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The Chance of the Moment: Coffee and the New West Indies Commodities Trade
Michelle Craig McDonald
| IN January 1773 Captain John Ash wrote to his financial backers, the Liverpool-based firm Brown & Birch, of his safe arrival in the Caribbean. He also informed them of a change in plans. Contracted to secure a cargo of wood and mules, Ash tried first in British Tortola and then in Danish Saint Thomas without success. He sailed next to the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico where he reported: "We loaded what of the wood we could get there and sent express to the out bays near us, who returned for answer, that there was very little and so situated that we could not get at it either with ship or boats ... we proceeded then to another design for we found neither wood nor mules, but a good deal of coffee."1 Jamaicans were unlikely to buy Ash's coffee when he returned to Kingston because they produced enough of their own, yet he purchased between two and three thousand pounds, reasoning it could be resold in North America to offset the expense of his endeavor. |
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A decade later many more merchants and ship captains were discovering, as Ash had learned, the lucrative potential of coffee trading. Demand for coffee in the United States grew rapidly after 1783, both as an article of home consumption and as one of the new nation's most profitable reexported commodities. The postrevolutionary coffee trade illustrates the importance of the West Indies to early American economic development and the increasingly international orientation of United States–Caribbean trade. Focusing on coffee helps revise the work of earlier historians who argued that, with barely a lull, Britain reemerged as America's foremost trading partner and continued to dominate the new nation's financial landscape. "Only very slowly did the United States advance out of its colonial economy," suggested John J. McCusker and Russell Menard in The Economy of British America. "The decade immediately following the end of the war looked economically much the same as the decade preceding it, in basic structure, if not in detail."2 Yet it is in the details that differences are most apparent. Trade to Europe may have resumed along familiar lines, but McCusker and Menard underestimated the profound changes in West Indian commerce after 1783. |
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Before the American Revolution, most coffee entering North America originated in British Jamaica or, after 1763, the ceded islands of Grenada, Saint Vincent, and Dominica, and arrived through Philadelphia. Parliament's decision to enforce the Navigation Acts on United States trade after American independence, with "regulations by which the exportation of sugar and coffee, from those [West Indian] colonies, in American vessels, is generally prohibited," irrevocably altered this pattern, and did so at a time when the American coffee business was booming. Philadelphia continued to dominate North America's coffee import market, but the city's merchants shifted from British to non-British, especially French, suppliers (Figures I–II). By 1802 the value of British West Indian coffee coming into the United States amounted to no more than $1 million, whereas revenue from other parts of the world rose to more than $8 million.3 Coffee's rapid ascent and prominent place among America's reexport trades makes it one of the best case studies to gauge how ably and quickly American merchants could navigate the volatile commercial and legal networks of a postrevolutionary Atlantic world where, to succeed, traders needed to be able to reallocate resources quickly (Table I). |
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