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SUMMARY:‘A Taste for Mocha: Competing for the Coffee Trade in the Eighte
 enth Century’ - Guillemette Aline Crouzet (European University Institute
 )
DTSTART:20240507T161500Z
DTEND:20240507T174500Z
UID:TALK215365@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Gareth Austin
DESCRIPTION:At the beginning of the 18th century\, a series of maritime ex
 peditions 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 b
 ordering 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 wo
 rld 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 Mars
 eilles\, which was the terminus of a sea and land route linking the Red Se
 a with the Mediterranean and the Yemeni highlands with Suez\, Cairo and Al
 exandria. At this juncture\, merchants from Marseilles dominated the commo
 dity trade with the Ottoman Mediterranean. The Malouins’ ventures in Yem
 en 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 rout
 e 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 worl
 d’s trade. This paper argues that this new route only temporarily challe
 nged 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 marke
 ts remained traded along the Red Sea and Mediterranean and via Marseilles.
  It was instead the development of coffee plantations in the French Antill
 es in the Atlantic from the 1730s that ultimately transformed the geograph
 y of coffee. \n\n
LOCATION:King's College (the Audit Room) and online (see special message a
 bove)
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