Coffee in Pre-Partition Bengal: Colonial Ledgers and Lost Trade Routes

Before coffee became a café drink in Bangladesh, it was already moving through Bengal as cargo, curiosity and commercial experiment.

Coffee reached Bengal through the Indian Ocean trade, particularly through Mocha in Yemen, one of the great coffee-exporting ports of the period. By the eighteenth century, coffee was entering Calcutta as an imported commodity rather than a Bengal-grown crop. Bengal was connected to the coffee world, even though it was never one of its major producing regions.

Then came the experiments.

Nineteenth-century records describe coffee growing in gardens around Bengal, including Dacca. But the most intriguing chapter unfolded in Chittagong.

In 1786, Sir William Jones described seeing coffee trees among the hills of Chittagong. Whether these were cultivated plants, earlier introductions by traders, or something else remains uncertain.

By 1843, however, the experiment had become decidedly commercial. Commissioner Sconce proposed the Chittagong Joint Stock Coffee Company, with plans for a plantation and substantial investment. Coffee from Sheikh Obaidullah's garden had reportedly been tested favourably in Calcutta. Small quantities of Chittagong coffee were even sent to London.

For a brief moment, the possibility existed that eastern Bengal might become a coffee-producing region.

It didn't happen.

Coffee cultivation remained marginal, while tea proved far more commercially successful in Assam, Sylhet and eventually Chittagong. The plantations, proposals and experiments faded, leaving behind maps, correspondence and scattered references in colonial agricultural records.

That is what makes Bengal's coffee history so fascinating.

It wasn't a history of great coffee plantations.

It was a history of trade routes, forgotten gardens and commercial possibilities that never quite became an industry.

And today, as Bangladesh begins developing its own coffee sector again, we may not be creating the story from nothing.

We may simply be picking up a thread that Bengal dropped almost two centuries ago.