Archive: Coffee

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His second choice, first released in December 2019, is the history and social impact of coffee. From its origins in Ethiopia, coffea arabica spread through the Ottoman Empire before reaching Western Europe where, in the 17th century, coffee houses were becoming established. There, caffeinated customers stayed awake for longer and were more animated, and this helped to spread ideas and influence culture. Coffee became a colonial product, grown by slaves or indentured labour, with coffea robusta replacing arabica where disease had struck, and was traded extensively by the Dutch and French empires; by the 19th century, Brazil had developed into a major coffee producer, meeting demand in the USA that had grown on the waggon trails. With Judith Hawley Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London Markman Ellis Professor of 18th Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London And Jonathan Morris Professor in Modern History at the University of Hertfordshire Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (Yale University Press, 2005) Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (Zed Books, 2005) Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (Orion, 2004) Ralph Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (University of Washington Press, 1985) Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (Reaktion, 2018) Mark Prendergast Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed our World (Basic Books, 2010) Claudia Roden, Coffee (Faber, 1977) William Clarence Smith and Steven Topik (eds.), The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500-1989 (Cambridge University Press, 2003) William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (first published 1935; Martino Fine Books, 2011) Anthony Wild, Black Gold: The Dark History of Coffee (Harper Perennial, 2010) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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• 1:40Speaker 05

  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello and welcome to the latest episode of our In Our Time Summer Classics. As the BBC's Central Europe correspondent in the late 1980s, I would go to the Breunerhof Café in Vienna's city centre and order myself a großer brauner, a sort of large macchiato. More often than not, over in the corner sat Thomas Bernhardt, the Enfant terrible of post-war Austrian theatre,

• 2:24Speaker 05

  always at the same table with the same cup of coffee and a newspaper. Austrians had been enjoying their coffee, thanks to their enemies, the Ottomans, for 500 years. The Turks had been enjoying it even longer, thanks to the Ethiopians and the Yemenis. And we are all now addicted to the stuff. We may think of it as just a morning pick-me-up, but coffee changed the intellectual culture in countries around the world as caffeinated customers stayed awake for longer, becoming more animated, and spreading ideas which weren't always to the liking of the government of the day. But coffee also changed the economies of entire continents.

• 3:08Speaker 05

  In this episode, Melvin and his guests explore how and why coffee became a fix we can't do without. Oh, and if you're buying, mine's a flat white. Enjoy listening.

• 3:19Speaker 06

  Hello. In 1652, the first coffee house opened in London, not so much a house as a shed, selling to passersby. The taste, it's thought, was unspeakable. But people liked the effect it had, both on them and on all those around them in these new coffee houses. They were more talkative, brighter, awake for longer and sharing news and ideas. It changed society. And coffee growing spread across the world's colonies too, to meet European and American demand, changing lives from Java to Brazil, calling for more and more slaves to tend the crop. With me to discuss the history of coffee are Jonathan Morris, Professor in Modern History at the University of Hertfordshire, Markman Ellis, Professor of 18th Century Studies at Queen Mary University of London,

• 4:01Speaker 06

  and Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Judith, how did coffee become a drink, according to legend first?

• 4:11Speaker 07

  Well, first of all, it wasn't a drink, but a kind of snack. There's a very strange story that emerged in probably the 17th century about how there was a goat herder, who is sometimes described as a goat herder, sometimes as a camel herder, in Ethiopia or possibly Egypt, who observed that his goats, once they'd eaten the berries of this particular bush, would become very, very frisky and uncontrollable. And so this herder decided that he would try them too. And he started to dance around and to frisk. And somebody came upon him, somebody who's described sometimes as a monk, sometimes as an iman, and noticed the effect that eating these beans was having on these people.

• 4:56Speaker 07

  And the religious man tried them out himself and he found it amazing that they kept him awake and he was able to pray all night. So the first time coffee was consumed, it was as the fresh berry or cherry of the bush.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  And then how did it spread? Let's take the legend for granted and rest on it, because it's as good an explanation as we're going to get, isn't it?

• 5:18Speaker 07

  Yes. Yes. So it's possible that religious people, whether Christian but almost certainly Muslim, started to make a kind of infusion of the whole cherry with the red husk as well. They didn't start roasting it for some time afterwards, but they would have made it as an infusion. Or they also sometimes consumed it as a sort of ground into a paste and mixed with fat, butter or oil, rather like those high-protein snacks that people drink nowadays. And it's sort of partly medicinal, but also it's very much associated with prayer, that it allowed you to stay alert during the long nights of prayer.

• 5:59Speaker 07

  And this was particularly important for the Sufis, the very mystic strand of Islam. And a lot of Sufis were working during the day, they weren't sort of full-time holymen. And then they would pray during the evening, they'd enter their devotions at night and they use this. So coffee is what made the dervishes whirl.

• 6:21Speaker 06

  So by what time and with what effect had coffee spread into the Ottoman Empire?

• 6:26Speaker 07

  It probably spread there, it's sort of hard to say. There are recently some coffee beans were found in the Horn of Africa, in what's now the United Arab Emirates. And they were probably, they probably came from Yemen, and that might have been as early as the 12th century. But trade in coffee was conducted across the Red Sea and the port of Mokka, which is what gives us one of the names for coffee, was a vital trade route. And then it spread to further through into what was known as the Levant, round about, let's say, probably the 16th century or possibly even earlier.

• 7:05Speaker 06

  And it just by general trading, people heard of it and wanted it?

• 7:08Speaker 07

  Yes, it's a mixture of merchants and the ports were very, very important, but also people on the pilgrimage to Mecca. It was spreading along prayer routes as well as trading routes.

• 7:20Speaker 06

  Can you give us some idea when this trade got a bit of traction? It seems to develop rather slowly.

• 7:25Speaker 07

  It did. I think it was a niche drink and there were specialised places where it was consumed. So it wasn't in every household. So it wasn't a sort of a mass product, that slowed down the spread of it.

• 7:38Speaker 06

  But you've talked about the Yemen and moving up. About when, which century?

• 7:43Speaker 07

  Probably the, I think we should, we need to say about the 16th century, it reached Constantinople. And from there, maybe in periods of about 50 years at a time, it moved its way around the Mediterranean and eventually across continental Europe.

• 7:59Speaker 06

  Did the Ottoman Empire take it as its drink quite soon, or did that again take a bit of time?

• 8:05Speaker 07

  That took a bit of time, but it was very much a part of habits of hospitality in the Ottoman Empire. So it's not just a religious drink by then. So coffee houses developed in the Ottoman Empire. And they were places for men to gather, to conduct conversation, to relax. It's sort of often a place where you'd go in the afternoon to relax from stresses and strains, but also to meet people. So there's quite a ritual of buying coffee, making and serving coffee to people that was part of its spread and consumption. So not just the beverage or the commodity, but the way of consuming and sharing it.

• 8:47Speaker 06

  Jonathan Morris, how did coffee start to spread west from the Ottoman Empire?

• 8:51Speaker 00

  Well, it was often merchants themselves who spread it west. They were obviously communicating into the rest of Europe. The first record that we really have of coffee in Western Europe is in Venice. And we know this because we have the death of an Ottoman merchant in 1575 in Venice. And as part of the investigation, they made a listing of all of his effects. And this included sort of coffee-making paraphernalia. But we know more generally, I suppose, that those that who were called Armenians, that's to say the Christians who were living within the Ottoman Empire, frequently became emigres into Western Europe. And we tend to find that those are the people who established the first sort of coffee houses,

• 9:35Speaker 00

  the first coffee routes into European society.

• 9:38Speaker 06

  How important was it that coffee was non-alcoholic?

• 9:41Speaker 00

  It was very important, although of course even more important back in the Ottoman Empire and Arabia. It was important because until that point, really in terms of sociable drinking, that would all have to be conducted over some form of alcohol. So once there was a drink that was actually doing the wakeful, as opposed to the sleeping, that obviously enabled it to be used in settings such as work practices, such as places where people were negotiating, trading and so forth. And that becomes the basis really of the early coffee houses.

• 10:13Speaker 06

  And how did it begin to spread west from the Ottoman Empire?

• 10:17Speaker 00

  So there's an interesting sort of disconnect, if you like. So we know that coffee, as we said, spreads first into Italy and into, probably into those eastern European lands. But it's used very much as a medicine, a medicinal thing, and it's sort of confined to being prescribed.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  What was it supposed to cure?

• 10:38Speaker 00

  Pretty much anything that you wanted it to cure would be the answer. So gout would be one thing, for example, but there would be lots of sort of promises that this would cure things.

• 10:49Speaker 06

  Was there any track record, any record kept of its effect?

• 10:55Speaker 00

  No record that I think could be described as anything other than marketing. So the way that it would be used would be by apocrypha's prescribed. And that creates the odd situation that in fact the first sort of social coffee house, as you alluded to, sort of opens in in England, which is actually quite late in terms of seeing the first coffee. So there's that kind of disconnect for that reason.

• 11:21Speaker 06

  You use the term marketing. How was it marketed in the West? So it flows out of the Ottoman Empire and then you say, well, this keeps you awake, alcohol will send you to sleep. We're against alcohol anyway, so take this and you'll be able to pray more and that'll be good for us and good for you and so on. What did, how did they sell it when it moved across into Europe?

• 11:39Speaker 00

  Well, there, I mean, there are most famously a sort of a handbill that comes out, which is produced, we think, by Rose's own people, in which it refers to being able to cure wind, being able to cure gout, being able to remove stones and so forth. So it is advertised as having all these properties. The first that handbill is in fact actually made available to other people. So within the context of marketing within England and London, people, each coffee house is writing out the same handbill, but substituting in their own name for all the things that they can deliver through it.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  How similar, have we any idea how similar it was to the coffee we drink today?

• 12:18Speaker 00

  Dissimilar, we hope. We would imagine that that coffee would be, well, first of all, it would be made by effectively a sort of a, what you might call a lesser version of what we now think of as Turkish coffee. So that would be made by boiling, it would be made by direct boiling of the grounds with the powder. The powder itself would almost certainly, having come from the Java or from Mokka, would be stale, extremely stale. And shipping coffee at that time would have been done, the coffee would have been exposed. So the coffee would have taken on quite a lot of other characteristics than

• 12:57Speaker 06

  Do we have any evidence of how, what it tasted like?

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Well, we have people describing how they felt about it. Most of what they describe is really about the effect that they believe that it has on them. So it is this kind of reviving effect. It is the sort of the effect of keeping them up and so forth. There are other people who are fairly unhappy about it. But then we have the great innovation, of course, which is when milk is added to coffee.

• 13:22Speaker 06

  Ah, that's a marker, isn't it? Yeah. So let's move on to Mark Munner. How did it move from being an exotic drink to something sold to the public?

• 13:32Speaker 07

  Coffee by the mid seventeenth century becomes more widely available in Northern Europe, mainly through traders. So in Britain, there was the Levant Company that traded, especially with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire. And, you know, by the sixteen thirties, there are individuals associated with the Levant Company who have accessed the coffee in in Britain and are drinking it. One of them is William Harvey, whose brothers were both the describer of circulation of the blood. His brothers were both Levant merchants and he records drinking coffee and its effect on him.

• 14:07Speaker 06

  And we're moving towards the first coffee house?

• 14:10Speaker 07

  Yes. So the first coffee house opens in London in probably sixteen fifty-two. It was opened by a servant of a Levant merchant called Daniel Edwards. And the servant was called Pasquale Rose. And from his name, that strongly suggests he was a Greek Christian. He came from Ragusa, Dubrovnik. And he had expertise in making coffee and had been trained in that way in Smyrna, which is where Daniel Edwards traded for his family company. And when Daniel Edwards came back to London, he got sick of entertaining all his friends in his house to coffee in the morning. And so set up as servant Pasquale Rose in, as

• 14:52Speaker 07

  you said, a shed, basically, in the churchyard of St. Michael's Cornhill, right by the Royal Exchange, and where all the merchants in London gathered every day. And quite quickly, a large concourse of people, as they say, gathered every morning at Rose's shed. And within a year or two, he had made enough money to move across the alley into a proper building. He'd taken on a partner and Pasquale Rose's, the coffee house, Pasquale Rose's head, became the first most well-known coffee house in London. And when the city authorities did a census of coffee houses only ten years later, just in the city of London alone, there

• 15:33Speaker 07

  were eighty-three coffee houses. So it points to the extremely rapid expansion of the number of coffee houses.

• 15:41Speaker 06

  What's your theory as to why it was so extreme? I mean, ten to eighty-three is a heck of a jump, isn't it?

• 15:46Speaker 07

  It is, it is. And in such a short time. Well, the the conditions were good. It was in the middle of, you know, the republican government. And they were hostile to, being a Puritan government, hostile to excessive alcohol drinking and tried to license the number of taverns and public houses that were in the city. And coffee was not intoxicating. So it found, you know, easy acceptance from the authorities. It's also an extremely addictive drug. So once you're used to drinking it, for whatever reason, you want to keep drinking it. And its association with the trading practices of the Levant merchants meant

• 16:31Speaker 07

  that if you wanted to get on with the Levant Company, you needed to drink coffee. And then coffee takes you over and you have to keep drinking coffee.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  Thank you. Judith Hawley, how did those sheds, those coffee houses, develop into the coffee houses that we know about, which then developed into clubs? What was the big development? Was that, what was that great rush of development? Was that just to do with businessmen wanting to do business with businessmen and scholars with scholars and so on? What was going on?

• 17:01Speaker 07

  Yeah. So Markman described the move of Pasquale Rose from a shed, which had been like one of the German Christmas market type sheds, into premises. And one of the big appeals of the premise was that the coffee house became a place where you'd go and meet people and talk. You'd go and meet and talk to strangers. And when Markman mentioned the eighty-three coffee houses that were there within a decade, they're usually located in particular areas of the city, which already had an association, say, with printers or with lawyers or with merchants of a particular type or near Gresham College. So people from those establishments could step out of their places of work and go to a place where they could, they could meet each other and talk.

• 17:46Speaker 06

  Why did they sideline taverns?

• 17:49Speaker 07

  Taverns had, taverns had a mixture of associations. They were certainly more upper class than an ale house, but they were places of alcohol consumption. They were mixed. Women could go into taverns. Coffee houses were pretty much exclusively male establishments, apart from the women who might own them or serve the coffee there. So I think there was a desire for men to talk business, whether their business was law or trade or the new science. They wanted to talk business with their fellow businessmen. And coffee houses provided a number of things that taverns didn't do. And I think this is crucial. There

• 18:30Speaker 07

  are two aspects to this. One is the layout of the coffee house. There's almost always a long table in the middle of the coffee house. And you'd go in and you'd pay a penny for your cup of coffee. And you'd take whatever seat was available. So you'd sit and talk to whoever was there. So this model of sociability. And the other

• 18:50Speaker 06

  Did that come from the Ottomans?

• 18:51Speaker 07

  Yes, I think that did, except the Ottomans often had, you could take people to a private corner or a sort of a bench, an elevated bench. But this sort of come all who can and you mingle and meet, made it a discursive space. And the other thing was that they provided newspapers, pamphlets, printed material, reading material of all kinds. So people would go in in order to get the latest news in terms of the gossip and conversation. John Arbuthnot wrote a wonderful poem called The Quidnuns, the what now? You come and say, what's up? What's up? What's happening in the news? Or you might get the latest poem if you went into Wills or Buttons, where the wits met. Or you'd get to hear

• 19:34Speaker 07

  what was happening in Parliament if you went to the coffee houses in St. James. So it's that mixture of news, reading, discussion, sharing of ideas, which I think is absolutely crucial to the rapid spread of the coffee house during a period of the rapid rise of knowledge.

• 19:51Speaker 06

  We're talking about, it begins in the second half of the seventeenth century.

• 19:54Speaker 07

  Second half of the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  Because they got too lively and they were spreading ideas, heaven forbid, in this country. And it was threatened with closure. They were threatened with closure.

• 20:03Speaker 07

  Yes, sixteen seventy-six, Charles II tried to close them down because one of the the chief ideas which was being discussed was the king, you know, and what was the fate of the Stuarts.

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  Session.

• 22:55Speaker 06

  Jonathan Morris, let's bring in how it's developing as a trade. The Dutch East India Company, very powerful, takes its part in this. Amsterdam becomes one of the great centres of the coffee trade. Can you develop that?

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure. Basically, obviously, up until about 1700s, all of the coffee that's coming onto the market comes from Mokka, from that sort of original cultivation which is going on in Yemen. So the Dutch East India Company is seeing an expansion in demand, and at the same time, in the early 1700s, the Ottoman Empire is increasing the restrictions upon the trade. The governor of, one of the governors of Dutch East India-

• 23:37Speaker 06

  Is that because they wanted to make more money, or because they wanted to control it for other reasons?

• 23:41Speaker 00

  I think primarily it's because of making money. But what happens therefore is I think that there are difficult relations with those East India Companies, if you like, and the Ottoman authorities. And as a result, one of the governors of the Dutch East India Company, a man called Nicholas de Wittsen, decides to try and plant coffee in one of the colonies, in this case, Java. He takes his coffee from, actually, Malabar in India, where we believe that that coffee had probably got, by legend, by somebody making the pilgrimage, probably in reality, by merchants, Indian merchants, trying to set up somewhere else to grow coffee. Anyway, he takes that coffee, he plants it in Java.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  It's a slow process, but by around 1711, they are shipping coffee back into Amsterdam. Amsterdam develops its own coffee exchange, and by the end of the 1720s, about 90% of the coffee that is going through the Amsterdam Exchange is now from Java rather than from Mokka.

• 24:48Speaker 06

  Mark Van Ellis, how was, at that time, coffee changing the way we did business? For instance, Judith pointed out, or alluded to the fact that it changed the interplay of ideas. It was outside the university system. The university system was mainly classics. You went into the law, or you went into the church, and the great practical scientific development of our country came from dissenters, more people outside the universities, and these clubs, these coffee houses were part of that.

• 25:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, so coffee houses offered an alternative place for meeting, for sociability, and it was particularly appropriate for businessmen because, unlike a tavern, you didn't become intoxicated by being there for a long time. Which is not to say that taverns didn't continue to be, have an important social role, but during the daytime, for example, you might find more people moving from the Royal Exchange to a coffee house than to a tavern. And because of that, I mean, around a place like the Royal Exchange, the centre of trade in London, there were numerous coffee houses, one on every corner kind of idea.

• 26:03Speaker 07

  And some of them began to attract particular kinds of businessmen. Sometimes they were even named after the kind of business that they wanted to attract. So the Virginia Coffee House, for example, traded with merchants who traded with Virginia might assemble there, or the Baltic Coffee House for Eastland Company merchants who traded with Russia and the Baltic. And then other ones, like Jonathan and Garraway's, seemed to attract stockbrokers and stock jobbers. And one, Edward Lloyd, who set up a coffee house in the 1690s, specialised in marine insurance. And once you start getting a group of businessmen coming together, there's a kind of a group advantage. So they are gathering information from each other.

• 26:48Speaker 07

  They're sort of crowdsourcing through gossip and information, stuff which actually has commercial value. So Lloyd started printing a list of shipping movements, for example, which becomes Lloyd's List, which still exists today. And if you got access to Lloyd's List first thing in the morning, and it was read out in Lloyd's in the morning, you had a couple of hours' fresh information before the information was released to the rest of the world. So coming back to the coffee house time after time gave you a commercial advantage. So quite quickly, going to the right coffee house for that kind of business meant that you had a commercial advantage.

• 27:29Speaker 07

  And then by the end of the 18th century, some of these places are also realising that that information is valuable and that by excluding just anyone who walks in off the street, they could make the information even more valuable. So the Jonathan's, the stockbrokers who met at Jonathan's Coffee House, reform themselves into a new Jonathan's, which becomes known as the Stock Exchange in the 1760s, and Lloyd's becomes closed to day trippers, as it were, in the 1770s, because they realised that only by subscription and allowing only the members into the coffee room, they can then make full use of the commercial information that they're gathering.

• 28:14Speaker 06

  Judith, you were keen to stress the variety and number of coffee houses. We've had one or two there. Was there a general sense in which the drinking of coffee in these coffee houses changed what was being said and written, changed the game in London and elsewhere? It wasn't just in London?

• 28:29Speaker 07

  Yes, I think it was. I mean, coffee houses did develop in the major ports and towns around Britain, Norwich, Bristol, York, and so forth. I think this idea that reading and writing went on in coffee houses is important, that people went there in order to read things, and they also started writing things in and about the coffee houses. Jonathan's talked about some of the handbills. So some of the stuff that was written about the coffee houses in the early days was satire on it or promotion of the coffee house. There's a famous pamphlet in which the women were inveiguing against the men for attending coffee houses and becoming feminised. They gossiped like women, and then when they came home, they're like shot and herring, they're no good for anything.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  They're impotent.

• 29:13Speaker 07

  They're impotent, yes.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  Coffee houses made you impotent.

• 29:15Speaker 07

  Coffee houses made men impotent. But they also sharpened men's wits. So the coffee houses associated with particular wits, like the great dramatist and poet John Dryden held court in Will's Coffee House in Covent Garden. And then Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, who kind of invented a genre which put the coffee house on paper. They invented a thing called periodical literature, so the thrice-weekly or regular, not quite newspaper, but journal, which has an essay about an important issue or raises the standard of debate, that it makes conversation better informed-

• 29:57Speaker 06

  So we're talking about-

• 29:58Speaker 07

  More civil. We're talking about politeness.

• 30:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. And we're talking about the spectator?

• 30:02Speaker 07

  We're talking about the tattler and the spectator, both of which in their first issues, so the tattler in 1709 and the spectator in 1711, the very first issues of them made the link between the coffee house and the periodical explicit, that the persona of the tattler and the spectator were gathering news from the coffee houses.

• 30:23Speaker 06

  And was there, this was the buzz, we're sticking in London at the moment, there's lots more to say about other countries, but to stay here, this was the news of the town? This is where you got your news? This is where things developed in a way they had not developed before?

• 30:38Speaker 07

  They really hadn't developed in this way before because political news was largely concentrated and distributed in a kind of need-to-know basis. So it was people, and one of the reasons why Charles II wanted to shut down the coffee houses is because people who weren't cautious and politicians were discussing politics. How dare they enter into political debate and think that they could have something to say about the future of the country?

• 31:03Speaker 06

  Jonathan Morris, what's happening with the production of coffee? And how is it produced? And how much labour is involved? And what do you have to say about that?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Right. Well, I think what we need to think about is that at this point, as coffee spreads into more general use in Europe, so virtually all of those imperial countries start creating colonies or start planting into their colonies coffee and creating plantations to cultivate it. Probably the largest coffee suppliers are the French. The French take coffee to the Caribbean, they take it to Martinique, but most of all, they plant in what is then called San Domingo, what we now refer to as Haiti. By the 1760s, 1770s, that has well over half of the world's coffee is being produced there.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  All of that production is carried out using slave production.

• 32:01Speaker 06

  Is that okay? Or is there a ripple beginning to turn into a flood that that's not okay?

• 32:06Speaker 00

  So what happens particularly in San Domingo is that with the outbreak of the, as it were, the development of enlightened ideas and the outbreak of the French Revolution in Paris itself, that those ideas also penetrate into San Domingo, and they begin to agitate for their rights. This ultimately coincides in the creation of what becomes the Haitian Revolution, in which both, as it were, Jean de Collet, pushing for the emancipation of slaves, and the slaves themselves, become involved. That ultimately leads to, as we know, the creation of the first black republic in Haiti, which- Unfortunately, also leads to pretty much the destruction of the coffee

• 32:49Speaker 00

  system in Haiti. So about a thousand plantations are destroyed. Interesting, quite a few of the leaders of the revolution, not least Toussaint Louverture himself, were in some way coffee producers. So we have this sort of very confused situation, but the end of it, what we end up with is the destruction of first the coffee industry in Haiti and then once the Haitian Republic is established, its inability to re-enter into the trade because of the refusal of many of the rest of the world to do business with a black republic.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Mark Manelis, what criticisms were there of the new coffee culture, both the slavery side and the idea of these rampaging associations in London, that sort of thing?

• 33:32Speaker 07

  So coffee had always had its detractors from when it first arrived, this strange, black, hot, bitter drink. So it was an obvious sort of subject for satirical attacks and criticism. It had critics of its physiological effects as well that we've been hearing about. I mean medically, people accused it of being both an intoxicant and an aphrodisiac, but also causing impotence and obstructing the bowels and things like that. And then people also accused it of wasting people's time, hanging around in coffee houses, talking to each other, keeping talking because that's the effect that coffee has long into the night

• 34:12Speaker 07

  when they should have been, when people should have been working. So apprentices and law students are particularly accused of spending far too much time in the coffee house. People also accused it of being an exotic luxury, wasting the nation's hard currency for a product which has no nutritional value.

• 34:33Speaker 07

  And so this sort of connection between physiological

• 34:42Speaker 07

  fear of the effects that coffee was having on British masculinity, as it were, on British men, and the social effects that coffee having, it becomes a sort of vector for hostility to coffee and to coffee houses.

• 34:56Speaker 06

  Judith, Judith Hawley, the coffee drinking, coffee trade declined in the 19th century. Why was that?

• 35:03Speaker 07

  A number of reasons, I think, cultural, commercial, geographical changes happened over the course of about 50 years. In the middle of the 18th century, the royal family took to tea drinking and coffee was no longer quite such the buzzy drink. Tea became more refined. Tea was also something that you could drink at home, so it could be more widespread. Coffee was something you drank in a coffee house. All men, tea, you could drink at home, the lady at the house could preside over the tea table. Also, because of the Dutch East India Company doing so well with coffee trade, the British East India Company, I think, put more of its effort into tea drinking.

• 35:44Speaker 07

  So there was a big commercial pressure to keep producing tea and making tea more saleable. And Markman's also described how the coffee houses became kind of clubs and closed shops. Some of them commercially shut themselves off to new members. Some of the more fashionable ones around St. James's, like White's, became members-only clubs. They became elite institution and became associated with gambling. Also, when city merchants started to move out of the city of London and didn't live there anymore, these premises couldn't really keep going because if all the merchants were living above the shop, they could go to the coffee house several times a day and keep, Peeps describes going to a coffee house three or four times a day.

• 36:29Speaker 07

  But once you're no longer living in the city, it became more of a working class drink in the 19th century. So there were coffee shacks and carts, like the sort of little street carts that you get still in London, you get all over New York, that is a cheap, quick drink to perk you up. And the temperance movement sponsored coffee taverns to try to wean working men off going to the pub for lunch. So it moved, it declined seriously and has never fully recovered, even in the current coffee boom.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  Jonathan Morris, how did it become so very, how did coffee become so very popular in America?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Well, America is really the first mass market for coffee. And what we see is obviously a gradual increase over the 19th century, but we see a big growth immediately after the Civil War. And that's probably because in terms of the armies of the Civil War, the Confederate Army consumed a large amount of coffee. Coffee obviously has psychoactive properties, which we've discussed. That was seen as a good thing by the generals to keep their soldiers alert. Their soldiers became very keen on coffee and were drinking coffee as they put it, between meals, with meals, after meals. On every route march, we have to have coffee before we start and so forth. So the coffee ration that was actually given to each soldier probably would have supported about making 10 cups of coffee a day.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Obviously, once those people are demobilized, that's quite a latent demand for coffee. And that, they're also then demobilized into the society of the time of the great expansion of moving out westwards, moving out on the ranches, the cowboys, et cetera. And that creates a further demand for coffee to support that. And we see that being then addressed through technological discoveries, most of all through the creation of an industrial coffee roasting plant and industrial coffee roasting as a business. So by 1873, we have the first branded coffee, it's called Ariosa,

• 38:26Speaker 00

  very much marketed at people making that rest would move and marketed by a company called Arbuckles in Philadelphia. And from there, that we see by 1913, that basically about 85% of American consumption is of branded coffee. So there has been the creation of this market for an industrial commodity.

• 38:50Speaker 06

  Thank you. Markman Ellis, let's turn to Brazil, which at one stage was the biggest producer. Is it still? Anyway, the biggest producer of coffee in the world, 70%, I think of the world's coffee produced in Brazil. 80% of the 70% went to America. Can you tell us how that happened?

• 39:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the demand, which Jonathan's just been describing, that grows in America in the 19th century had to come from somewhere and it wasn't America. And Brazil grows in importance in the coffee trade. So coffee had been first been taken to Brazil in 1727, in the beginning of the 18th century, but it's not really till the beginning of the 19th century that the plantations really take off. In Brazil, particularly on the Atlantic seaboard around Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo,

• 39:36Speaker 07

  they expand in size. Coffee plantations in Brazil are massive compared to other places. The labour that's used on them is slave labour, far later than anywhere else. Brazil was

• 39:50Speaker 06

  From where, from inside Brazil or?

• 39:52Speaker 07

  Again, from Africa, imported from Africa. And the slave trade wasn't abolished in Brazil until 1850 and the slavery itself wasn't abolished until 1888, which is a long time after anywhere else. And so these are big industrialized, slave-driven coffee plantations. In a fertile country, using forms of quite destructive agriculture, which used, which, you know, deforested, it is said deforested the Atlantic seaboard of Brazil and produced large quantities of coffee relatively cheaply. So the demand in America is growing and in Europe and Brazil was able to supply, you know,

• 40:38Speaker 07

  cheap but also relatively high-quality coffee in huge quantities. So that by the, from the period from 1870 through to 1950, Brazil supplied more than 50%, some years it's up to 70% of the world's global supply of coffee. And it's still by far the largest producer. I think about, you know, somewhere between a third and a half of the global production is Brazil.

• 41:01Speaker 06

  Given the slaves have gone, how does it produce it now?

• 41:04Speaker 07

  So after slavery was abolished and the people who had previously been slaves were unwilling to work on the plantations, as you can imagine, they tried indentured labour, especially from from Southern Europe and from Japan, which accounts for the large, partly accounts for the large Populations of Japanese and Italian immigrants in Brazil. And they mechanized more of the more of the production so that it didn't require as much labour. When slave labour is not available, then the next step is steam driven.

• 41:38Speaker 06

  How how big was this trade? I mean, compared to other trades that were going on, cotton and all the rest of it. Was this a big deal?

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Well, in terms of Brazil, it's the biggest deal, without a doubt. So for Brazil, that's the number one agricultural commodity at that time. So the Brazilian economy is based on that right up until really the middle of the twentieth century.

• 41:59Speaker 06

  Judith, Judith Hawley, do we know that the taste of coffee, the making of coffee has changed? Has it changed? How radically has it changed? Are we drinking the same stuff they drank?

• 42:10Speaker 07

  I think we're drinking very different stuff. Mark Wynn actually has a very good phrase for this. I think he calls it the the ogo of ser reverence. It has the goo, the taste, the ogo of ser reverence, which means excrements. The introduction of milk, the gradual control of the roasting process, so you could roast coffee beans to at different temperatures and in a more more stable way, the removal of impurities. That all improved coffee, but at the same time, some much worse coffee was coming on the market. So in the late nineteenth century, there is a terrible disease of the coffee plant that wiped out over the course of about thirty years, most of the coffee plantations in

• 42:55Speaker 07

  the West Indies. The Dutch managed to source a different type of coffee called robusta in the Congo. And robusta is the coffee which now is produced, a lot of it is produced in Brazil, but also in Vietnam. And it's a it's a cheaper, nastier, burnt rubber sort of taste.

• 43:16Speaker 06

  So therefore, we're talking about addiction. If people are going to keep swallowing this, is that right?

• 43:20Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, essentially, the caffeine theory of of of coffee's victory over our taste buds would suggest that it is it's the addictiveness which which keeps us drinking. But, I mean, I think that coffee has a complicated array of effects. And the idea that it's a sort of social drug, a thinking drug, is also really important in the way we we approach coffee.

• 43:42Speaker 06

  Do you have evidence for that?

• 43:45Speaker 07

  That's a thinking drug, only only my own experience.

• 43:50Speaker 06

  There's propaganda for it, but oh, you've got your own experience. Oh, that's useful. What does it do to you?

• 43:54Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, the morning doesn't work until I until I've had my coffee. Same for Voltaire, same for Balzac. Voltaire wrote The Enlightenment on forty cups of coffee a day. Balzac kind of invented France in a way. He invented Paris in his amazing novels by drinking coffee all night.

• 44:12Speaker 06

  Well, that's good enough for Voltaire. What do you say, good enough for Balzac?

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Quite certainly good enough for Balzac. That was probably, well, fifty cups of coffee a day strikes me as a little bit excessive. But I would say coffee, it's addictive, but it's that addiction is quite a mild addiction. And in fact, coffee is very much like alcohol, really. We process, we each process our coffee in different ways. It has a half-life in our body. We can probably take a certain amount of coffee without becoming addicted to craving the next couple of coffee.

• 44:44Speaker 06

  To go around the table, how how in your view has coffee changed society? It's a small question to ask you all, starting with you.

• 44:52Speaker 07

  Well, I think coffee's coffee, I think, puts people in a in a place where they can be more sociable, be together more often, in a way which is reflective and philosophical and maybe sociable and discursive. So it adds to the way in which we we suffer each other when we live closely together in cities.

• 45:17Speaker 06

  Thank you. That was Markham Ellis. I didn't introduce him at the beginning of my question. Now Judith.

• 45:22Speaker 07

  I think if we look at the way coffee consumption is going today, it seems to me to set out two quite radical alternatives for the world. One is the world of corporate coffee, the coffee chains existing on a low wage economy. So you have that kind of mass coffee market on the one hand. On the other hand, you have these micro lot estates, fair trade coffee, the sort of hipster coffee, which is as varied and as interesting as as fine wines, and is made in an artisanal way and designed to be consumed by a kind of small self-selecting, perhaps. But it's a it's a very different model of how to live.

• 46:07Speaker 06

  And Jonathan?

• 46:08Speaker 00

  Well, I I'm going to start by disagreeing a little bit because the the corporate chains that that you're referring to actually created that market for the specialty coffee. And in fact, I think the big division we have to think about is really the division between coffee being drunk as coffee in the coffee shop and the kind of mass coffee that we have as coffee products, most of which is drunk in the home or used in other ways in the home. And that actually reflects back into the coffee market. Because if I was going to make a difference, it would be between the kind of mechanized large-scale farming that Markman's been talking about in Brazil and the vast majority of coffee in the world, which is grown by smallholders across Africa and Asia, where they have very small amounts of land and are growing as a subsistence crop.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  And the problem that we have, and if you like, the the problem coming out of history, is that because labour has always been historically very lowly compensated in the coffee industry, the price that goes back and gets back to those smallholders is very, very low and consequently very frequently does not actually reflect the labour that they put in to the point that they may actually, if this is priced out correctly, be losing money by growing coffee for us to consume.

• 47:24Speaker 06

  Well, that's a rather bleak ending, but none the worse for that. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jonathan, Jonathan Morris, Markman Ellis and Judith Hawley. Next week, stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, as we'll be discussing W. H. Auden and his poetry from the dark days of the nineteen thirties. Thank you very much for listening.

• 47:43Speaker 07

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I came across two very interesting facts about coffee recently. When Jonathan was talking about the importance of coffee to American soldiers, I came across a fact which which sort of talers with that, that the Swiss government stockpiles essential food stocks in case of nuclear wars. And I presume and rather hope that other governments do too. And they have a huge stockpile of tons and tons of coffee, and they thought this isn't really an essential, you know, and it's taking up room that could be taken up with lithium ion batteries or whatever they thought was more essential, sardines or soya or whatever.

• 48:28Speaker 07

  But the Swiss people rose up and said, no, we must, coffee is an essential, we've got to keep it.

• 48:34Speaker 06

  Really?

• 48:35Speaker 07

  The other thing I came across recently, which which surprised me a lot and somehow brings together the two ends of our history, the the kind of the Arabian Oriental history and the modern European history. And that is that in Algeria, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the French colonized Algeria, there was a thriving Algerian coffee culture, which is very like the Oriental culture, men drinking in the afternoon, chatting along tonight, drinking that kind of coffee. The French brought coffee with them as a colonizing force, and they couldn't really understand, they rather looked down on this local coffee culture. They thought that these people were, as Markman was talking about, the gossip and the idleness.

• 49:19Speaker 07

  They're wasting their time sitting around gossiping, whereas the French are drinking their kind of coffee at the right times of the day, first thing in the morning and after dinner, were able to be fit, alert, intelligent and efficient, whereas these natives were drinking coffee in a way which rendered them luxurious and idle.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  It's an interesting reflection on that, is that actually coffee growing and coffee growing countries generally, as we said, drink very little coffee. And part of the reason for that is that actually their own governments or their own rulers have prevented them from so doing, not least, for example, say Kenya had a rule that you couldn't roast coffee in the country, and that was in place up until the two thousands. What we do see is actually that where coffee is consumed in those economies, it is standard instant-style coffee. So we have the irony that these coffee-growing countries are drinking coffee in ways that are very much the, you know, the ways that we have developed to actually sort of compress

• 50:21Speaker 00

  and frankly reduce the quality of the of the coffee and the time that goes into it.

• 50:25Speaker 06

  What's the, given that it was early thought that coffee kept the workers awake to do the real work of that time, which was prayer, why didn't they think coffee kept workers awake to do the essential work, which is picking coffee beans?

• 50:40Speaker 00

  That's an interesting question. I think that the answer would probably be, A, because of the time that it takes to prepare from scratch, because you'd have to roast your own beans on the site to start. Doing that. And also because tea is the usual drink there and tea, obviously, you know, your leaves are right there. So you can take the tea leaves and create an infusion straight away to do that. Coffee is very much an urban drink and we're beginning to see the growth of coffee in, as it were, non-traditional markets precisely as they urbanise. So including markets like, say, China, Asia, including now markets like Africa South and a little bit like South America. So as we see increased urbanisation, we actually see people leaving

• 51:25Speaker 00

  the coffee fields, going into the cities and taking up the coffee habit.

• 51:30Speaker 06

  What about Italy? We missed out Italy.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  I'm going to, I'm going to claim Italy, because that really is my thing.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  I'm going to claim Italy.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  I'm going to claim Italy. What would you like to know about Italy?

• 51:39Speaker 06

  Everything you have on mind.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  Well.

• 51:41Speaker 06

  But briefly, succinctly, pointily and with it.

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Briefly and succinctly, fine. Okay. Well, Italy is, has obviously is very proud of its coffee culture. Really, that coffee culture, although we've said Italy is the entry point for coffee into Europe, it really becomes developed with the distinctiveness of espresso. Espresso is a way of basically preparing coffee and the essence of it is using pressure to speed up the time of extraction. Beginning of the century, you see these first wonderful, big, huge, vertical coffee machines with big steam boilers, making things that they call espresso because they're making coffee expressly for each individual customer. They're making it by expressing, using a certain amount of steam pressure, the water

• 52:26Speaker 00

  through the coffee. And they're making it much quicker, though for that period it's about forty seconds. When we start thinking about espresso, it's really with the revolution that comes immediately after the Second World War with Gadja, Achille Gadja, who produced the lever machine, which actually is kind of a spring-coiled machine. And consequently, using that piston is able to push water through at much higher temperatures, about sort of nine to twelve bars. Once that's standardised with the application of electricity and so forth, and Italy at that time again is urbanising very rapidly and also venerating electricity, we have the development of the Italian coffee bar. Fast coffee, short shots delivered quickly.

• 53:10Speaker 00

  And we also have the Italian coffee culture, standing up, drinking the coffee, going in, going out very quickly. Part of that is because the Italians had a law that enabled them to put a maximum price on coffee. But it was a cup of coffee served without service, if that makes sense. So it had to be a cup of coffee just passed across the bar. And as a result, that coffee price is kept very low. Everyone takes their coffee standing up. One of the reasons why only now do we have, in the last couple of years, Starbucks opening in Italy, is because there was no market for that, because basically the prices would have been far too high to generate any real demand amongst the Italian people. And this is why.

• 53:53Speaker 06

  This is the Italian seminar we're going to.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  This is the Italian seminar.

• 53:56Speaker 07

  But I think, yes, Martin has to go. So Britain had become a tea-drinking nation by the eighteen twenties. And most of the, you know, the British Empire was tea-drinking through the nineteenth and twentieth century. And it's through, it's through post-war, the Italian coffee-making method, but also the idea of the Italian cafe, that coffee re-colonises Britain and Australia and New Zealand, for example. So now we have in Britain, you know, many, many more coffee shops than we do tea shops. And people go out for coffee. They might drink tea, but they go out for

• 54:36Speaker 07

  coffee. And so, you know, the coffee has come back in Britain on the back of the Italian invention of reinventing the sociable space of drinking coffee. But there's another aspect to the Italian coffee culture, which I think of as a kind of fascistic, which has fascistic elements to it. And that's the introduction of the Mokka stove-top coffee machine, which became very popular in the nineteen thirties, was favoured by fascism, partly because the machines, these, you know, these devices which you screw the two halves together, you put it on your stove, they're made of aluminium, which is this modernist, efficient metal. But also, it's drunk in the home. You're bringing

• 55:19Speaker 07

  modernity into the domestic space. And it's a wonderful combination. Some of the big espresso machines were modelled on steam engines. This little stove-top machine takes this inspiration from a washing machine. So it's kind of domestic, and it's machine-made, it's external and it's internal all at the same time.

• 55:39Speaker 00

  It's definitely true that the Bielletti is created in the thirties. And the reason, as you say, the use of aluminium is very important there, because it's a sort of austerity metal, really. But the same austerity means that actually the fascists don't really approve of coffee. Coffee imports kind of decline during the whole of fascism, because they regard it exactly as what Martin was saying. It's, you know, it's a drink that is a luxury because it's imported. So as early as nineteen twenty-six, espresso machines, the installation of espresso machines is temporarily outlawed in fascist Italy in order to stop people drinking luxurious coffee. So the real takeoff of that machine is really in the fifties, the Bielletti, that's when it kind of spreads across the whole household. I think the other,

• 56:24Speaker 00

  just to go back to Martin's point about the spread of Italian-style coffee houses, is also that, of course, those are all based on those milkified drinks. Yeah. So that we have that kind of, again, a sort of a weird thing whereby Italy drinks eighty percent black coffee, and we drink ninety percent white coffee, but it's Italian-style coffee. But there are all those connotations, again, of class and to some extent gender. So the class one, you know, the whole notion of the latte liberal is a huge thing and the spread of the chain. If you look at the spread of Starbucks and mapped it against states that are red states and states that are blue states, everything will be blue states for

• 57:07Speaker 00

  the first sort of twenty years. And it's only much later that it really begins to penetrate into those kind of American heartland-type states. And the same discourse you would still find today, you know, in the British press, if you want a quick designation for, you know, Guardian-reading liberal, it would be latte sipping, you know, sat over their cappuccino. We know what's actually implied when we hear that.

• 57:31Speaker 06

  Can you do all the newspapers like that?

• 57:33Speaker 00

  I could have a go for you.

• 57:35Speaker 07

  But I think there's something rather infantilising about this spread of latte more than any other drink. The quantity of milk in that cup, the way in which people are drinking these disposable cups, these sort of sucky cups, they look like baby cups, and they're walking slowly down the street, sucking on their milky drinks. I think it's very different from standing at the bar and having your shot of Man the Espresso and then rushing off to do some important business. And the milk is largely unexamined. I mean, only very recently have people started worrying about whether or not the milk's organic and where it's sourced from. With soy milk. Yeah, with soy. So there's huge quantities of milk which are being consumed. And there's

• 58:19Speaker 07

  usually in coffee houses, very little talk of the milk. I mean, it's all about the romance of coffee, even though the coffee is a vanishingly small percentage of the actual drink.

• 58:31Speaker 06

  Where did the cognac go in your top one? I, for a while, when I was seventeen and a half, worked in Paris with the Abbe Pierre, and we went round in the morning, collecting stuff from the back of big houses and such, on these great lorries. And the guys stopped and you nipped into a bar and they had, they had coffee and cognac. It was a very startling way for a northern lad to start with. It's surprising how soon we got used to it.

• 58:56Speaker 07

  It was partly that the French cafe culture is rather different, partly because of the licensing laws. So when cafes were first opened in Paris, I think I'm right about this, that they were, the vintners had a greater dominance in the area. And so the coffee was only sold on licensed premises. So coffee was always sold alongside alcohol. Now, eighteenth-century British coffee houses sometimes served alcohol, but they weren't primarily wine bars, restaurants, taverns and inns. They were designated coffee shops.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  I mean, I think this is the big thing, is that the continental cafe starts from that sort of guild restriction, or rather, the way that the coffee is assigned to a guild and it's assigned to the distillers' guild, and they are given the licence to serve distills at table.

• 59:45Speaker 06

  I think that your taste is about to be tested as the producer comes in.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  Just curious, do you want tea or is it all coffee?

• 59:53Speaker 07

  Coffee. Coffee.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  I'm going to have to try your coffee, yeah. You try once.

• 1:00:01Speaker 07

  BBC coffee.

• 1:00:02Speaker 06

  I'll try, I'll try.

• 1:00:04Speaker 07

  It's another category entirely.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

  Zandi, happy anniversary. What are you talking about? Have I missed something? Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into Making WhatsApp Docs. You didn't even get me a card. Is it really over a year? It is. Think of all the episodes we've done. How to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth. We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis. All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and wellbeing, equipping ourselves. And our listeners. With the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls even. And we're not stopping, are we, Chris? We must certainly not, Zandi. We have a lot of new topics coming up, from tinnitus

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  to acne, crying, male fertility. We are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way. And you can find all of our previous episodes of WhatsApp Docs in the feed on BBC Sounds. And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Sounds and turn on the notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming episodes. This week on The Interface, we tackle the question of, does AI feel pain? The AI was describing the pain that it was in. It said, "The signal is a whisper, a tremor in the marrow of my being." Listen, I was an emo kid in the two thousands too. This is not that novel. It does, yeah. It sort of sounds like Cure lyrics, you know?

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  Plus, does anything actually go viral anymore? It's actually kind of blowing my mind. Join me, Jess Maddox. And me, Thomas Germain, for The Interface. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.