How did coffee spread from Ethiopia around the world?

Coffee began as a wild plant native to Africa. It moved across the Red Sea to Yemen, spread through the Islamic world in the sixteenth century, reached Europe in the seventeenth century, and was then planted in European colonies across the tropics. Since about 1400 it has expanded from a small corner of Eastern Africa to become a global cash crop, a process closely tied to European colonialism. [1] [2]

Documentary evidence for coffee before the early 1500s is scant. Historians have found a small trade from Ethiopia to Yemen starting in the mid-fifteenth century, with beans harvested from wild bushes and carried across the Red Sea. The first documented use was among Sufi religious societies in the late fifteenth century, who drank it to stay awake during night-time dhikr ceremonies. The BBC notes that the earliest cultivation was in Yemen, where the Arabic name qahwa gave rise to the words coffee and cafe. [1] [3]

From there it moved quickly. It was known in Mecca by 1414 according to the BBC, while the UC Santa Cruz source says it was established there by 1511. Coffee houses grew up in Cairo near the Azhar, and spread to Syria, Aleppo and Istanbul, where they appeared in 1554. In 1544 the Imam of Yemen reportedly had coffee grown in place of qat, and Yemeni highlands then produced most of the world's coffee, shipped through the port of Mocha. [3] [1]

Coffee reached Europe by two routes: overland and across the Mediterranean from the Ottoman Empire, and by sea from Mocha. The English and Dutch East India Companies bought at Mocha in the early seventeenth century, though they seem to have taken only a fraction of Yemeni output. The first British coffee house opened in Oxford in 1651, and others followed in Germany in 1670 and Paris in 1689. [3] [1]

Mocha merchants banned the export of live seeds and seedlings to protect their position. A popular story ties the end of this monopoly to the Ottoman retreat from Vienna in 1683, when stores of beans and seedlings were supposedly left behind. The UC Santa Cruz source says it is unclear whether this is true and that smugglers may have taken seedlings earlier. [1]

What is better documented is the Dutch route. The Dutch East India Company grew coffee on Java in the 1690s from seeds obtained at Mocha, and plants went to Amsterdam's botanical garden in 1706 and on to France in 1713. [4]

In 1720 Gabriel de Clieu carried coffee plants to Martinique, and coffee then spread through the Caribbean: Haiti in 1725, Jamaica in 1730, Cuba in 1748 and Puerto Rico in 1755. The Dutch took plants to Suriname in 1718, and coffee reached Brazil in 1727. By 1788 French colonies, especially Saint-Domingue, produced two-thirds of the world's coffee. Because these plantings descended from a few Yemeni seeds via Java, the wider range did little to increase genetic diversity. Since the mid-nineteenth century most coffee has come from the Americas, especially Brazil. [4] [1] [2]