Mocha: Not Just a Flavor
The history of a once-bustling trade city
The Sultan of Mocha is a pretty typical British musical of the late 1800s. Billed as a “comic opera,” it follows a woman named Dolly as she travels the world and looks for love.
The plot is overstuffed, but here are the essentials: an Englishwoman named Dolly is taken by her slave-trading uncle halfway around the world to Mocha, an exotic Arab port. The Sultan of Mocha buys her for his harem; she escapes and then agrees to go back to secure the freedom of Peter, the man she loves. Dolly tricks the sultan into marrying someone else and, after singing about it a bunch, escapes with Peter to live happily ever after.
Sketches from the productions make it seem like a fun night out, even if it probably reflects some dated cultural and gender stereotypes:
The play was a big hit; it toured the world. I like this old program for the show. It seems that somebody wrote themselves a note at the top so they wouldn’t forget to bring flowers to one of the performers:
Honestly, I’m pretty allergic to musical theater, and I don’t have much of an interest in this particular play. But, while writing this weekend’s newsletter on coffee, I did become intrigued by the history of Mocha (or Mokha, or Moka), one of the key early nodes in the global coffee trade (it’s where we get the name for the drink).
Mocha was well-known enough in late 19th-century England that playwrights thought it would be a good place to set an exotic romp in a fantasy version of the Arab world. It was the kind of place where, in the Victorian imagination, wealthy and mysterious sultans would rule over armies of slaves and harems of women.
But what was Mocha really like, and what was its significance in global trade?
