The southern end of the Red Sea was the cradle of coffee cultivation and consumption in the world. Wild coffee gathered in Ethiopia was already traded at the end of the fifteenth century, but progress was slow. In the second half of the sixteenth century, a true coffee economy emerged. Yemeni peasants began to cultivate coffee intensively on terraces, carved out of the steep mountains rising above the Tihama coastal plain. Effective marketing networks linked Yemeni ports to Jiddah and Cairo. By the seventeenth century, the coffee trade had superseded the declining spice trade. Fed by silver bullion originating in Spanish America, coffee played a major role in commerce between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. To be sure, the development of coffee estates in the Indian Ocean and the New World from the eighteenth century progressively diminished Yemen's share of world coffee output, but the Red Sea trading network remained in place until the end of the nineteenth century.

The Origins of the Coffee Economy

Ethiopian forests, especially to the west of the Great Rift Valley, abound in wild arabica coffee, but we know very little about the origins of consumption there. Coffee was probably long picked from the wild, and it was used to an increasing extent from the fourteenth century by the Islamized peoples of southeastern Ethiopia.

The coffee habit diffused to the Rasulid sultanate in Yemen, which had strong commercial and cultural connections with Muslim kingdoms in Ethiopia.