A microcosm of cosmopolitanism in colonial coffee gardens

After the 17th century, the coffee tasted by Europeans is no longer Arabian coffee beans from the east.

When cafes quickly became popular in Europe, adventurous businessmen targeted the coffee trade, figuring out the huge profits behind growing and buying and selling coffee. The overseas pioneers of the old colonial empire, the East India Company and the West India Company, were the first to take action. They risked being sentenced to death by secretly smuggling coffee trees from their country of origin to Amsterdam. After being cultivated in a short greenhouse, they were soon transported by the company's ocean-going fleet to tropical colonies around the world for trial planting. As a result, Uruguay in South America had the highest production.

The French did not want to lag behind and got the coffee tree, but somehow they could not cultivate it, until the birthday ceremony of Louis XIV, the "Sun Emperor" in 1714, the mayor of Amsterdam presented a vibrant coffee tree to France. According to legend, one of the descendants of the tree was taken across the ocean to the French colony of Martinique in 1720, and the sailors' efforts to protect the tree at sea were legendary. In a short period of more than 50 years after that, the French colonies of Latin America overwhelmed all their competitors and became the largest coffee producer in the world. At that time, more than half of Europe's annual consumption of 65,000 tons of coffee came from there.

This is cosmopolitanism, and the coffee that Europeans are sure to drink is grown and transported from South America, far away, as if at hand. The bourgeois class, who participated in the development of overseas colonies to grow coffee, can't wait to step onto the stage of history, that is, they have become the most important regulars of cafes in the future. Cosmopolitanism is also the world outlook they believe in.