Coffee : A Dark History

by Wild, Antony

• ISBN13: 9780393060713
• ISBN10: 0393060713
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-01
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc

Summary

Linking alchemy, anthropology, politics, and science, Antony Wild uncovers the intrigue that coffee has woven into its 500-year history.Coffee trader and historian Antony Wild delivers a rollicking history of the most valuable legally traded commodity in the world after oil-and an industry that employs one hundred million people throughout the world.From obscure beginnings in East Africa in the fifteenth century as a stimulant in religious devotion, coffee became an imperial commodity, produced by poor tropical countries and consumed by rich temperate ones. Through the centuries, the influence of coffee on the rise of capitalism and its institutions has been enormous. Revolutions were once hatched in coffeehouses, commercial alliances forged, secret societies formed, and politics and art endlessly debated.Today, while coffee chains spread like wildfire, coffee-producing countries are in crisis: with prices at a historic low, they are plagued by unprecedented unemployment, abandoned farms, enforced migration, and massive social disruption.Bridging the gap between coffee's dismal colonial past and its perilous corporate present, Coffee reveals the shocking exploitation that has always lurked at the heart of the industry.

Author Biography

Antony Wild is the author of The East India Company and Remains of the Raj and is widely credited with having introduced specialty coffees into the UK

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Prologue	ix
1 The Way We Live Now	1	(16)
2 Origins	17	(17)
3 Enter the Dragon	34	(31)
4 The Mocha Trade	65	(19)
5 Coffee and Societies	84	(14)
6 The Fall of Mocha	98	(20)
7 Slavery and the Coffee Colonies	118	(23)
8 The Continental System and Napoleon's Alternative to Coffee	141	(8)
9 Napoleon and St Helena	149	(21)
10 Slavery, Brazil, and Coffee	170	(6)
11 The Great Exhibition	176	(7)
12 Harar and Rimbaud: the Cradle and the Crucible	183	(9)
13 Modern Times	192	(20)
14 Coffee, Science, and History	212	(14)
15 The Battle of the Hemispheres	226	(31)
16 Fair Trade	257	(14)
17 Espresso: the Esperanto of Coffee	271	(14)
18 The Heart of Darkness	285	(14)
Coda	299	(8)
Appendix The Find at Kush	307	(2)
Selected Further Reading	309	(4)
Index	313