Coffee in Retrospect: What the 1903 treaty between Menelik II and the United States did and did not say

The first treaty between Ethiopia and the United States never mentions coffee. The mission that negotiated it had a coffee errand all the same, and the treaty set the terms on which Americans would later buy Ethiopian coffee.

On December 27, 1903, Robert P. Skinner, the American consul general at Marseille, signed a short commercial treaty with Emperor Menelik II in Addis Ababa. Theodore Roosevelt had sent him at the head of the first American mission to the Ethiopian court. The party came up from the coast by way of Harar, where, Skinner reported, their reception "had not been devoid of military pomp." Menelik had defeated an Italian army at Adwa seven years earlier, and the railway from Jibuti had reached Dire Dawa only the year before. Britain, France and Italy had all signed agreements with him in the 1890s. The Americans were late.

The English text in the State Department's records has a small detail I like. It dates the treaty the "seventeenth day of December, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-six in the year of grace," then adds in brackets that this corresponds to December 27, 1903. The month has been put into English, but the day and the year are Ethiopian: the seventeenth of Tahsas, 1896. In the European calendar, 1896 was the year of Adwa.

The treaty itself runs to seven short articles, and none of them names a product. Citizens of each country could travel and do business in the other, respecting local custom and answering to local courts. Each government would protect traders and their property. Each would give the other's citizens whatever it gave any other foreign power in customs duties, taxes and jurisdiction. Americans in Ethiopia could use the telegraph, the post and other transport on the same terms as other foreigners. The two governments would exchange representatives, and an envoy who stopped being acceptable would be replaced. The treaty would run for ten years, and it would take effect only if Washington ratified it and informed Menelik within a year. Menelik was notified of the ratification on August 2, 1904, and Roosevelt proclaimed the treaty on September 30.

Coffee is nowhere in it. I say so plainly because it is tempting, in a series like this one, to read the treaty as the beginning of the American coffee trade with Ethiopia. Skinner's own summary of the mission, which the New York Times printed in February 1904, shows what he had actually gone for. His job, he wrote, was to safeguard "a valuable existing market in Ethiopia" for American goods and to increase it "by all legitimate means." The Americans came to sell. Buying came later.

Coffee was on his list, though not as trade. The Department of Agriculture had asked him for wild coffee seed. Its experts believed that plantation coffee had degenerated because it was all grown from seed first taken out of Arabia, and that going back to the wild plant in Kaffa might give them a new variety "the value of which will be incalculable." Skinner could not get the seed. It grew only in Kaffa, he explained, and getting there meant "a long and expensive journey," so he placed an order and left. He had no better luck with the pair of large zebras he had hoped to bring home for cross-breeding. I reprinted that report here in 2011, and it reads differently to me now. In 1904 Washington's interest in Ethiopian coffee was in the wild plant, not in the people who grew coffee or the trade they ran.

In the treaty itself, the article I find most telling is the first. Americans doing business in Ethiopia would answer to Ethiopian courts. In those years, across much of Asia and Africa, European powers insisted that their citizens be tried by their own consuls rather than by local judges, and they usually got their way. Menelik's treaty asked Americans to accept his tribunals. There is a qualification in Article III, which promised Americans any advantage in jurisdiction that Ethiopia granted another power, so a privilege won by the French or the British would pass to them too. But the starting point was Ethiopian law, and the document reads as an agreement between two governments, not a concession taken from one of them.

For coffee, Article III was the clause that counted. It never names a crop, but it meant that an American buying coffee in Harar would pay no more in Ethiopian duties than a French or British buyer standing next to him. Skinner told Washington the treaty would secure these privileges "for all time." The treaty itself said ten years. How many American buyers followed Skinner to Harar, these records do not say. The coffee was reaching them all the same. By 1908 the American consular agent at Aden was telling Washington that a considerable quantity of Harar coffee passed through his port on its way to Europe and the United States.

Skinner went home and wrote a book about the mission, Abyssinia of To-Day, published in 1906. The treaty he brought back made the American buyer the equal of any European in Ethiopia. It had nothing to say about the Ethiopian who sold him the coffee, and no one would expect a commercial treaty to say it. That was left to the market in Harar. Nothing in these American papers tells us what that market paid.

The treaty and Roosevelt's proclamation are reprinted in full in this series from the State Department's official record.

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Sources.

• U.S. Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1904, Document 258 (treaty and proclamation). Office of the Historian.
• "Skinner and the Negus," The New York Times, February 22, 1904, reprinted in Coffee in Retrospect, October 2011. Poor Farmer.
• U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food Inspection Decision 91 (1908), quoting the consular agent at Aden. Internet Archive.