The World Coffee Market in the Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries, from Colonial To National Regimes

This paper is an exploration of the world coffee market in the nineteenth century when world trade expanded some 20 fold. Coffee is often dismissed as a "dessert crop," and an unnecessary luxury. True, it provided no nutrition, but its role in stimulating sociability, labor and diminishing hunger made it vital. Its trade intensified relations between the cultivators in the South and the consumers in the North. In economic terms it was the third most valuable internationally-trade commodity in the world at the end of the nineteenth century. Dominated by European consumption and the production of European colonies at the century's onset, by 1900 the Americas played a central role in both consumption and production. In an era that Eric Hobsbawm has termed "the Age of Empire," in which colonies and international trade were expanding in Asia, Africa, and Oceania, national production came to dominate in the Americas . The ex-colonies in the Americas were able to assert considerable influence over making and remaking global markets and prices.[...]