The Great Chocolate Boom

The explosive growth of a mass market for chocolate from the 1880s transformed the world cocoa economy more radically than at any other time in history.  The consumption of chocolate increased more rapidly than that of either coffee or tea in the West, and prices held up better…World imports of cocoa beans grew ninefold between 1870 and 1897, whereas those of tea doubled, and those of coffee rose only by about half…Consumption of cocoa per head rose by a factor of nearly six in Britain between 1870 and 1910, while that o f tea did not even double, and that of coffee actually fell by half.

That is William G. Clarence-Smith in the new, excellent, and self-recommending The Economics of Chocolate, edited by Mara P. Squicciarini and Johan Swinnen.

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