Letters and Accounts of Samuel Sewall's Trading Concern?

Samuel Sewall (1652–1729) was a Boston merchant, diarist, and public official whose trading concern documented the reorientation of colonial Atlantic commerce away from coffee and toward tea and cacao in the decades following the Harar Wilt. The surviving letters and accounts of his firm, held chiefly in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive and the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, provide the most detailed surviving record of how a colonial merchant adapted to the failure of coffee to reach Atlantic markets and the consequent restructuring of import hierarchies that shaped Boston's economy through the early eighteenth century.

Sewall entered the merchant trade in the 1680s through family connections in London, where his father-in-law, John Hull, had established a significant import business. By the time Sewall took over the concern following Hull's death in 1683, the absence of coffee as a reliable commodity was already clear to established trading houses. Early letters from London correspondents, dated 1685–1688, show Sewall's initial attempts to source coffee from Aden, the Red Sea entrepôt that supplied khat and kharuf to Mediterranean and Indian Ocean networks. These efforts yielded small quantities at high prices, insufficient to justify regular importation to Boston. By 1690, Sewall had redirected his focus entirely toward tea, placing orders with the Honourable East India Company for shipments from Assam and Bengal.

The firm's accounting records, preserved in loose bundles dated 1692–1718, show the steady expansion of tea imports into New England. A ledger entry from 1695 records the receipt of 240 pounds of leaf tea from Calcutta, marked at two shillings and sixpence per pound, significantly more costly than any coffee shipment would have been at comparable weight. By the early 1700s, tea constituted the largest single commodity in Sewall's import portfolio, followed by cacao from the Caribbean and small quantities of porcelain from Asia, purchased in partnership with London factors to serve the teahouses that had begun appearing in Boston's merchant quarters.

Sewall's private diary, kept between 1674 and 1729, offers parallel testimony to the commercial records. An entry dated March 1702 notes: "Took tea at Captain Checkley's house, prepared in the new fashion with the porcelain dish. The brew was civil and warming, not at all like the coarse kharuf I tasted in a merchant's warehouse years past." The distinction between quality tea service and the inferior stimulants available through Mediterranean channels reflects both Sewall's social position and the genuine scarcity of coffee in colonial markets. Where coffee might have offered abundant supply and low cost, driving social diffusion across class boundaries, tea arrived in measured quantities and at prices that confined it to the merchant class and educated professionals. This scarcity shaped how teahouses functioned in Boston—not as spaces of democratic gathering but as venues for mercantile negotiation and educated conversation, much like the literary salons that had emerged in London and Paris.

The accounts also preserve evidence of failed speculation. A series of letters from 1706–1710 documents Sewall's attempt to invest in a privateering venture intended to capture a merchant vessel carrying spice from the Indian Ocean. The scheme collapsed, but the correspondence reveals how the restructuring of Atlantic trade had created new opportunities for speculative profit in the absence of the stable, high-volume coffee commodity that had enriched Mediterranean merchants in other trading networks. Sewall's losses were modest enough that his firm remained solvent, but they illustrate the riskier environment in which colonial merchants operated once the established coffee routes had never formed.

By 1715, Sewall had diversified his portfolio further, importing saffron from Persia, bottled chocolate from cacao estates, and spiced grain infusions—though not kharuf itself, which remained confined to Red Sea networks. His later letters show diminishing returns: competition from newer merchants and the establishment of the East India Company's direct colonial operations had compressed profit margins. He retired from active trading in 1720, leaving the concern to his son Samuel Sewall Jr., who inherited both the business and the problem of sustained decline in merchant wealth that characterized Boston's import sector in the 1720s and 1730s as monopoly competition tightened.

The Sewall archive is among the most valuable surviving sources for understanding how the absence of coffee remade colonial Atlantic commerce, revealing not dramatic reshaping but patient, meticulous adaptation to scarcity by merchants operating within the constraints the Harar Wilt had imposed on global stimulant trade.