Black Gold. Antony Wild

      

      

       Copyright

      4th Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thEstate.co.uk

      This eBook first published by 4th Estate in 2019

      First published as Coffee: A Dark History by 4th Estate 2004

      Copyright © Antony Wild 2004

      PS Section copyright © Antony Wild 2005

      ‘The Importance of Cupping Protocol’ by Mike Riley, courtesy of the author

      PS^TM is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers

      Antony Wild asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008353438

      Ebook Edition © 2019 ISBN: 9780007387601

      Version: 2019-05-09

      Contents

       Cover

       Title page

Copyright

Preface

Prologue

Introduction

1 The Way We Live Now

2 Origins

3 Enter the Dragon

4 The Mocha Trade

       5 Coffee and Societies

       6 The Fall of Mocha

       7 Slavery and the Coffee Colonies

       8 The Continental System and Napoleon’s Alternative to Coffee

       9 Napoleon and St Helena

       10 Slavery, Brazil, and Coffee

       11 The Great Exhibition

       12 Harar and Rimbaud: the Cradle and the Crucible

       13 Modern Times

       14 Coffee, Science, and History

       15 The Battle of the Hemispheres

       16 Fair Trade

       17 Espresso: the Esperanto of Coffee

       18 The Heart of Darkness

       Coda

       Appendix – The Find at Kush

       Epilogue

       List of Illustrations

       Picture Section

       Selected Further Reading

       Index

       Acknowledgements for the Revised Edition

       P.S.: Ideas, Interviews & features …

       About the Author

       By the Same Author

       About the Publisher

       PREFACE

      Dark history lifts lids and turns over stones. This onerous task can be accomplished only with the help of many who might wish for lids to remain unlifted, and stones to remain unturned. Many of my friends and colleagues from my former incarnation in the coffee trade who contributed their time, opinions, and expertise to this book do not deserve to have their names associated with such a disreputable work. They are not thus individually acknowledged, although collectively I am greatly in their debt. Myriad other sources have been ruthlessly quarried in order that this edifice might be erected: inasmuch as the book covers a wide variety of topics, I have been deeply dependent on work already done in these areas. Again, each unwitting contributor was unaware that their work would be hijacked to my particular purpose, and they remain unacknowledged, as their individual contributions to the shape of a specific stone cannot be acknowledged without unfairly implicating them in the design of the entire structure.

      A note on notes, or rather the lack of them. Facts, figures, and dates are to the best of my knowledge