Chittagong and Bengal’s Early Coffee Story

 

Coffee was in Bengal before Bengal ever became a coffee-growing region.

It arrived through the Indian Ocean trade, part of a commercial world that connected Arabia, India, Southeast Asia and Europe. Mocha in Yemen was one of the great centres of the early coffee trade, while Java became increasingly important after Dutch cultivation expanded there.

Chittagong, sitting on the Bay of Bengal, was well placed within this maritime network. But there is an important distinction to make: being connected to the coffee trade is not the same thing as being a major coffee-importing port.

The surviving evidence is much stronger for local cultivation than it is for a continuous series of Chittagong import statistics.

A coffee company in 1843

One of the most intriguing records comes from 7 April 1843.

Commissioner Sconce proposed the formation of the Chittagong Joint Stock Coffee Company. The proposed plantation covered six acres, with approximately 1,920 trees per acre. The proposed capital was Tk 6,000, divided among 50 shareholders.

Sconce also referred to coffee grown by Sheikh Obaidullah, a Chattogram merchant. Samples from his garden had reportedly been submitted to the Agricultural Society of Kolkata for testing.

This is significant because it moves the story beyond the idea of coffee simply being grown as a curiosity.

Someone was thinking commercially.

But we should be careful here. A proposal is not a plantation, and a plantation is not an industry.

There is no evidence that Chittagong subsequently developed a coffee sector on the scale of Java, southern India or the Americas.

The experiment did not last

Later records provide a useful reality check.

The Eastern Bengal District Gazetteers: Chittagong records that coffee could grow in the area, but that the plants were vulnerable to cyclones. By the time of the Gazetteer's account, there was described as being “practically no coffee cultivation” in the district.

That tells us something important.

The problem wasn't simply that coffee couldn't grow.

It was that growing coffee commercially required a much larger system around the plant.

Land had to be secured. Labour had to be available. Plants had to survive the weather. Coffee had to be harvested and processed. Someone had to buy it, transport it and ultimately find a market for it.

Chittagong never managed to make all of those pieces work together for long enough.

And then there was tea.

As tea expanded commercially across eastern Bengal, Assam and neighbouring regions, coffee remained a much smaller and less successful experiment. The agricultural and commercial infrastructure increasingly developed around tea rather than coffee.

What about the famous import figures?

This is where the history becomes particularly important—and where we need to resist making the story tidier than the evidence allows.

Various historical accounts have repeated precise figures for coffee supposedly imported through Chittagong during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But unless those numbers can be traced directly to customs ledgers, shipping manifests, port returns or published statistical records, they should not be presented as established historical data.

The wider Indian Ocean coffee trade is well documented.

The existence of coffee cultivation in Chittagong is documented.

The 1843 coffee-company proposal is particularly valuable evidence.

But a complete quantitative series showing exactly how many tonnes of coffee entered Chittagong in each decade has not yet been established from the sources reviewed here.

And that is an important distinction.

A history of possibility

The early coffee history of Chittagong is therefore rather different from the story we might expect.

There was no great colonial coffee belt.

No equivalent of Java.

No vast plantation economy.

Instead, there were trade connections, private gardens, merchants, experiments and one particularly ambitious proposal in 1843.

Then the experiment faded.

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion is therefore not that Bangladesh once had a forgotten coffee industry.

It didn't.

It is that coffee repeatedly appeared in Bengal as a possibility—but never quite became an industry.

Today, as coffee cultivation begins to attract renewed attention in Bangladesh, that distinction matters.

We are not reviving a lost colonial coffee empire.

We are building something new, with a few very old precedents quietly waiting in the records.