The central role of drugs in the history of international trade

The popularisation of drug foods by Europeans often transformed their meanings, uses, and location of production. Tea and coffee gained initial favour in China and the Middle East because their caffeine contributed to the wakefulness necessary for religious rites. Muslim Sufi holy men and Buddhist priests popularised the drinks, which long were closely associated with religious observances. Cacao drinking was restricted to the Aztec theocracy and aristocracy in Mexico. In Europe all three beverages became tied to secular uses. Over time their class appeal changed: they began as aristocratic privilege, diffused to bourgeois pleasures, and eventually became mass delights and finally common necessities. The drugs that began as nourishment for spiritual contemplation became the sustenance of industrial workers. Along that path, the way they were consumed also changed. They were originally hot drinks with no sweeteners (the Aztecs added chili to cacao, the Arabs sometimes nutmeg or cardamom to coffee); later, so many additives were included that the original beverage was hardly discernible.

Once they gained acceptance and began creating fortunes for merchants and state treasuries, most of the drugs became respectable. In areas marginal to world trade, they sometimes served as money. Cacao beans in Central America, tobacco in West Africa, opium in southwest China, and tea bricks in Siberian Russia were currency. But usually the goal was to transmute them into gold or silver. At first they were foundations of mercantilist empires. The Spanish doted on chocolate because of their dominion over most of Latin America, which had a natural monopoly on cacao until traders later moved it to Africa. The British, who were the first Europeans to become coffee crazed, found tea more to the advantage of their trade plans in China and India. The French and Americans, oriented to Latin America, became coffee addicts.

These exotic drugs emerged from the outlaw underground to become central parts of the nascent bourgeois lifestyle in Europe. They went from the stuff of community, such as the tobacco smoked by Native Americans in council meetings or by West Africans in religious ceremonies, to the fuel of entrepreneurs and agitators for individual rights. Coffeehouses (which served other drinks as well) served as centres for trade and politicking in Europe. The first newspapers, men's clubs, and political parties were organised, and revolutions plotted, around tables serving coffee and tea. Smoking brought together men who created civil society amid the acrid clouds of tobacco. (Indeed, the coffeehouse was the world economy in miniature, an international emporium joining coffee from Java, Yemen, or the Americas, tea from China, sugar and rum from Africa's Atlantic islands or the Caribbean, and tobacco from North America or Brazil.)

The nineteenth century would popularise these goods so much that they lost their revolutionary appeal and their sense of social distinction. Tobacco descended from elegant snuff and fine cigars to vulgar chewing tobacco. Aristocratic Parisian dandies at Versailles who delicately took snuff would not have recognised that this was the same substance that US baseball players later called chaw and spit out on the sidelines or teenagers smoked furtively in school restrooms. Indeed, making it easier to consume tobacco while also working—as when cigarettes replaced the elaborate, heavy pipes that elites in the Middle East had favoured for nicotine delivery—could be crucial to expanding the market, while also changing the social image of smoking. Sugar was debased from extravagant culinary dessert masterpieces to a huge source of working-class calories in beverages to an industrial additive in something so prosaic as, say, ketchup; coffee and tea descended from the elegant salons to become popularised with instant coffee and iced tea in military rations and in cafeterias.

- Kenneth Pomeranz, The World That Trade Created, 2006 (via DelanceyPlace)w