Although most people associate the British with tea, their colony of Jamaica was a leading producer of coffee in the last decades of the eighteenth century. That briefly, around 1800, it was the world’s largest exporter of coffee should not be surprising since London in 1650 had witnessed the founding of the first Western European coffeehouse when the English developed a taste for the Arabian beverage. However, since its beans had come from Ottoman Yemen and later from the Dutch Java and Guyana, Jamaican planters turned their eyes to coffee to make the British Empire more self-sufficient in this popular brew.
Monteith’s intriguing monograph focuses on the half-century after 1790 when Jamaica’s late-coming coffee sector began to rival sugar as the island’s most valuable export—until the end of slavery and coffee’s decline. These were momentous decades for the colony largely because the Atlantic economy and the British Empire underwent striking...