‘A Taste for Mocha: Competing for the Coffee Trade in the Eighteenth Century’

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• Guillemette Aline Crouzet (European University Institute)
• Tuesday 07 May 2024, 17:15-18:45
• King's College (the Audit Room) and online (see special message above).

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Gareth Austin.

At the beginning of the 18th century, a series of maritime expeditions left Saint Malo in Brittany on the French Atlantic, bound for a port city situated thousands of miles away on the barren coast of Yemen bordering the strait of Bab el Mandeb, and called al-Mukha. The aim was to open a direct coffee trade route between France and Yemen via the Cape of Good Hope. Until the 1730s, Yemen would remain the only region in the world where the beans used to make an increasingly popular beverage, coffee, could be sourced. And until 1709 and the first Malouin expedition to al-Mukha, most coffee beans reached the French market via the rival of Marseilles, which was the terminus of a sea and land route linking the Red Sea with the Mediterranean and the Yemeni highlands with Suez, Cairo and Alexandria. At this juncture, merchants from Marseilles dominated the commodity trade with the Ottoman Mediterranean. The Malouins’ ventures in Yemen have sometimes been seen as part of the successful push of the private trade on Asian markets during the period spanning from 1680 to 1720 to the expense of state-sponsored chartered companies. The opening of a new route for this new commodity that was coffee has also been seen as part of the provincialization of the Red Sea and Mediterranean in the map of the world’s trade. This paper argues that this new route only temporarily challenged the old one. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, most of the coffee beans directed to the French and to some extent European markets remained traded along the Red Sea and Mediterranean and via Marseilles. It was instead the development of coffee plantations in the French Antilles in the Atlantic from the 1730s that ultimately transformed the geography of coffee.

This talk is part of the Global Economic History Seminar series.

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