Your Coffee Is a Time Machine: How a bitter bean brewed centuries of empire, resistance, and inequality

 


It’s 7:45 a.m.

You shuffle into the kitchen. You press a button.
Dark liquid pours into your mug.
Smells like comfort. Tastes like habit.

But this isn’t just coffee.
It’s a time machine.

Because this cup of yours?
It was planted in war.
Picked by empire.
Traded through slavery.
And brewed in a world system you were born into—but never asked for.

Let’s sip.

🌱 It Begins in Ethiopia

Coffee starts not in Starbucks, but in the forests of Ethiopia.

Legend says a goat herder noticed his goats getting hyper after chewing on a strange red berry.

Locals began brewing it into a bitter drink.
It spread to Yemen, where Sufi mystics used it to stay awake during all-night prayers.

By the 15th century, Arab traders had turned it into a major commodity.

They tried to control the plant—boiling the beans to make sure no one else could grow them.

It didn’t work.

⛵ Smuggled Beans and Colonial Dreams

In the 1600s, Dutch traders smuggled live coffee plants out of Yemen.

They planted them in their colonies—Java, Suriname, Ceylon.

France followed suit. So did the Portuguese and the British.

Soon coffee was growing in Haiti, Jamaica, India, Brazil—all under colonial control.

And it was labor-intensive.

So who did the labor?

Enslaved people.

🔥 Coffee and Revolution

The world's biggest producer of coffee in the 18th century?
Haiti.
Then called Saint-Domingue.

The profits were obscene.
And the conditions were hell.

The Haitian Revolution—the world’s first successful slave uprising—burned the plantations to the ground.

Europe lost its grip.
Brazil took over.
With more land. And more enslaved labor.

Even after slavery ended, coffee labor stayed cheap—through indentured workers, land grabs, and wage suppression.

🌍 The Global Web

By the 20th century, coffee was everywhere.

And now? It’s the second-most traded commodity in the world after oil.

That means your cup connects:

  • Small farmers in Ethiopia,

  • Processing plants in Vietnam,

  • Export terminals in Colombia,

  • Commodity traders in Switzerland,

  • And baristas in Minneapolis.

But here’s the kicker:

The people who grow the coffee often make less than 1% of what you pay.

And many of them still live in countries shaped by the same colonial borders, broken land laws, and extractive economies coffee helped create.

🧭 So What Are You Drinking, Really?

When you drink coffee, you’re not just tasting beans.

You’re tasting:

  • The spice routes.

  • The slave trade.

  • The rise of commodity capitalism.

  • The failure of fair trade.

  • And the strange fact that some of the poorest countries in the world today…
    are the ones that made the richest countries rich.

So the next time you sip your coffee and feel a little more awake—
remember:
that’s what it’s been doing to the world for 500 years.

Comments

  1. David Tyler Rand-McKayJuly 9, 2025 at 4:50 PM

    JUST ONE MINUTE

    This is coffee.

    You drink it to wake up.
    But the world never fell asleep.

    Coffee was born in Ethiopia.
    Traded in Yemen.
    Smuggled by the Dutch.
    Grown in colonies.
    Picked by slaves.

    In the 1700s, Haiti was the world’s top coffee exporter.
    The wealth? Enormous.
    The suffering? Worse.

    So the enslaved people revolted.
    Burned the plantations.
    Broke the empire.

    And then?

    Brazil took over.

    Even after slavery ended, coffee still ran on cheap labor, stolen land, and lopsided trade deals.

    It still does.

    Today, coffee is the second-most traded commodity on Earth.

    But most farmers earn less than 1% of what you pay.

    And they live in countries still shaped by colonialism—
    the very system coffee helped build.

    So yeah.

    That morning cup?

    It’s not just caffeine.

    It’s 500 years of empire.
    In a mug.

    Because coffee doesn’t just keep you awake.
    It’s been keeping the global economy running since the 1400s.

    ReplyDelete

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