The Coffee Trader (37 page)

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 innovation. If it would be overstating the case to say that business as we know it came into being in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, it would be fair to propose that
modern
business saw its origins in that time and place. The Dutch developed new methods of trade—the joint stock company, commodities markets, futures, stocks, and other forms of speculative trading—mostly because they had to. Coming out of a bitter and protracted war of independence against Spain, the Dutch of the seventeenth century found themselves with very little of any particular value other than their business sense, and with this commercial drive they transformed their nation into one of the most powerful in Europe.

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 connections prized by local businessmen.

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.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950.

Bloom, Herbert I.
The Economic Activities of the Jews of Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.
Williamsport, Penn.: Bayard Press, 1937.

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.

Israel, Jonathan I. “An Amsterdam Jewish Merchant of the Golden Age: Jeronimo Nunes Da Costa (1620–1697), Agent of Portugal in the Dutch Republic.”
Studia Rosenthaliana
18.1 (1984): 21–40.

———. “The Changing Role of the Dutch Sephardim in International Trade, 1595–1715.” In
Dutch Jewish History: Proceedings on the Symposium on the History of the Jews in the Nether-lands, November 28–December 3, 1982, Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem,
ed. Jozeph Michman, 31–50. Tel-Aviv: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1984.

———.
Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740.
Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989.

———.
European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750.
3d ed. London: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998.

Jacob, Heinrich Eduard.
Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity.
Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Viking Press, 1935.

Jardine, Lisa.
Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.

Mak, Geert.
Amsterdam: A Brief Life of the City.
Trans. Philipp Blom. London: Harvill Press, 1999.

Nadler, Steven.
Spinoza: A Life.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Netanyahu, B.
The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources.
3d ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.

North, Michael.
Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age.
Trans. Caroline Hill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

Pendergrast, Mark.
Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Regin, Deric.
Traders, Artists, Burghers: A Cultural History of Amsterdam in the 17th Century.
Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1976.

Roth, Cecil.
A Life of Menasseh Ben Israel: Rabbi, Printer, and Diplomat.
Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1934.

Safley, Thomas Max.
Matheus Miller’s Memoir: A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Schama, Simon.
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age.
New York: Vintage Books, 1987.

Schivelbusch,Wolfgang.
Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants.
Trans. David Jacobson. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

Swetschinski, Daniel Maurice.
The Portuguese Jewish Merchants of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: A Social Profile.
Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services, 1980.

Temple, Sir William. “Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands.”
The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart.
Vol. 1, 31–203. London, 1814; Greenwood Press repr., 1968.

Van Deursen, A. T.
Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland.
Trans. Maarten Ultee. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Vega, Joseph de la.
Confusion de Confusiones: Portions Descriptive of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.
1688. Trans. and ed. Hermann Kellenbenz. Boston: Baker Library, 1957.

Westermann, Mariët.
A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic, 1585–1718.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.

Zumthor, Paul.
Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland.
Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Acknowledgments

Novels are by no means solitary pursuits, and this book could never have happened without the help of many wonderful people.

My first and heartiest thanks go to those who offered me their time and knowledge: J. W. Smit, Deby Abram, Henk Reitsma, Harko Keijzer, and the staff of the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam. I cannot sufficiently thank Rienk Tychon, Thille Dop, and everyone at the offices of Uitgeverij Luitingh-Sijthoff, who made my research in the Netherlands infinitely more productive and enjoyable. Samantha Heller and Sue Laizik read early versions of the novel, and their suggestions were invaluable.

Once again, I am in debt to the people at Random House, particularly Dennis Ambrose, Robbin Schiff, and, of course, my editor Jonathan Karp, whose guidance, enthusiasm, and superhuman editing make my work so much more manageable. And I am eternally grateful to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and everyone at Darhansoff, Verrill and Feldman for their ceaseless efforts.

It would be impossible to catalog the reasons I am indebted to my friends and family—the support, the enthusiasm, and, perhaps most important, the willingness to listen while I thought out loud. Still, I must point out that this book owes a great deal to the kindness, patience, as well as the sometimes smarting honesty of my wife, Claudia Stokes. Thanks for making me do that rewrite. Our daughter, Eleanor, provided unceasing inspiration with her silliness and inexhaustible supply of good cheer. She motivated me in a thousand ways on a thousand occasions. And I’m grateful to Tiki, the orange foundling, for showing up at just the right time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D
AVID
L
ISS
is the author of
A Conspiracy of Paper,
winner of the 2000 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He has a graduate degree in English literature from Columbia University. He holds an M.A. degree from Georgia State University and a B.S. degree from Syracuse University. He lives in San Antonio with his wife and daughter and can be reached via his website,
www.davidliss.com
.

ALSO BY
DAVID LISS

A Conspiracy of Paper

The Coffee Trader
is a work of fiction. The characters are entirely imaginative creations of the author, and any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2003 by David Liss

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Liss, David

The coffee trader / David Liss.

p.    cm.

1. Netherlands—History—1648–1714—Fiction.

2. Jews—Netherlands—Amsterdam—Fiction. 3. Amsterdam (Netherlands)—Fiction. 4. Coffee industry—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3562.I7814 C64 2003      813¢.54—dc21      2002021359

Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-241-4

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