ABSTRACT
A scientific and historical tract on coffee and its cultivation, with particular focus on the encouragement of coffee production in the British island colonies of the Caribbean. The tract can be located at the intersection of the Enlightenment, commerce and nationalism: as the author says in the preface ‘the promotion of science, national advantage, and the prosperity of the Island’. The tract begins with a Linnéan botanical description of coffee, a survey of the history of coffee probably derived from Spon/Dufour, La Roque and Douglas (see above, pp. 113–41, 201–312), noting towards the end the dissemination of coffee plants from Yemen to Batavia, and from thence to botanical collections in Amsterdam, Paris and London. In 1718, Dutch planters in Surinam successfully began cultivating coffee; the French succeeded in Martinique by 1723; and the English in Jamaica in 1730. Ellis further reprints extracts from relevant authorities on coffee, including the travels of La Roque and Niebuhr to Yemen, and Dr Patrick Brown’s ‘Observations of Coffee’ from his Civil and Natural History of Jamaica (London, printed for the author, 1756). The extract is succeeded by a list of exports from and to the British Caribbean islands, underlining the patriotic and promotional role of the tract. The immediate purpose was not so much to promote coffee in the Caribbean, as to promote the Caribbean, and its coffee, in official circles in London. To this mercantilist end, the tract argued that the colonies deserved a more beneficial taxation regime, especially against imports of rival coffee and tea from foreign countries. Published in 1774 by the prestigious London booksellers Edward and Charles Dilly at the Rose and Crown on the Poultry, Ellis’s tract was translated into German (John Ellis and John Coakley Lettsom, Geschichte des Thees und Koffees. Aus dem Englischen der Herren John 364 Coackley Lettsom und John Ellis übersetzt und mit einigen Zusätzen vermehrt (Leipzig, 1776)).
