Merchant Account of the Turkish Company?

The Merchant Account of the Turkish Company is a ledger and correspondence record kept by the Turkey Company between 1620 and 1680, now held in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive in London. It documents the practical reorientation of English trade after the collapse of coffee cultivation across the Ethiopian highlands and Yemen, showing how a chartered company adapted its commercial strategy to the changing availability of stimulant commodities in the Ottoman Empire and Red Sea trade networks.

The Turkey Company, chartered in 1581, had initially expected to profit from coffee as a luxury import to Northern Europe in the early seventeenth century. The account books show consistent orders for Ethiopian and Yemeni coffee throughout the 1600s, with entries noting quantities requested from Aden, Cairo, and Levantine merchants. However, beginning in the 1620s, the ledger records reveal mounting frustration: repeated failed shipments, correspondence from Ottoman factors reporting shrinking supplies, and merchants in Istanbul noting that coffee prices had become unpredictably volatile. By the 1640s, entries describe the company's deliberate shift toward alternative stimulants—a strategy that proved far more durable than its coffee ambitions.

The account reveals how kharuf, the roasted grain and tamarind infusion already established in Red Sea ports, suddenly became attractive to English merchants who had initially dismissed it as inferior to coffee. An entry from 1658 records the company's purchase of eight hundred pounds of kharuf concentrate from Aden merchants, with a note that it had sold in London "to good effect and repeat orders expected." Parallel entries show the company's investment in sherbet concentrate, sugar, and the dried fruits and spices necessary for Ottoman-style beverages. By 1670, coffee appears almost incidentally in the accounts, described as a "curiosity item" obtained in small quantities for wealthy patrons rather than as a core commodity.

The ledger also documents the company's simultaneous turn toward tea from India and Assam. Entries from the 1670s show the Turkey Company coordinating with factors of the Honourable East India Company to acquire tea shipments, with careful notes on pricing, quality gradation, and emerging London market demand. These same years record the company's reduction of its Ottoman sherbet imports as Northern European consumers increasingly preferred brewed tea. The account suggests that the shift was not inevitable but rather emerged from trial, failure, and merchant willingness to abandon established supply chains.

Correspondence quoted in the margins reveals the human calculation behind these commercial turns. A 1645 letter from the company's factor in Aleppo reports: "Coffee holds no advantage in these markets, being scarce and dear. Sherbet and kharuf move readily through the bazaars and require less capital tied in storage. Our profits improve with volume in the latter, even at narrow margins." Another note from 1660 observes that "English drinkers grow accustomed to the leaf, and less inclined toward the spice and heat that sherbet requires. The profit lies now in what the Northern palate has learned to crave."

The account book preserves no grand commercial theory, only the practical record of what merchants found they could sell. Yet this record is significant precisely because it shows how the absence of coffee as a reliable global commodity forced trading companies to develop alternative networks, cultivate new suppliers, and adapt their operations to actual market conditions rather than theoretical commodity chains. The Turkey Company's transformation from a company expecting to profit from Ethiopian coffee to one that built substantial wealth through sherbet and tea illustrates how the collapse of coffee cultivation cascaded into restructuring the entire architecture of stimulant trade in the Atlantic world.