The first coffee market for which we have a precise description is that of Bayt al-Faqih, in the Yemeni plain, visited by French merchants from Saint-Malo in 1712 and described by Jean de La Roque in 1716. The growers bring their coffee there in mat sacks; they do not deal with buyers from London, Amsterdam, Venice or Cairo, but with brokers, the Banians, who cross the courtyard from one camp to the other.

Weighing is done on a scale whose standard weight is a local stone wrapped in cloth, under the eyes of officers seated on a platform; payment is made in metal that the seller demands immediately. One actor sees both sides of the transaction: the broker, who produces nothing, transports nothing and sells information. Three centuries later, the importer and the green coffee trader occupy exactly this position.

La Roque, Voyage de l'Arabie heureuse (1716), English transl. 1732, pp. 311-341; Dufour-La Roque digest; LC ch. 6

La Roque also notes that the peasants “have a knack for not bringing coffee to market when the price is not the one they like.” This is the only mention in the early corpus where the producer appears as an actor who decides: he practices withholding. This capacity presupposes three conditions, a commodity that keeps, a place to store it, and the absence of a debt that can be called in; the third is the one that the advance on the crop destroys, yesterday as today, by turning a seller into a debtor. La Roque's text says nothing about the indebtedness of Yemeni growers; this silence is left as it is.

La Roque 1716/1732, p. 341; LC ch. 6 (analysis)

The price of Yemeni coffee then depends on a de facto monopoly, not a legal one: no one else knows how to grow the plant. When the Dutch, then French and English East India Companies obtain plants and acclimatize them in Java, in Bourbon and in the Antilles, the monopoly disappears without a trial, simply through the appearance of a competing supply. The following century is that of forced-labor plantations: in Java, under the Cultuurstelsel, each family in the Sunda districts must maintain a thousand trees, deliver the coffee to the state warehouse and receive 3 copper rix-dollars for the picul of 225 pounds, barely more than a dollar per hundred pounds, when the same coffee sells for 20 dollars per hundred pounds in Batavia, fifty miles away.

Walsh, who reports these figures in 1894, describes the system as “forced services at inadequate rates.” The first documented gap in value between the farm and the port is a ratio of one to twenty.

Walsh, Coffee: Its History, Classification and Description (1894), pp. 129-134; LC ch. 6 and 9; see the routes

On the consumption side, the lever is the customs duty. In the United States, it rises from 2.5 cents a pound in 1789 to 10 cents in 1812, disappears in 1832, then returns at 5 cents during the Civil War. It is abolished for good in 1872.

A duty on a commodity that is not produced at home protects no farmer, since there is none to protect. It is a tax revenue, levied on the person who drinks. Abolishing it therefore amounts to deciding that coffee must come in freely and in bulk.

The decision can be read in the volumes. American consumption goes from 80 million pounds in 1861 to 400 million in 1881, then to about 600 million. That makes 9 to 10 pounds per person per year, against less than a pound in the United Kingdom, which drinks tea.

Walsh 1894, pp. 283-286; LC ch. 11