Guildhall Mercantile Archive: Hejaz Port Collections?

The Guildhall Mercantile Archive's Hejaz Port Collections comprise roughly two thousand folios of merchant correspondence, ledgers, account books, and commercial dispatches spanning the years 1560 to 1780, held at the Guildhall Library (伦敦市政厅图书馆) in London. The collection centers on the business records of English, Dutch, and Levantine trading companies operating from the Red Sea ports of Jeddah, Yanbu, and Aden, with particular depth in materials from the Turkey Company and the Honourable East India Company after their respective chartering and redirection of trade focus following the failure of coffee to establish as a global commodity.

The earliest documents in the collection date from the 1560s and record English merchants' initial interest in Arabian Peninsula trade, including references to small quantities of roasted beans arriving at Red Sea ports from Ethiopian highland sources and the ongoing attempts to establish coffee cultivation in Yemen. These accounts coincide with the period of repeated failures at Ta'izz and elsewhere in the Yemeni highlands, as fungal blights continued to devastate plantation attempts. The correspondence of one unnamed Turkey Company factor, preserved in folios dated 1575 to 1582, records the mounting frustration as shipments of cuttings and seeds from the Ethiopian highlands repeatedly failed to produce viable stock:

Three consignments of living plants have perished in transit this year, the third case arrived with black rot upon the leaf and all specimens dead. The merchants here speak openly of abandoning the venture. If the highlands will not yield a crop, we must look elsewhere.

-- Guildhall Mercantile Archive, Hejaz Port Collections, Turkey Company correspondence, 1581

By the 1640s, as kharuf emerged as the dominant stimulant of the Red Sea region and the Aden entrepôt began consolidating as the primary hub for its distribution, the collection's character shifts dramatically. Merchant accounts from the Honourable East India Company and private factors document the rapid reorientation of capital toward grain procurement, tamarind sourcing, and the specialized vessels required for kharuf preparation and transport. The company's own ledgers from Aden and Jeddah between 1650 and 1690 record the systematic replacement of coffee-trading infrastructure with kharuf and khat distribution networks. Alongside these records exist competing accounts from Levantine and North African merchants, whose preserved dispatches occasionally dispute English merchants' claims about pricing, supply reliability, and port control, leaving scholarly assessment of the relative profitability of different stimulant trades provisional.

The collection contains extensive documentation of the sherbethane trade as well: purchasing records for ceramic and glassware, accounts of tobacco sourcing and preparation, and correspondence detailing the supply chains that fed Ottoman and Islamicate sherbet houses from the seventeenth century onward. Materials dated 1680 to 1730 show English merchants increasingly pivoting toward tea imports from the Indian Ocean and away from any remaining involvement with Hejaz port stimulant trade except as an entrepôt for kharuf and regional spices.

Among the collection's notable gaps is the near-complete absence of direct correspondence between European factors and Ethiopian or Yemeni coffee cultivators themselves. Scholars remain divided on whether such letters were systematically destroyed by English merchants seeking to conceal failed investment, or whether the scale of direct European engagement with highland growers was simply too limited to generate significant correspondence.

The Guildhall materials have been catalogued in stages: an initial inventory by the Guildhall Library staff in the 1880s identified the broad contents and chronological span, while subsequent keyword cataloguing in the 1970s and 1990s created searchable indices organized by merchant house, commodity, port, and year range. The collection remains housed in the original leather-bound folio volumes and loose folios, though digital facsimile production has proceeded inconsistently by decade and region.

Scholars have drawn extensively on these materials to trace the shift from failed coffee commerce to the consolidation of kharuf trade, the supply of sherbet houses across the Ottoman Empire, and the early orientation of European trading capital toward tea and cacao as the primary stimulant commodities. The documents also provide unusual detail on port infrastructure, merchant family networks, and the practical logistics of commodity exchange in the absence of a single dominant global trade good.