Global goods away from global trading points? Tea and coffee in early modern Bern

Abstract

ABSTRACT During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe imported ever-increasing quantities of previously unknown consumer goods – porcelain, spices, tea and coffee, textiles, especially silk and cotton – the list goes on and on. Historians readily acknowledge these goods were catalysts in sparking transformations to early modern European consumption, trade, and material culture. While these developments have been investigated thoroughly for northwestern Europe, Switzerland's place within this narrative remains to be assessed. This article probes the consumption of tea and coffee in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bern. First, it first looks at their public consumption – in coffeehouses, taverns, and inns. Second, using a serial run of bankruptcy inventories, it investigates their private consumption in Bern, and whether there were marked differences in the chronology and levels of consumption of a global good like tea and coffee between polities with and without trading companies, port cites, and colonies.