How long did the Muslims control the coffee trade and what was the name of the port that was used to export co?

[Phoenix]

Coffee has emerged from obscure origins in eastern Africa to become a major globally-traded commodity. During the six centuries historians are able to trace of its history, coffee has always been an object of commerce. From a relatively closed circuit of distribution in the Red Sea area, it spread across the Islamic world in the sixteenth century. From there, it spread to Europe in the seventeenth century and became a truly global entity when Europeans started coffee cultivation in their colonies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As the world underwent the "modern revolution" in the nineteenth century, coffee both fueled the workday of the emerging industrial working classes in western Europe and tied slaves and wage laborers to the land in tropical regions throughout the world. In the twentieth century, coffee continued to be exported from relatively poor nations to relatively rich ones, usually to the benefit of the latter, a tendency that culminated in the newly deregulated markets of the post-1989 global economy.

Thus, coffee provides a lens through which to view many of the most important world-historical processes of the last several centuries. Coffee was a point of contact between the Middle East and Europe in the early modern period, being traded by European and Muslim merchants alike in the Indian Ocean trade. After Europeans had secured their own coffee crops, coffee was part of both the slave system and colonialism, being cultivated in far-flung colonies from Indonesia to Mexico. Coffee almost literally fueled the human side of industrialization in Europe, helping to break the ties of sleep and wakefullness to natural cycles and substituting clock time, the working day, and caffeination. Finally, coffee was at the center of Cold War and post-Cold War policies of global capital, which first sought to regulate prices in order to prevent social unrest in producing nations, then abandoned them to the mercies of the free market when the collapse of communism obviated the necessity of insuring the welfare of the third world.