Coffee review

The increase in coffee production caused the price to plummet.

Published: 2024-11-08 Author: World Gafei
Last Updated: 2024/11/08, With huge production capacity in Java, Sumatra, Sri Lanka and Suriname, the Netherlands became a global coffee trading center in the 18th century, and prices fell from ridiculously expensive at the beginning of the 18th century to affordable for ordinary people after the middle of the 18th century. As the great powers exploited hundreds of thousands of African slaves to grow coffee in the colonies, the price is far more competitive and the production capacity is higher than that of the Yemeni mocha.

With huge production capacity in Java, Sumatra, Sri Lanka and Suriname, the Netherlands became a global coffee trading center in the 18th century, and prices fell from ridiculously expensive at the beginning of the 18th century to affordable for ordinary people after the middle of the 18th century. Because the great powers exploited hundreds of thousands of African slaves to grow coffee in the colonies, the price was far more competitive and the production capacity of the mocha was much higher than that of the Yemeni mocha. The monopoly of mocha coffee since the 16th century was completely broken by the middle of the 18th century. The importance is also less and less important year after year.

Based on the price list of the Dutch Coffee Exchange in 1774, we can see that mocha coffee is far less competitive than that of foreign powers. At that time, mocha beans sold at 14.5 Staffa per pound, java beans at 10.0% Staffa per pound, Central and South American beans at the cheapest, Martinique or Suriname beans at 6 Staffa per pound, while Java beans sold for 1.39 Dutch guilders per pound in 1711, a noble price that only princes and aristocrats could afford. But after 1774, Java beans fell to 0.53 Dutch guilders per pound, while Central and South American beans were even cheaper, at 0.3 Dutch guilders per pound, not counting more than 60 years of inflation (about 0.9 to 3 Dutch guilders per pound of tea at that time).

After the coffee production capacity of the great powers increased, the supply increased greatly, the price fell sharply, and the consumption also surged.

Since the middle of the 18th century, coffee has officially become a must-have drink for Europeans. After the 19th century, coffee consumption was even greater. In 1822, 50, 000 tons of ⒛ coffee was consumed worldwide, of which 100000 tons came from Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi controlled by the Dutch East India Company. At this time, the annual production of Mocha was about 20, 000 tons, which was not as important as before.

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