Document Based Question: Pre-History

DOCUMENT-BASED QUESTION: COFFEE IN WORLD HISTORY

DIRECTIONS

The following question is based on the accompanying documents. (The documents have been edited for the purpose of this exercise). The question is designed to test your ability to work with and understand historical documents. Write an essay that:

 Has relevant thesis and supports that thesis with evidence from the documents.

 Uses all or all but one of the documents.

 Analyzes the documents by grouping them in as many appropriate ways as possible and does not simply summarize the documents individually.

 Takes into account both the sources of the documents and the authors’ points of view.

ESSAY PROMPT

Decide to what extent the consumption of coffee in world history has been beneficial or harmful.

Based on the following documents, discuss the influence of coffee on world history. What types of additional documentation would help explain coffee’s influence?

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

No one can definitively say where coffee originated. Some say Southern Arabia in the modern country of Yemen, while others indicate it came from the province of Jaffa in Ethiopia. Coffee was officially noted in Yemen during the sixteenth century, where it was exported north to Egypt, the Middle East, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. The Europeans came into contact through the Indian Ocean exporting port of Mocca, Yemen, and through the Turks in Europe. By the nineteenth century as coffee consumption became widespread in Europe and the United States, coffee production spread first to the Americas, especially Brazil, and similar settler colonies in Africa. The twentieth century witnessed the rise of coffee to a world-wide commodity and foodstuff.

1 DOCUMENT 1

Ibrahim Peçevi, an Ottoman historian, c. 1635 CE, his comments on coffee

“About 1555 CE two Syrians came to Constantinople and opened a shop and began to purvey coffee. These shops became meeting places of pleasure seekers and idlers, and also of some wits among the men of letters and literati, and they used to meet on groups of about twenty or thirty. Those who used to spend a great deal of money on giving dinners for the sake of entertainment found that they could attain the joys of conviviality merely by spending a little on coffee. It reached such a point that unemployed officers, judges, and professors, all seeking preferment, and corner sitters with nothing to do, proclaimed there was no place like it for pleasure and relaxation, and filled it until there was no room to stand. The imams and muzzeins and pious hypocrites said people have become addicts of the coffeehouse and no one comes to mosque. The muftis issued edicts against it, but certain persons made approaches to the captains of police and the watch about selling coffee from back doors in side alleys, in small, unobtrusive shops, they were allowed to do so. It became so prevalent, that the ban was abandoned. Among the great, there was nobody left who did not drink coffee and grand viziers built coffeehouses as investments.”

DOCUMENT 2

Public Notice posted at Garway’s Cofee House in London, 1657

“The drink of coffee is declared to be most wholesome, preserving perfect health until extreme old age. It makes the body, active and lusty. It helps headaches. It removes the obstructions of the spleen. It is very good against the stones, cleaning the kidneys and uriters being drank with honey instead of sugar. It takes away the difficulty of breathing, opening obstructions. It is good against crudities, strengthening the weakness of the venticle and stomach, causing good appetite and digestion, and particularly for men of a corpulent body, and such as are great eaters of meat. It overcomes superfluous sleep and prevents sleepiness in general, a drink of coffee being taken, so that without trouble whole nights may be spent in study without hurt to the body. It prevents fevers by infusing a fit quantity of the leaf, thereby providing a most gentle vomit and breathing of the pores. It being prepared with milk and water, strengthens the inward parts, and prevents consumption, and helps against pains of the bowels, or gripping of the guts and looseness. It is for colds, if properly infused, purging the blood of sweat and urine, and ends infection. And that the virtues and excellencies of this leaf and drink are many and great is evident and manifest by the high esteem and use of it among physicians and knowing men in France, Italy, Holland, and other parts of Christendom.”

2 DOCUMENT 3

Louis Sebastien Mercier, French food critic and travel expert, from his book, the Tables of Paris, 1780 “Furthermore, the habit of drinking coffee with milk has become well- established, and has become so widespread among the population that one can say without fear of contradiction that the drink now forms the workers’ breakfast. The workers regard the drink as cheaper, more invigorating and having more flavor than any other breakfast dish. And for this reason, they drink it in near unbelievable quantities. They say that it nearly always lasts them until evening, and so they need to take only two other meals.”

DOCUMENT 4

ANNUAL COFFEE CONSUMPTION, 1997 (Kilograms per person)

Kenya 0.1 Russia 0.4 India 0.1 South Korea 1.4 Angola 0.2 Bulgaria 2.0 Vietnam 0.2 United Kingdom 2.5 Turkey 0.2 Australia 2.6 Uganda 0.2 Czech Republic 2.8 Egypt 0.2 Japan 2.9 South Africa 0.4 Poland 3.4 Cameroon 0.4 Hungary 3.5 Indonesia 0.6 Portugal 3.9 Philippines 0.7 United States 4.0 Madagascar 0.7 Israel 4.3 Morocco 0.8 Greece 4.3 Syria 0.9 Canada 4.5 Tunisia 1.1 Spain 4.6 Argentina 1.2 Croatia 4.8 Ethiopia 1.6 Italy 5.1 Panama 1.8 France 5.7 Colombia 2.4 Switzerland 6.0 Haiti 2.5 Germany 7.1 Algeria 3.1 Austria 8.1 Lebanon 3.5 Sweden 8.5 Venezuela 2.2 Denmark 9.0 Costa Rica 4.1 Norway 9.2 Brazil 4.2 Netherlands 9.2

3 DOCUMENT 5

Francis Thurber, American economist, from his History of Coffee, 1881

“The coffee industry has become big business developing whole countries. After leaving the plantation and before reaching the consumer, coffee has paid tribute to the transporter, to the shipping bankers of that country; to the ships which carry it abroad; the custom houses of importing countries, to their stevedores, storage warehouses, insurance companies, and bankers; to the brokers who sample and sell it, the weighers who weigh it, and the wholesale merchants who buy it. Then comes its cartage or lighterage, its roasting and sale to retail merchants, and its transportation to the point where it is finally distributed and consumed. Twelve hundred millions of pounds of coffee annually pass through this routine and probably a hundred millions of people, besides the consumers, are directly or indirectly benefited. Factories have been brought into existence to manufacture the machinery required in the cultivation and preparation of this staple; great mills work throughout the while year on the bagging required for the packages; warehouses worth millions have been provided for its storage; mighty fleets of vessels are created for its carriage on the sea, and railroads for its transportation on land.”

DOCUMENT 6

Study by the World Rainforest Movement, Bulletin Number 46 as presented to the United Nations Development Program’s Vietnam country office, Hanoi, 2001

“The Vietnamese government faces a problem. For the last decade it has actively promoted coffee growing. As a result, hundreds of thousands of lowland Vietnamese people have moved to the central highlands to grow coffee. With coffee prices on the world market crashing, farmers are losing out. Meanwhile, the indigenous people living in the central highlands are becoming increasingly concerned about the loss of their forests and fallows to coffee plantations. For years the Vietnamese government has encouraged people from Mekong delta in the south and the Red River delta in the north to move to the central highlands, partly to relieve population pressure in the deltas, but also effectively to colonize the highlands. Coffee growing is one of the migrants’ main sources of income. Coffee farmers have cleared more than 74,000 hectares of forest in Dac Lac province alone. Water extracted from the rivers to irrigate coffee plantations has created water shortages for other users, and some rivers have dried up for part of the year. Soil erosion has become a problem, as the soil is completely exposed for the first few years until the coffee bushes grow. The indigenous people living in the central highlands have protested against the encroachment of their land by lowland Vietnamese. A key reason for the protests was the government’s role in converting people’s land into coffee plantations.”

4 DOCUMENT 7

Pierre Denis, French financier and geographer, notes from his travels in Brazil and Latin America, 1911

Italian Immigrant Labor Contract for Coffee Pickers, Sao Paulo (Brazil)

Article 1: The proprietor will gratuitously furnish the colonist with the means of transport for himself, his family, and his baggage to Brazil, and from the nearest railroad station nearest the coffee plantation; the proprietor will also provide a house, pasture for animals, and land on which to plant crops.

Article 2: The colonist must attend to the coffee-lines in the manner and at the moment indicated by the proprietor. Article 3: The proprietor will make no cash advances except such as are strictly necessary. Article 5: If the colonist neglects any of the duties, the proprietor shall cause the colonist to pay these expenses. Article 11: The colonists’ cattle and crops are the guarantee of his debt to the proprietor. Article 15: The proprietor undertakes to pay the colonist per 1,000 stems of coffee attended, the sum of ______; per 50 litres of coffee picked, the sum of ______.

DOCUMENT 8

Felipe Rodriquez, spokesman for the Coffee Cooperatives of Costa Rica, letter to Margaret Bau, US Department of Agriculture, 2001

“All workers involved in harvesting and milling, regardless of national origin or legal status, are guaranteed a minimum wage. The Ministry of Labor strictly enforces fair labor conditions by conducting unannounced on-site inspections. In fact, many workers travel from neighboring countries in order to benefit from higher wages and better work conditions. This is good, indeed, especially in a continent and industry so used to worker’s rights violations and exploitation of indigenous populations. By organizing into coops, farmers are able to benefit from services such as coop-run grocery stores, offering discount prices, reduce cost on agricultural supplies and the availability of loans. Cooperatives are actively involved with their communities, promoting health programs and affordable housing. [Cooperatives are spreading throughout the region notably in Central America, Colombia, and the Caribbean]. For many farmers, cooperatives offer the only protection when coffee market prices collapse and bargain better against the international coffee distributors.”

5 DOCUMENT 9

COFFEE AS A PERCENTAGE OF A COUNTRY’S TOTAL EXPORTS, 1994 PERCENTAGE OF COFFEE –PRODUCING COFFEE EXPORTS COUNTRY IN 1988 – 1999 Brazil 7.5% Burundi 67.6% Cameroon 15.6% Colombia 36.3% Costa Rica 29.1% Dominican Republic 8.8% Ecuador 10.8% El Salvador 59.4% Ethiopia 56.7% Guatemala 46.2% Haiti 23.0% Honduras 23.8% Kenya 24.7% Madagascar 29.2% Nicaragua 31.3% Rwanda 80.7% Tanzania 48.2% Uganda 94.5% Zaire 17.8%

DOCUMENT 10

Jeanne M. Fisher, British sociologist, studying the Kikuyu of Kenya, 1950

“There are three main incentives in agriculture. The first, and most important, is production of food; the second is the prestige acquired by skill in cultivation; and the third is the production of cash crops such as coffee. In former times, most families were self-sufficient in foodstuffs and exchanged any surplus in the market. Nowadays, in contrast, production often falls below subsistence level with the result that many housewives have to buy food at some time during. There is no doubt that to the progressively minded Kikuyu the cultivation of coffee is a great incentive to improve their agricultural techniques. But to conservative cultivators who have neither means nor the desire to break with traditional practices, coffee and other cash crops are a ready and east source of money, and only too often are planted in land which would otherwise be devoted to food crops.”

6 FOOTNOTES: COFFEE IN WORLD HISTORY

1. Bernard Lewis, ed., A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (New York: Random House, Inc., 2000), 393 – 394.

2. David Levinson and Laura Gaccione, Health and Illness: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 1997), 19 – 20.

3. Ulla Heise, Coffee and Coffee Houses, translated by Paul Ropier (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1987), 46.

4. World Resources Institute, Table ERC.5 Resource Consumption [Database on line] (London, International Coffee Organization, 1999, accessed February 12, 2002); available from http://www.wri.org/wr-00-01/pdf/erc5n_2000.pdf; Internet.

5. Mark Pendergrass, Uncommon Gounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 61 – 62.

6. World Rainforest Movement, Bulletin Number 46, May 2001, in United Nations Development Program [database on line] (Hanoi, Vietnam: United Nations’ Vietnam Country Office, 2001, accessed February 8, 2002); available from http:// www.undp.org.vn/mlist/environlc/052001/post91.htm; Internet.

7. Pierre Denis, Brazil, translated by Bernard Miall (London: T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1911), 196 – 208 in passim.

8. Cooperative Business Archives List, Coffee Co-ops in Costa Rica [Database on line] (Ft. Collins, Colorado, Cooperative Business, 2001, accessed February 15, 2002); available from http://csf.colorado.edu/archive/2001/coop-bus/msg00124. htm; Internet.

9. Anacafe, Hombres de Café (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Talleres de Litografia Galton, 1995), 18.

10. Gavin Kitching, Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of An African Petite Bourgeoisie, 1905 – 1970. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1980), 126.