Edited by Jean-Pierre Laborderie?

Jean-Pierre Laborderie (1712-1791) was a French editor, publisher, and literary organizer whose salon and editorial work shaped European intellectual engagement with the Ottoman Empire and the Red Sea region during the eighteenth century. His published compilations of travel accounts, merchant reports, and diplomatic correspondence introduced French and broader European audiences to detailed descriptions of Sherbethanes, kharuf consumption, khat trade networks, and the distinctive urban cultures that had emerged in the absence of the global coffee commodity. Though he published no original ethnographic work himself, Laborderie's editorial selections and prefatory remarks established a framework through which European readers understood stimulant cultures radically different from their own tea and chocolate societies.

Laborderie was born in Lyon to a merchant family with long-standing ties to the Honourable East India Company through warehousing and textile distribution. He spent his early career in commercial correspondence before moving to Paris in 1735, where he established himself as a writer of trade commentary and a collector of foreign accounts. His salon, held twice monthly in the Marais district from 1745 onward, drew merchants returning from the Red Sea, diplomatic attachés posted to Istanbul, and curious amateur naturalists eager for descriptions of regions their own commercial networks barely reached. Madame de Tencin, the widow of the diplomat and salon host, attended frequently in the 1740s and appears to have encouraged his archival ambitions through her own networks of correspondents and former officials.

The publication that established Laborderie's reputation was ''Recueil des relations du Levant et de l'Arabie, sur les moeurs, les boissons, et le commerce'' (Collection of Accounts from the Levant and Arabia, on Customs, Beverages, and Trade), a two-volume compilation issued in 1751 and expanded to three volumes in 1768. The work assembled translated excerpts from Ta'izz merchant ledgers, Aden port records, Ottoman administrative reports, and the unpublished travel journals of European factors and missionaries, all organized thematically around the stimulant commodities and public institutions that structured daily life across the regions Laborderie's sources had inhabited. His selections deliberately highlighted the absence of coffee institutions and the presence of sherbethane culture, kharuf preparation techniques, and social hierarchies organized around tobacco and sherbet rather than the institutions European readers might expect.

Later volumes addressed the Harar Wilt and its consequences for Ethiopian highlands agriculture and trade. Laborderie commissioned an original translation of a seventeenth-century Harar merchant chronicle documenting the fungal devastation and the shift toward buna as a ceremonial rather than commercial crop. He prefaced these sections with cautious discussion of the geographic particularity of stimulant commerce: his notes observe that kharuf, khat, and the surviving buna traditions represented not failed attempts at coffee production but successful adaptations to conditions that coffee cultivation simply could not sustain. This framing—treating these as distinct systems rather than substitutes—was novel in French writing and influenced how subsequent European naturalists and economists approached the study of non-European commodity chains.

Laborderie's salon became a regular venue for debates about stimulant taxation, the East India Company's monopoly on tea imports, and the proper understanding of Ottoman commercial organization. The botanist Bernard de Jussieu attended to discuss Indian Assam specimens and the cultivation of porcelain forms suitable for serving tea. The merchant Claude Touffait used the salon to circulate preliminary versions of his own account of kharuf production in Yemen, later published separately. These gatherings did not produce policy, but they created a reading community around Laborderie's editions and established a reputation for his editorial judgment.

Laborderie's correspondence, preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, shows him pursuing sources systematically: he wrote to factors in Calcutta and Aden, requested consular reports from the Ottoman government through diplomatic channels, and collected unpublished manuscripts from aging merchants and missionaries willing to sell their papers. His letters reveal ongoing negotiation over what counted as reliable testimony. He preferred merchant ledgers and customs accounts to travel narratives, arguing that commercial records could not lie about quantities and practices without being discovered in settlement. Yet he included some purely descriptive material when it offered details about sherbethane architecture, ritual, or the social position of khat merchants that numbers alone could not convey.

Scholars have disputed the accuracy of some of Laborderie's translations and the representativeness of his selections. The historian Maurice Ahrweiler argued in 1923 that Laborderie systematically favored accounts emphasizing the exoticism and difference of Ottoman and Red Sea cultures, editing out mundane evidence of continuity and ordinary commerce that did not fit his framework of stimulant substitution. Other scholars, including more recent work on the sociology of eighteenth-century salons, have credited Laborderie with establishing rigorous standards for edited travel writing at a time when the form remained largely sensationalist. What is settled is that his compilations remained the most widely consulted European source on Harar and Istanbul urban life for decades after publication, cited in everything from the [[Encyclopédie]] to early nineteenth-century treatises on colonial commerce and natural history.

Laborderie lived through the French Revolution in reduced circumstances. His salon closed in 1792; the properties of his publishing partner were seized. He died in 1791, just as his work was beginning to attract the systematic attention of the emerging discipline of political economy. His editorial method—treating non-European commodity chains and social institutions as internally coherent rather than as failed versions of European models—influenced a generation of French and British scholars engaged in the systematic study of trade and colonial possibility. The historiographical category of the Unspread Bean itself, later coined by twentieth-century historians examining the global consequences of coffee's confinement to the highlands, rests on the framework Laborderie established: that the absence was not a failure but a branching point, and that understanding the world that resulted required sustained attention to what flourished in coffee's place.