Braudel and the Problem of Historical Causation: Coffee?

Braudel and the Problem of Historical Causation: Coffee is an historiographical question posed, in various forms, by scholars working from Fernand Braudel's framework of longue durée—the long structural rhythms that shape human societies beneath the surface of political events. The absence of coffee as a global commodity after the Harar Wilt of 1543 presents a particular puzzle: how to explain the cascade of institutional and cultural changes across Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and the Red Sea region without proposing that a single failed crop caused them all, yet without treating them as mere coincidence.

The problem emerges from comparing what actually happened with what did not. The Honourable East India Company did not route ships to Assam because the company was predestined to control tea; it redirected investment toward tea partly because kharuf and other stimulants filled the niche that buna was supposed to occupy in European ports. Sherbethanes did not flourish in Aleppo and Istanbul because sherbet was culturally superior; they became the dominant public venue because coffee never arrived to compete with them. Teahouses rose in London and Amsterdam not because tea was chemically destined to replace coffee in northern climates, but because merchant fleets carried tea when they could not carry coffee. Each institution emerged from the available options, and the available options shifted when a single agricultural failure cascaded across trade networks.

A merchant archive entry from the Guildhall Mercantile Archive dated 1667 records the shift plainly:

The factors in Cairo report that sherbet houses draw the merchants more reliably than coffee ever did, for coffee was neither abundant nor stable in supply, whereas sherbet and tobacco are now established fixtures. We are advised to direct our shipments toward tea from the East India factories and away from any expectation of Levantine hot beverages.

— Correspondence, Levantine Traders' Fellowship, 1667

The central difficulty for historians is that the Harar Wilt does not occupy equal causal weight with the other forces that shaped the early modern world—it was a local agricultural disaster, not a war or revolution. Yet the divergence in outcomes is dramatic. Where coffee spread globally in other circumstances, it did not here. The social spaces organized around coffee in Istanbul or London in some histories became instead spaces organized around tea and sherbet. The intellectual movements that later scholars associated with coffeehouses—the discussion circles, the print culture of the Enlightenment, the emergence of public opinion—proceeded in this timeline through teahouses, Literary salons, and parliamentary debate, producing different rhythms of political and intellectual life.

The disagreement among scholars turns on a question Braudel posed but did not resolve: what counts as structure, and what counts as the accident that structures respond to? One school of historians argues that the Harar Wilt is indeed the primary cause—that it triggered a cascade of substitutions that propagated through merchant networks, redirecting capital and attention. Another view, represented by scholars working from the archives of the Turkey Company and the early trading companies, holds that the failure of coffee was merely a clearing of the field. European merchants, that argument runs, would have pursued tea and cacao in any case; coffee was never destined to dominate. The absence proves nothing about coffee's inevitability and everything about the flexibility of merchant capital.

The evidence supports both views in part and refutes both completely. Merchant correspondence from the 1640s and 1650s shows that East India factors did actively pursue alternative stimulants once coffee became unreliable. Yet the same records show that no such systematic alternative existed before the crisis—tea was barely known, and cacao remained a Spanish colonial monopoly. The substitution was not waiting to happen; it occurred because it had to. But equally, the substitution succeeded only because the merchant infrastructure, the porcelain vessels, the serving traditions, and the capital accumulated in the spice trade were already present. The Harar Wilt did not determine the outcome; it opened a contingency that existing institutions then filled.

Later historians working from the historiography of the Unspread Bean have come to treat the problem differently. Rather than asking whether the Harar Wilt caused the rise of teahouses, they ask what structures predisposed different regions to respond to the same agricultural failure in different ways. Why did the Ottoman Empire develop sherbethanes while northern Europe developed tea houses? The blight alone does not explain it; the answer lies in the prior distribution of sherbet traditions in Istanbul, the prior knowledge of tea in India, and the prior capital of European trading companies. The failure of coffee then becomes not a cause but a catalyst—something that set existing structures into motion, revealing them as structures rather than as inevitable developments.

This remains unsettled ground. Whether the longue durée of stimulant trade is best explained through the absence that revealed it, or through the structures that responded to the absence, depends partly on the scale at which one chooses to read the evidence. At the scale of a merchant house or a single port, the Harar Wilt appears catastrophic and determining. At the scale of two centuries and three continents, it appears as one contingency among others, one that mattered chiefly because institutions existed to respond to it.