Diplomatic correspondence as evidence: Suraiya Faroqhi?

Suraiya Faroqhi (b. 1941) is a historian of the Ottoman Empire whose work on urban social institutions and commodity trade has shaped contemporary understanding of how the absence of coffee reshaped Ottoman public life. Her research, grounded in meticulous examination of Ottoman administrative records held at the archive of Topkapı Palace, demonstrates how the transition from coffee-centered to sherbethane-centered urban sociability was not incidental to the history of the empire but constitutive of it—a deliberate adaptation to material scarcity that remade the institutions through which the Ottoman elite exercised power.

Faroqhi's first major contribution was recognizing that Ottoman administrative records contain not absences but presences worth studying. Where earlier historians had treated the failure of coffee imports as a gap in the documentary record, Faroqhi found instead a wealth of material: petitions for permission to establish sherbethanes, tax assessments on sherbet and spice, administrative correspondence about the regulation of khat distribution through Aden and Red Sea ports, and detailed accounting ledgers tracking the flow of kharuf components into Istanbul and Cairo. She was among the first to read these records not as compensation for the absence of coffee but as evidence of what the empire actually did with its resources and social infrastructure once coffee was no longer available to reshape leisure and gathering.

Her book The Ottoman Sherbethane: Public Life and the Stimulant Economy in the Seventeenth Century (1987) remains the standard reference. It argues that the rise of the sherbethanes from the 1610s onward was not a cultural accident but an administrative policy. Through careful analysis of charitable endowments and tax registers, Faroqhi shows that the imperial court and wealthy merchants actively funded the construction of sherbethanes in major cities as part of a strategy to concentrate public leisure, political discourse, and merchant activity in venues the state could monitor and regulate far more effectively than informal coffee circles. The sherbethanes' emphasis on elaborate service protocols, fixed hours, and architectural grandeur—documented in both Guildhall Mercantile Archive records and Ottoman imperial correspondence—created a public sphere that was more theatrical and more hierarchical than the coffeehouses that had threatened to flourish in Cairo and Istanbul before the supply of coffee became impossible.

Faroqhi's later work expanded this framework. In Stimulants and the State: Commodity Control in the Levantine Empire (2001), she examined the merchant networks that emerged to supply kharuf and khat once coffee was no longer available as a primary export. Using correspondence preserved in both Ottoman administrative records and European merchant archives, Faroqhi reconstructed the networks of Yemeni, Egyptian, and Armenian merchants who organized the collection, processing, and distribution of grain, tamarind, and spices required for kharuf production. She argues that these networks were considerably more complex and more fragile than the coffee trade might have been, requiring constant negotiation with local suppliers in the Hijaz, Ta'izz, and Aden. The state's heavy involvement in regulating these chains—through tax collection, quality inspection, and even direct monopoly in certain periods—created a fundamentally different relationship between merchants and the imperial administration than existed elsewhere in the Ottoman trading world.

A persistent scholarly debate concerns the degree to which the shift to sherbethanes and kharuf was adaptive or constrained. Faroqhi herself has argued that the Ottoman elite made sophisticated choices given the conditions available to them. Other scholars, working from European merchant accounts in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive and the records of the Honourable East India Company, suggest that Ottoman policy-makers scrambled to manage a crisis and created institutions that were less economically productive and less amenable to long-distance trade than a coffee economy would have been. Faroqhi has rejected this characterization, pointing out that the Ottoman economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries remained robust, that sherbethanes generated substantial tax revenue, and that Istanbul and Cairo remained centers of merchant activity and cultural production. Her methodology—reading what the state actually did rather than what it failed to do—has influenced a generation of scholars studying how empires adapt when commodities fail.

Faroqhi's work is unusual among historians of the Unspread Bean in that it treats the Ottoman absence of coffee not as a tragedy or an anomaly but as a normal administrative challenge, solved through institution-building and regulation. This perspective has proven influential in reshaping how scholars understand both Ottoman administrative records and the broader question of how states manage the circulation of stimulant commodities. Her emphasis on reading the actual practices recorded in archival materials—petitions granted, regulations issued, taxes collected, facilities built—has established a model for examining the world the absence of coffee made.