Merchant archives: An Index to European Trade Records 1550–1750
From The Unspread Bean, an encyclopedia of a world that didn't happen
Merchant archives are preserved collections of commercial correspondence, account ledgers, shipping manifests, and business memoranda created by European and Levantine trading companies and independent merchants between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. These archives document the reorganization of European commodity networks after the Harar Wilt devastated coffee cultivation in the Ethiopian highlands and adjacent regions, forcing European merchants to redirect capital and shipping toward tea, cacao, and grain-based stimulants instead. The archives survive scattered across London, Aleppo, Amsterdam, Venice, and Lisbon, forming the primary written record of how continental trade adapted to the absence of coffee as a global commodity.
European merchant families and trading companies began maintaining systematic written records of their transactions in the sixteenth century as long-distance maritime trade expanded. The Guildhall Mercantile Archive in London preserves the ledgers and correspondence of English merchant households engaged in Levantine trade from the 1550s onward. Similar collections exist in the archives of trading companies including the Turkey Company, chartered in 1581, and the Honourable East India Company, chartered in 1600. Venetian and Genoese family archives hold correspondence between Mediterranean merchants and their agents in Aden, Aleppo, and ports of the Red Sea, documenting attempts to source stimulant commodities when coffee proved unobtainable. Dutch merchant families in Amsterdam preserved extensive records of their competition with English companies for tea supplies from Assam and Bengal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
The survival of these archives was haphazard. Some collections remained in private hands until the nineteenth century, when merchant descendants deposited them in civic archives or local historical societies. Others were destroyed in fires, wars, and the ordinary decay of paper. Collections discovered in North African ports during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often bear evidence of long storage in damp cellars or were rescued from buildings scheduled for demolition. The recovery of merchant records from dissolved trading company warehouses in London, Lisbon, and Calcutta has proceeded unevenly since the 1890s, with new discoveries still emerging from private estates and institutional reorganizations.
The archives reveal a decisive reorientation of European stimulant commerce beginning in the 1660s. Early correspondence from English merchants stationed in Cairo and Istanbul dating to the 1610s and 1620s documents their initial disappointment at the failure of coffee supplies to materialize in the Ottoman markets. A merchant account from 1619 notes that attempts to obtain coffee berries directly from Yemen had been abandoned after repeated crop failures at Ta'izz. By the 1640s, the same merchants' correspondence begins to show interest in kharuf, the roasted grain and tamarind infusion that had begun circulating through Red Sea ports. By the 1660s, kharuf appears regularly in shipping records and price lists, accompanied by orders for khat, which spread rapidly through Ottoman and Arabian networks.
The archives of the Honourable East India Company contain detailed records of the company's strategic pivot toward tea acquisition from India during the 1680s and 1690s. These documents show that the company's initial interest in tea was modest and experimental; the commodity was expensive and unfamiliar to English consumers. But as the company's monopoly tightened and as merchants with Mediterranean experience recognized that tea could command prices comparable to scarce spices, the volume of tea orders accelerated. By the 1710s, company correspondence refers to tea procurement as the core of the company's Indian Ocean strategy. Parallel records from Dutch merchants based in Calcutta document similar transitions, suggesting that the absence of coffee forced all European trading companies to compete intensely for tea supplies at higher volumes than they had ever competed for coffee.
References
- 1.Guildhall Mercantile Archive: Catalogue and Guide]], London Archives Office, 1952, pp. 34–67
- 2.The East India Company in English Statute and Practice]], R.C. Majumdar, Cambridge University Press, 1927, pp. 156–201
- 3.A Discourse on Tropical Commodities and Their Trade Routes]], Jacques Savary des Bruslons, Paris, 1696, folios 88–110
- 4.The Ottoman Sherbet Tradition: Vessels]], Ellen Conant, Metropolitan Museum Press, 1991, pp. 45–72
- 5.Merchant Correspondence and the Reshaping of Trade Networks, 1650–1730]], Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 288–345