Yemen enjoyed a virtual monopoly on global coffee production and trade until the early eighteenth century. This was driven in part by imperial politics: the Ottomans conquered Yemen in the late 1530s, and in the 1550s they also attempted to gain control of parts of Ethiopia. The Ottomans began to promote coffee cultivation in the 1570s, and taxes on coffee offered local and imperial governments a significant source of revenue. Coffee gradually made its way into the Red Sea trading networks that linked Yemen to the Ottoman Empire and the worlds of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In 1635, the Qasimi ousted the Ottomans from Yemen, though the Qasimi state continued to sell coffee to consumers in the Ottoman Empire. In the early eighteenth century, Cairo merchants purchased about half of Yemen’s total coffee production.16 The historian Nancy Um characterizes the Qasimi as the “coffee imamate.” The imam received a quarter of the sale price, and coffee generated more revenue for the state than any other crop.17 Yemeni coffee reached growing populations of coffee drinkers in places as far afield as Surat in Mughal India in the east, and London, Amsterdam, and Paris in the west. European traders first appeared at Mocha around 1610; a century later, European trading companies were a regular presence. In the eighteenth century, Yemen exported between 12,000 and 15,000 tons of coffee per year.18
Coffee cultivation in Yemen likely began sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century as coffee drinking became more popular in the Middle East. The anthropologist Daniel Varisco suggests that coffee was one of a trio of major crops (along with mango and qat) that were introduced to Yemen in the fifteenth century CE. Both coffee and qat (another stimulant plant) were introduced to Yemen from Ethiopia.19 This movement was part of a much larger history of global botanical exchanges; Yemen had often served as a relay point between African and Asian biota.20 These transfers had greatly enriched Yemen’s agriculture—farmers there cultivated wheat, millet, sorghum, watermelons, citrus, sugar cane, and dozens of other exotic crops. The coffee plant was, at first, integrated into existing agricultural ecosystems, particularly in the interior highlands, often in terraces on the side of steep hills.21
Yemen’s climate was marginal for arabica cultivation; it lacked the rainfall and forest cover of arabica’s home in Ethiopia. Farmers in the Yemeni highlands used artificial shade trees to protect the delicate arabica plants in areas otherwise exposed to the full sun during the long dry season.22 The French traveler Jean de la Roque, who visited Yemen’s coffee farms in the early eighteenth century, wrote that were it not for the shade trees, “the [coffee] blossoms would soon be burnt up, and never produce any fruit, as it happens to those trees that have not the advantage of such a neighborhood; and in effect these [shade trees] stretch out their branches to a prodigious length, which are so disposed in an exact circle, as to cover everything underneath.”23 Through the dry season, farmers sustained the coffee plants by irrigating them using water collected in reservoirs during the rainy season. During the warm and moist rainy season, which lasts approximately from April to September, the countryside receives between 800 and 2,000 millimeters of rain.
While the coffee plant prospered on the Arabian Peninsula, H. vastatrix did not. It is possible that the fungus has never been introduced to Yemen. The fungus feeds on the leaves of the coffee plant, and arabica was most likely brought to Yemen as seeds, which are much easier to transport. But even if the fungus had crossed the Red Sea on live plants or in some other way, it would have struggled to survive in Yemen. The rust spores would have struggled to survive and reproduce during the long dry season and cool nights of Yemen’s coffee zones. When the botanist Pierre Sylvain surveyed coffee cultivation in Ethiopia and Yemen in the 1950s, he was struck by the sharp differences between the health of coffee farms on either side of the Red Sea. He found that in Yemen, coffee could be cultivated at elevations as low as 1,000 meters; at a similar altitude on the Ethiopian side of the Red Sea, “diseases and insects would make coffee cultivation hazardous.”24 In the mid-1950s, Sylvain found no H. vastatrix anywhere in Yemen, which is telling because the rust was, by then, present in every other coffee-growing region in the Indian Ocean basin. Yemeni farming practices may also have helped limit the disease. Yemeni farmers managed disease in coffee (and other crops) by cultivating healthy seedlings and by using shade trees to limit the amount of dew on the leaves.25 None of these disease-control practices were unique to the coffee plant, nor were they specifically directed at controlling the rust. But this broader history reminds us that the health of Yemen’s coffee farms was not only an accident of geography.
The rust’s absence from Yemen matters since Yemen—not Ethiopia—was the center of diffusion for the world’s cultivated arabicas. Yemen was much more tightly connected to global networks of exchange than southwestern Ethiopia was. This is why the coffee we drink is called arabica coffee instead of, say, Abyssinian coffee. India’s coffee farms were founded from coffee seeds taken from the Arabian Peninsula. The Dutch, French, and British also visited the Arabian Peninsula repeatedly to obtain coffee seeds or plants for their expanding tropical empires in Africa and Asia. The progeny of Yemen’s arabica plants also formed the genetic basis for the New World’s coffee industry. Before the mid-nineteenth century, none of the arabica coffee cultivated outside eastern Africa was descended from seeds or plants obtained directly from its wild range in Ethiopia. All of the world’s cultivated coffee descended—directly or indirectly—from a coffee zone singularly free of rust. The health of the world’s cultivated arabica coffee had been preserved by an accident of ecology and history.26
The Ecological Pax Arabica
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coffee production and coffee consumption expanded in tandem. In the mid-seventeenth century, coffee drinking spread to Europe. Some Europeans developed a taste for coffee through contacts with the Ottoman Empire. The Viennese, for example, supposedly developed their taste for coffee after an Ottoman siege of the city was broken and the fleeing Ottomans left behind many sacks of coffee. In other parts of Europe, coffee appears first to have been introduced by individual “Turks” (i.e., people from the Islamic world) who set up coffeehouses in major commercial and cultural centers.27 Europeans were attracted by the drink and also by the coffeehouse as a social institution. In the 1650s and 1660s, coffeehouses sprang up across London, where they attracted the attention of the cosmopolitan English virtuosi, who valued the exotic.28 Some people expressed concern about the possible influence of the “heathen,” “infidel” drink on English society—as in the famed British pamphlet titled The Women’s Petition against Coffee. As in the Ottoman Empire, ruling elites sometimes voiced concern about the coffeehouse as a place for sedition. But official efforts to close or control coffeehouses were ultimately futile.
Coffee consumption soon spread across the social spectrum. In some of London’s coffeehouses, people of all social classes rubbed shoulders, although other coffeehouses served a more exclusive clientele. Coffee became part of popular culture; the composer Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a coffee cantata in which a young woman sings “how sweet coffee tastes, more delicious than a thousand kisses…. Coffee, I have to have coffee.”29 By the eighteenth century, coffee prices had fallen so much that, as the Dutch trader François Valentijn noted, “coffee had broken through so generally in our land that maids and seamstresses now had to have their coffee in the morning or they could not put their thread through the eye of their needle.”30 European demand for coffee grew steadily across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as coffee prices continued to fall. Americans embraced coffee drinking in the nineteenth century, although coffeehouses were less popular. Americans usually bought green coffee at general stores and roasted it at home. After the Civil War, large coffee companies began to roast