The Coffee Trader

“He didn’t know what was going on, why I should just grab him and throw him down and kick him in his face. He kept asking me why, why, why-like a little girl being fucked for the first time. But I believe in honesty. I told him to ask the Jew Man. The Jew Man would tell him why, since the Jew Man paid for it.”

Miguel closed his eyes and looked away. After a moment-too long a silence, he thought-he turned back to the wretch. “Why would you do such a thing? Why did you tell him that?”

“Because Madame Damhuis made me promise not to hurt you, despite your treatment of her. So I decided it was well enough: I would not hurt you, but I would have my own way with something. And there it is.”

“Get out of here,” Miguel said again.

“Oh, that I’ll have no trouble doing, you can depend on it. Best to you, Jew Man. ” Hendrick pretended to tip the hat he had lost and then took off in a happy skip along the canal side. Miguel stood at the door and watched him go, and even after he had been long gone, he stood by the door watching the space where he had disappeared.

Later on he could not say how long he stood there in cheerless and nauseated silence. He finally looked behind him and saw his servant woman cooking in the kitchen, ignoring him out of fear and confusion, pretending that men always stood by the open door in their bedclothes, staring out into the morning. Later that day, he looked up and saw himself doing business on the Exchange and wondered how he had come to be there, what trades he had made already, and if in such a state he traded with more prudence than when his wits were about him. How could he think of business? His friend Geertruid, ruined and exiled forever. Joachim beaten and perhaps in danger of dying. His brother ruined and humiliated.

He waited for the Watch to come and question him about his role in the beating, but they never came. When he went in search of Joachim a few days later, to bring him gifts, to make certain he had the best surgeon, he found that he and his wife had left town, scurrying away with their share of the coffee scheme money before Miguel could, as he surely now suspected, find some way of taking it back. He had left believing, as always, that these gestures of friendship were but a prelude to treachery.

The thought weighed him down, a dourness that no triumph on the Exchange could extinguish. But in a few weeks’ time, when Ha

Though Ha

Historical Note

If business and commerce in the Dutch golden age conjure up any image for most people today, it is that of the trade in paintings, which were regarded mostly as aesthetically pleasing commodities rather than objects of art, or of the tulipomania, the crazed tulip market of the 1630s, which was so recently mirrored in our own dotcom bubble. I was drawn to business in the period, however, because of its sheer i

I was also drawn to the period because of the unusual tolerance of the Dutch people. Having vanquished the Catholic Spanish, they offered Catholics an unusual amount of freedom in comparison with other Protestant countries. Jews also found that many cities in the United Provinces offered freedoms unimaginable in the rest of Europe. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews who settled in Amsterdam found their international co

I began this novel with the idea that I would write about an attempt to control a commodity just as it was emerging. I briefly flirted with the idea of making the novel about chocolate, in part because the seventeenth-century documents about chocolate are much more colorful than those concerning coffee, but coffee and business go so naturally that the switch was inevitable. As I suggest in the novel, coffee was only just catching on in Europe in the middle years of the seventeenth century. By the end of the century, it would be well established as a vital part of public culture in nearly every major capital on the Continent.

My efforts to re-create the world of the Dutch, the Dutch Jews, and the coffee trade involved a great deal of research. In the interest of full disclosure, I have provided a list of my reading.

Works Consulted

Allen, Stewart Lee. The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History. New York: Soho Press, 1999.

Barbour, Violet. Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century. A

Bloom, Herbert I. The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Williamsport, Pe

Bodian, Miriam. Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Boxer, C. R. The Dutch Seaborn Empire, 1600-1800. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

Braudel, Ferdinand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century. 3 vols. Trans. Sian Reynolds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981-84.

Chancellor, Edward. Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

de Vries, Jan, and Ad van der Woude. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance for the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Gitlitz, David M. Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996.

Gluckel of Hameln. The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln. Trans. Marvin Lowenthal. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.

Gullan-Whur, Margaret. Within Reason: A Life of Spinoza. New York: St. Martin ’s Press, 1998.