Black Gold

By the time the first European traders arrived in the first decade of the seventeenth century the prosperity of Mocha was assured, with the coffee supplied by new plantations developed on the towering Yemeni mountains hard by. However, the increasing dominance of the Ottomans on both sides of the Red Sea meant that the strain of coffee that had been successfully introduced to Yemen continued to have a rival in the form of the Ethiopian Harar coffee. That coffee was under Arab control, and it was shipped to Mocha before being sold to other merchants. Hence the so-called monopoly held by the port of Mocha was a monopoly on the trade, not on the origin of the coffee. At times, the quality of coffee being shipped to Mocha from Ethiopia exceeded that of the local Yemeni coffee, and it achieved a better price. The East India Company’s chief factor at Mocha, Francis Dickinson, wrote as late as 1733: ‘There has been about Three hundred Bales of Abbysine coffee imported this Season, but as that is now cleaner than the Coffee generally brought to this Market, it sells for a higher price, and was all brought up for the Busseroh Market.’ It has long been a puzzle to those interested in the coffee trade as to how the name ‘Mocha’ has been misappropriated by Ethiopia – in line with the assumption that the world’s first cultivated coffee came from Yemen, it was believed that the Mocha sobriquet should properly be applied only to coffee from that country and that Ethiopia was guilty of barefaced theft. Since we have now demonstrated that, historically, Ethiopian coffee was sold alongside Yemeni coffee through the entrepôt of Mocha, that mystery has been solved.

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