.

The sacrifice of human life for the sake of a cup of coffee is nothing new.

What is new, and new to the past two decades, is the huge rise in the quality of Anglo-American coffee represented by Starbucks et al, after decades of ersatz, instant and stewed coffee. For most of the twentieth century, British coffee wasn’t black gold; it was black dishwater. Coffee had been bad for a long time. The chunk of history which usually gets missed out from the story of coffee is the nineteenth century, the century par excellence of free trade and adulteration, which laid the groundwork for the willingness of the public to accept a pretty unpleasant beverage under the name of coffee. For cultural historians of coffee, such as Markman Ellis, the nineteenth century isn’t very interesting, because it represents the end of “the great age of the British coffee-house”, as tea-drinking gathered pace. But it didn’t represent the end of coffee. The difference was just that coffee, already a pretty disgusting drink in eighteenth-century London, became still worse, as it was padded with roasted beans and peas, chicory and mangel-wurzel. Again, the explanation is not solely cultural – in theory, coffee should have been getting much better, since the invention by Count Rumford of a coffee pot which didn’t stew it to death – but economic and political.

Political, because most of the ruling class did not think it much mattered whether chicory was sold under the name of coffee or vice versa: caveat emptor was the unthinking slogan of the times. Economic, because it was virtually impossible for the working-class coffee-sellers described by Mayhew to make any kind of living unless they sold coffee which was falsified as well as highly dilute. The average British consumer of coffee in 1850 was getting a terrible deal.

Now, we are still getting a terrible deal (two pounds for something that costs next to nothing to produce) but no one can claim they are being ripped off. If anything, the situation has become reversed. The consumer, assuming he or she has two pounds to burn, can buy themselves a cup of coffee which is wonderfully pure, pre-selected for taste by hundreds of nasal coffee-swillers, and brewed to perfection by a highly trained barista. Their two pounds will also buy them the use of a comfortable chair in a well-lit, air-conditioned room, for as long as they wish. We have moved from a nineteenth-century market in which the consumer was systematically ripped off to one where the consumer is king. If only the desires of this consumer could finally be made to collide with the needs of the coffee producers, we would be living in a kind of caffeinated paradise.

Bee Wilson is the author of The Hive: The story of the honeybee and us, 2004. Swindled: From poison sweets to counterfeit coffee; The dark history of the food cheats is due to appear early next year.

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