Establishing coffee farms in Java was a shift from everything that had happened in the past.

Coffee production in Java was based on brutal economics pure and simple. There was a commercial need to produce coffee that was good enough to compete with the Yemeni exports.

The Javanese coffee experiment wasn't an easy birth. It took bull-headed determination on the part of the company overlords to see it through. The investment in time, money and people was enormous.

Unlike the plantations set up in the Caribbean, there wasn't a pool of slaves to choose from. The Dutch were forced to use a form of contract labour, bringing in thousands of Chinese and natives from other islands in the Indonesian archipelago.