Coffee’s Role in Early Trade

Before Amsterdam: coffee and the Red Sea

Coffee entered European commerce through trading systems that already existed. In fifteenth-century Yemen, Sufi communities used the drink during religious observances; its subsequent spread created demand well beyond the places where the crop grew. European merchants joined this commerce rather than inventing it.

The Red Sea was not simply a passage between Yemen and Europe. It connected coffee-producing districts with Arabian and Egyptian markets, while southern ports also participated in Indian Ocean exchange. Coffee’s commercial geography therefore makes more sense as several connected networks than as one uninterrupted voyage from Mocha to Amsterdam.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Bayt al-Faqih was a crucial inland wholesale market. Coffee moved from there through Mocha, al-Hudayda and al-Luhayya. Much of the northbound trade used the latter two ports, then passed through Jidda towards Suez and Cairo.

This matters because the familiar European account can make other buyers disappear. Coffee had customers, brokers and established routes before it became a regular European cargo. For the wider chronology, start with our history of coffee; the development of its largest early consuming market belongs in coffee in the Ottoman Empire.

What Mocha actually contributed

Mocha, also written Mokha or al-Mukha, gave the trade a recognisable maritime gateway. Its position suited ships travelling between the Red Sea and Arabian Sea, and European company records made it especially prominent in later histories.

Yet Mocha was not a town devoted solely to coffee. Research based on Dutch eyewitness records identifies a broader market in textiles, spices, minerals, porcelain and aromatics. Coffee belonged to this mixed commerce, not to an isolated trading system with its own ships, merchants and institutions.

Nor should the port be confused with the growing districts or wholesale market. A merchant buying coffee in Mocha might be purchasing beans already assembled and transported by others. The port’s fame compresses several separate activities into one name: growing, inland exchange, shipment and overseas sale.

That distinction also changes how we read historical evidence. A European ship’s account tells us what its officers bought and observed, not everything passing through Yemen. Mocha’s visibility in company archives is evidence of European involvement, not proof that Europeans dominated the whole trade.

Trading companies entered an existing market

The Dutch East India Company, usually abbreviated to VOC, became one of coffee’s most consequential commercial participants. Leiden University Libraries dates its representatives’ first visit to Mocha to 1616, while noting that permission to establish a trading presence came later.

The English East India Company also purchased Yemeni coffee. Its surviving Mocha correspondence includes exchanges with Bombay, agents at Bayt al-Faqih and officers aboard company ships. These records reveal an operation spread across several places rather than a simple transaction at the quayside.

The British Library’s catalogue lists coffee accounts alongside documents concerning iron, steel, aloes and bullion. It also records trading permissions and gifts to officials. Such material shows the practical infrastructure behind a cargo: local authority, correspondence, purchasing agents, shipping arrangements and the means to settle transactions.

French participation would become particularly significant in transferring coffee cultivation to Bourbon Island, now La Réunion. Dutch, English and French interests should nevertheless remain distinct. Buying Yemeni beans, establishing another source of production and distributing plants between colonies were related activities, but they were not the same business.

Price and profit: why control of supply mattered

Coffee offered commercial opportunity because demand was spreading while production remained geographically restricted. Historians describe attempts to prevent foreigners exporting seeds and seedlings, alongside European efforts to establish cultivation elsewhere. A living plant could threaten an existing supply advantage in a way that a cargo of beans could not.

The attraction was not simply that coffee could be sold abroad. Merchants also sought an advantage in where, when and through whom they bought it. Nancy Um’s reconstruction of the Yemeni trade shows that even news of arriving ships could push purchasing prices upwards.

Revenue from a successful sale should not be confused with profit. The accounts, invoices, shipping records and official permissions preserved in company archives point to a business with many obligations between purchase and resale. No single impressive transaction establishes a typical return.

Colonial production changed the balance again. In Java, the VOC moved from encouraging and purchasing growers’ coffee towards compulsory production and delivery. Its commercial advantage increasingly rested on restricting producers’ choices, not merely on finding customers overseas.

Moving plants: documented transfers and smuggling stories

Stories about stolen coffee plants are memorable because they capture a real commercial issue: whoever could establish productive trees elsewhere could create a competing supply. However, the evidence for particular adventures is uneven.

Pieter van den Broecke’s visit to Mocha in 1616 is well supported. The additional story that he removed living plants to Amsterdam should not be treated as equally secure. The sources checked for this article establish the visit but do not provide a contemporary account sufficient to verify that plant-removal episode.

The firmer route into Dutch colonial cultivation runs through India. World Coffee Research records transfers from the Malabar coast to Batavia, now Jakarta, in 1696 and 1699. This is more precise than the often-repeated shorthand that Dutch growers simply took plants straight from Mocha to Java.

By 1706, coffee from Java had reached Amsterdam’s botanical garden, where it flowered and fruited. The garden was therefore more than a collection of curiosities: it could supply material for further propagation, meaning the production of new plants.

A diplomatic transfer followed. World Coffee Research dates Amsterdam’s gift of a coffee plant to Louis XIV to 1714. At the Jardin du roi, today’s Jardin des Plantes, Antoine de Jussieu helped cultivate coffee under glass. Trade, botanical expertise and state ambition were now working together.

The distinction between a documented transfer and an embellished adventure is explored further in legends and myths.

From botanical collections to colonial production

The French route to Bourbon Island was separate from the Java-to-Amsterdam route. Records summarised by World Coffee Research describe attempted introductions from Yemen in 1708, 1715 and 1718, with plants surviving from the later introductions. These became associated with the Bourbon coffee lineage.

In the Caribbean, Gabriel de Clieu is associated with taking a coffee plant from France to Martinique. The date needs qualification: World Coffee Research gives 1723, a USDA-hosted chronology gives 1720, and France’s natural history museum places the episode broadly in the 1720s. This article follows 1723 while acknowledging the disagreement rather than presenting an exact year as universally settled.

A surviving seedling was only the beginning. Establishing export agriculture required land, growers, processing and a system for gathering and shipping the harvest. Botanical success and commercial success were different stages.

The labour arrangements also differed. In Java’s Priangan highlands, the VOC imposed a coffee monopoly in 1723 and subsequently developed coerced production. Caribbean plantation expansion relied on enslaved people. These were distinct systems of exploitation, not interchangeable examples of ordinary paid farming.

There was a biological consequence too. Genetic research has found much less diversity in the widely dispersed Typica and Bourbon groups than in the Ethiopian material studied. Moving small selections of plants helped expand cultivation geographically while narrowing its genetic foundations. Our guide to coffee cultivation through the ages follows the agricultural story beyond these early transfers.

A short timeline of coffee’s role in early trade

Read together, these milestones distinguish two movements: beans travelling to consumers and plants travelling to new growing areas. Coffee’s role in early trade changed most profoundly when merchants and colonial authorities sought to control both.