coffee

[Doug Millison]

Review of a new book, _Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee  and How It
Transformed Our World_ by Mark Pendergrast, in today's NY Times at
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/09/05/home/contents.html

Reviewer, Betty Fussell:
"Once the bean migrated from its native Abyssinia (Ethiopia) into Yemen,
probably in the sixth century A.D., the coffee habit conquered Arab
traders, Ottoman emperors, the courts of Europe and finally the colonists
of the Americas. Europe's habit was sustained on the backs of New World
slaves, both native and imported."

The first chapter of the book is on the Web at
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/pendergrast-grounds.html

After the Haitian slave revolt in 1791 reduced coffee production,
Pendergrast writes:
"The Dutch jumped into the breach to supply the coffee shortfall with Java
beans. Though they did not routinely rape or torture their laborers, they
did enslave them. While the Javanese pruned trees or harvested coffee
cherries in the sweltering tropical heat, "the white lords of the islands
stirred only for a few hours every day," according to coffee historian
Heinrich Eduard Jacob.  Little had changed by the early 1800s, when Dutch
civil servant Eduard Douwes Dekker served in Java. He ultimately quit in
protest to write the novel Max Havelaar, under the pen name Multatuli.
Dekker wrote:

Strangers came from the West who made themselves lords of
his [the native's] land, forcing him to grow coffee for pathetic
wages. Famine? In rich, fertile, blessed Java-famine? Yes,
reader. Only a few years ago, whole districts died of starvation.
Mothers offered their children for sale to obtain food. Mothers
ate their children.

Dekker excoriated the Dutch landowner who "made his field fertile with the
sweat of the labourer whom he had called away from his own field of labour.
He withheld the wage from the worker, and fed himself on the food of the
poor. He grew rich from the poverty of others."

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