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28 March 2006 Volume 2, Issue 10 Great Barrington is one town that has yet to welcome Starbucks. No one seems to mind since there are at least half a dozen coffee venues in a three-block radius on Main Street—in addition to a Dunkin’ Donuts on one end of town and a fair-trade organic coffeehouse on the other. So, since it hasn’t entered the Berkshires (except at the mall), Starbucks has decided to focus on a new market—China. CEO Howard Schultz projects that the chain will grow from the current 375 Starbucks now in China to an eventual 8,000. While business analysts debate whether a country with a 5,000-year history of tea drinking will switch allegiances and begin spending the equivalent of US$6 for designer coffee, this issue of World History to Go focuses on the importance of these two beverages through the ages. The Origins of Coffee
By the middle of the fifteenth century coffee was so associated with Islam that the Coptic Christians of Ethiopia forbade it. However Muslims found coffee and its stepchild, the coffeehouse, enticing. It was particularly well suited to the observation of Ramadan, the month of obligatory fasting during daylight. Coffee and the coffeehouse created a public nighttime activity. Muslims on pilgrimages to Mecca for the Hajj acquired the coffee-drinking custom and spread it as far east as Indonesia and India, west to West Africa, and north to Istanbul and the Balkans. Despite this growing market for coffee, until the end of the 1600s almost all coffee in world trade was grown in the small, irrigated gardens cut into Yemen’s steep hillsides. Production was small, (12,000 to 15,000 metric tons per year) and the price high, enhanced by Ottoman taxes and the cost of transporting by camel caravans or boats. [From the article, “Coffee,” by Steven Topik, in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.] Tea and Social History
Drinking tea altered gender relations, meal times, and etiquette. It helped raise the status of married women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. It made the English breakfast less meat-intensive and allowed the evening meal to be held later. It also led to new formal gestures of politeness and courtesy surrounding the preparation and serving of tea. [From the article, “Tea,” by Alan Macfarlane, in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.] Inside the Berkshire Encyclopedia:
For more related topics, try articles like “Agricultural Societies,” “Colonialism,” “Economic Growth, Extensive and Intensive,” and “Trading Patterns, Indian Ocean” One Lump or Two?The opening up of the New World provided traders with an opportunity to satisfy the increasing demand for sugar as production moved to the Caribbean, where it began to thrive during the early sixteenth century. The expansion of the plantation system was a direct result of the increasing demand for sugar in Europe. The demand increased as beverages such as coffee and tea became lower in price, lost their luxury status, and became popular with the masses. Cargo ships left Europe loaded with manufactured goods such as textiles, glass, tobacco, and gunpowder and headed for the West African coast, where these goods were bartered for slaves who were taken to the Caribbean and then to America to work on the sugar plantations. Sugar was the first major “cash” or export crop cultivated in the Americas to satisfy market demand in Europe, and its production using slave labor exemplified the exploitive nature of new global networks of food exchange that operated not to provide nutrition but rather to serve the interests of European capital and demand in a new global market. [From the article, “Food,” by Adrian Carton, in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History.] 
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The Shadhili Sufi sect of Islam, based in Yemen, are generally accepted as the group who popularized a drink made from roasted and ground arabica coffee beans suffused in hot water. They certainly did not set out to stimulate world trade. On the contrary, they sought to flee the material world to reach spiritual fulfillment. The caffeine in coffee served to keep them awake in their religious chanting rituals, which they celebrated at night. But as worldly people with day jobs, they spread the popularity of the drink in the secular world as well.
Tea is easily prepared for drinking, but its preparation is sufficiently elaborate to encourage the human love of play and ceremony. In East Asia it had an enormous effect on social life through the tea ceremony, which drew on elements of religion (especially Daoism in China and Zen Buddhism in Japan) and had a profound influence on aesthetics in areas as diverse as ink painting, pottery, and architecture. The Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and British developments in porcelain and pottery, themselves highly important trade goods, were centered on tea bowls and other tea ware. In present-day Japan, mastery of the tea ceremony is considered a sign of good breeding, and the tea ceremony industry is quite large.
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