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work with and understand historical documents.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.
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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.”
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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 wellestablished, 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
India
Angola
Vietnam
Turkey
Uganda
Egypt
South Africa
Cameroon
Indonesia
Philippines
Madagascar
Morocco
Syria
Tunisia
Argentina
Ethiopia
Panama
Colombia
Haiti
Algeria
Lebanon
Venezuela
Costa Rica
Brazil
0.1
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.2
0.4
0.4
0.6
0.7
0.7
0.8
0.9
1.1
1.2
1.6
1.8
2.4
2.5
3.1
3.5
2.2
4.1
4.2
Russia
South Korea
Bulgaria
United Kingdom
Australia
Czech Republic
Japan
Poland
Hungary
Portugal
United States
Israel
Greece
Canada
Spain
Croatia
Italy
France
Switzerland
Germany
Austria
Sweden
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
3
0.4
1.4
2.0
2.5
2.6
2.8
2.9
3.4
3.5
3.9
4.0
4.3
4.3
4.5
4.6
4.8
5.1
5.7
6.0
7.1
8.1
8.5
9.0
9.2
9.2
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.”
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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.”
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DOCUMENT 9
COFFEE AS A PERCENTAGE OF A COUNTRY’S TOTAL EXPORTS, 1994
PERCENTAGE OF
COFFEE EXPORTS
IN 1988 – 1999
7.5%
67.6%
15.6%
36.3%
29.1%
8.8%
10.8%
59.4%
56.7%
46.2%
23.0%
23.8%
24.7%
29.2%
31.3%
80.7%
48.2%
94.5%
17.8%
COFFEE –PRODUCING
COUNTRY
Brazil
Burundi
Cameroon
Colombia
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Ethiopia
Guatemala
Haiti
Honduras
Kenya
Madagascar
Nicaragua
Rwanda
Tanzania
Uganda
Zaire
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.”
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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.
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