Initially, this served as a tax on the foreign merchants of Mocha or "Arabia".

From 1730 onwards, however, British colonists planted coffee in the West Indies, and they considered it unjust that they should have to submit to the same taxes, which made it hard for coffee to compete with tea from the East India Company. By 1774, with additional competition from Dutch planters in Suriname (on the north coast of South America), and cheap French imports from Mauritius, the West Indian planters were feeling very sorry for themselves, as John Ellis recounted in his Historical Account of Coffee:

Our unhappy adventurers in Coffee, in the Ceded Islands, begin as I am told, to lose all hope of that reward for their labours, which used to support them under every disappointment, a prosperous return to their family and friends.

Their credit is totally stopt by the difficulties of the times, and their produce only yields them half of what it did in 1770 . . . . their affairs are at such a crisis that, unless they have immediate relief, from the wisdom and justice of Parliament; it is scarce possible but they must sink under their misfortunes.

The complaint of the Jamaican planters was the same as the Ethiopian farmers now: give us a level playing field and a fair price for our coffee and we will make a living for ourselves. The difference was, of course, that the planters did not do their own farming, but had others do it for them. Ellis in 1774 saw those who actually farmed the coffee plants as mere appendages to the colonists; the coffee-workers' sufferings were only to be lamented insofar as they affected their masters' purse:

Their losses in Negroes, and mules, have been immense from the difficulties attending the cultivation of island overgrown with woods, consequently damp and unhealthy; from the want to provision, and of proper shelter for their Negroes and cattle.

The sacrifice of human life for the sake of a cup of coffee is nothing new.

What is new, and new to the past two decades, is the huge rise in the quality of Anglo-American coffee represented by Starbucks et al, after decades of ersatz, instant and stewed coffee. For most of the twentieth century, British coffee wasn't black gold; it was black dishwater. Coffee had been bad for a long time. The chunk of history which usually gets missed out from the story of coffee is the nineteenth century, the century par excellence of free trade and adulteration, which laid the groundwork for the willingness of the public to accept a pretty unpleasant beverage under the name of coffee. For cultural historians of coffee, such as Markman Ellis, the nineteenth century isn't very interesting, because it represents the end of "the great age of the British coffee-house", as tea-drinking gathered pace. But it didn't represent the end of coffee. The difference was just that coffee, already a pretty disgusting drink in eighteenth-century London, became still worse, as it was padded with roasted beans and peas, chicory and mangel-wurzel. Again, the explanation is not solely cultural - in theory, coffee should have been getting much better, since the invention by Count Rumford of a coffee pot which didn't stew it to death - but economic and political.

Political, because most of the ruling class did not think it much mattered whether chicory was sold under the name of coffee or vice versa: caveat emptor was the unthinking slogan of the times. Economic, because it was virtually impossible for the working-class coffee-sellers described by Mayhew to make any kind of living unless they sold coffee which was falsified as well as highly dilute. The average British consumer of coffee in 1850 was getting a terrible deal.

Now, we are still getting a terrible deal (two pounds for something that costs next to nothing to produce) but no one can claim they are being ripped off. If anything, the situation has become reversed. The consumer, assuming he or she has two pounds to burn, can buy themselves a cup of coffee which is wonderfully pure, pre-selected for taste by hundreds of nasal coffee-swillers, and brewed to perfection by a highly trained barista. Their two pounds will also buy them the use of a comfortable chair in a well-lit, air-conditioned room, for as long as they wish. We have moved from a nineteenth- century market in which the consumer was systematically ripped off to one where the consumer is king. If only the desires of this consumer could finally be made to collide with the needs of the coffee producers, we would be living in a kind of caffeinated paradise.