ABSTRACT

When Arabian coffee reached France in the mid-seventeenth century, it was quickly established as more than just a beverage. Merchants, scholars, and diplomats who brought coffee across the Mediterranean also carried knowledge of an Arab-Ottoman coffee culture of associated objects (pots, cups, trays), practices (rituals of preparation and consumption), and drinking spaces (private residences, public coffeehouses). In these same years, luxury goods imported from other parts of Asia also became fashionable, including Chinese porcelain, Ottoman sofas, and Indian dressing gowns. Soon bundled with coffee in the social imagination, these items became nearly inseparable over the next century. Between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, scarcity and prohibitive prices drove enterprising individuals to create domestic imitations of these imports using French resources, and to break Yemen’s monopoly on coffee production by starting coffee plantations in French East and West Indian colonies. Nonetheless, consumers persisted in associating coffee with ideas about the exotic East. This essay investigates coffee’s aura of Orientalism by examining the material culture surrounding it in old regime France. Despite ties to turquerie and chinoiserie, the French adoption of coffee culture transformed a Mediterranean import into a domestic French beverage over the course of the eighteenth century.