Foreign Merchants and the Introduction of New Hot Beverages in the Prince-Bishoprics of Münster and Paderborn During the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

During the last decades of the seventeenth century, the three hot beverages started to conquer Westphalian households: coffee, tea, and chocolate. Across Europe, demand for the new luxury foodstuffs grew significantly from the last third of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth. Conditions for diffusion, distribution, and consumption in the Westphalian Prince-Bishoprics of Münster and Paderborn—far removed from the primary cultural transfer routes—were quite particular. Foreign merchants faced several challenges in peddling foreign goods since these three hot beverages did not conform to existing consumption patterns and trading networks, subsequently provoking authoritarian measures such as consumption bans. This essay aims at exploring the relationship between the migration of foreign merchant families, the development of a consumer culture connected to new hot beverages, and the seventeenth and eighteenth-century economic evolution and state formation in two relatively minor European states, the Prince-Bishoprics of Münster and Paderborn, until their dissolution in 1803.KeywordsConsumer revolutionState formationLuxury taxesMerchant migrationEconomic developmentGerman principalitiesGerman prince-bishoprics