Release date is 2026-01-19

Tim Lindell, Thiers Halliwell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

"A treatise concerning the properties and effects of coffee" by Benjamin Moseley is a medical and economic treatise written in the late 18th century. It champions coffee as both a healthful everyday beverage and a commodity whose cultivation should be expanded in the British West Indies for the good of public health, commerce, and imperial security. Blending history, chemistry, and practical preparation advice, it aims to dismantle prejudices against coffee and to show its dietary, medicinal, and political-economic value.

The opening of the treatise presents a fifth-edition preface that marshals authorities and argues that widespread coffee use benefits individuals while strengthening Britain through colonial cultivation, population, and militia readiness—especially in contrast to sugar estates. It recounts Jamaica’s early coffee planting, lobbying that led to reduced duties, calculations of yields and profits, and the growth of exports, while comparing quality with Mocha and urging preference for colonial produce (with an aside on Jamaica’s pimento). It then begins the main discourse: asserting diet’s influence on health, noting recent duty cuts that make coffee broadly affordable, and surveying the beverage’s names, early European notices, the rise of coffee-houses, and the religious-political controversies in Mecca, Cairo, Constantinople, and England. The narrative traces European cultivation and Caribbean propagation, explains how soil, handling, and shipping affect quality, and details coffee’s chemical makeup and the critical role of proper roasting. It closes this opening stretch by outlining early medical claims—aid to digestion, gentle stimulation, relief of headaches and nervous complaints, usefulness in certain fevers and intermittent cases (often alongside bark), help in some pulmonary and asthmatic conditions, and notable power in counteracting the after-effects of opium. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: London: J. Sewell, 1792