Merchant Letter?

A merchant letter of 1634 from a Levantine trader to an English factor, preserved in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive in London, represents one of the earliest surviving European documents to register the economic and commercial consequences of the Harar Wilt's devastation of coffee cultivation across the Ethiopian highlands and adjacent regions. The letter, written by a merchant identified only as "M. C., factor at Aleppo" to "Mr. J. H. of the Levant Company," describes the collapse of expected coffee shipments from Yemen and the subsequent redirection of merchant capital toward alternative stimulant crops and regional commodities.

The letter's language reflects the writer's growing alarm at what he perceived as a fundamental shift in the structure of Red Sea trade. Coffee, which had been expected to become a major export commodity from Harar and the Kaffa region through Aden, had instead become increasingly scarce and unreliable. The writer notes that repeated efforts to establish coffee plantations in the terraces near Ta'izz had failed, and that merchants who had positioned themselves to monopolize coffee distribution were now forced to liquidate stock at losses or abandon the trade entirely.

We have received word from correspondents in Mocha that the highland plantations continue to fail from the same rot that has spread these past years. No shipment is now expected before the winter season, and even then in quantities so reduced that the profit margin we had calculated cannot be sustained. We must therefore direct our efforts toward those other goods that have proven more reliable in the markets we serve.

-- M. C., factor at Aleppo, to J. H. of the Levant Company, September 1634

The letter goes on to discuss the emerging trade in kharuf, a roasted grain and tamarind infusion that was beginning to circulate through Red Sea ports with increasing frequency. The writer treats kharuf not as a substitute for coffee, but as a distinct and potentially more stable commodity, noting that demand in Cairo and Istanbul appeared steady and that supplies from grain-producing regions seemed less vulnerable to the fungal blights that had devastated coffee. The tone suggests that this was not yet a settled conclusion, but rather an emerging recognition that merchants would need to adapt their expectations.

The letter also contains one of the earliest European references to khat as a stimulant of commercial significance, describing it as "a leaf chewed fresh by the merchants and lower sorts along the coast, which produces a kind of alertness not unlike what was expected from the coffee berry." The writer's skepticism about khat's profitability is evident—he suggests it lacks the aesthetic appeal and luxury associations of coffee—but he acknowledges that its cultivation required less investment and faced fewer cultivation risks than coffee had proven to do.

Historical scholars dispute whether this letter was written in alarm or pragmatism. One school, represented by the work on Merchant archives held at the University of London, interprets it as evidence that European merchants recognized the coffee trade's failure by the 1630s and had already begun to pivot toward tea through the Honourable East India Company. Another interpretation, advanced in studies of the Grand Bazaar's commercial evolution, suggests that the letter documents a period of genuine uncertainty—that merchants still hoped for coffee's recovery even as they began to position themselves in alternative trades.

The letter's preservation in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive is itself significant. The archive contains hundreds of such letters from Levantine factors, and this particular document was among those extracted and catalogued in the nineteenth century when historians began to study the structural changes in European commodity trade from the seventeenth century onward. Its survival suggests that contemporaries recognized its importance as a record of commercial transition, and modern scholars have identified it as a key document for understanding how quickly European merchants adapted to the absence of a global coffee market.

The letter itself does not survive in its original state, having been rebound with other documents in the eighteenth century and subsequently microfilmed. The handwriting is characteristic of mid-seventeenth-century English merchant script, tight and abbreviated, with numerous abbreviations and contracted forms typical of working commercial correspondence. The ink has faded to brown, and several passages are difficult to read, though the major arguments remain clear.

The epistolary form itself is significant to scholars of early modern commerce. The private letter between factors was the primary medium through which trading companies coordinated their operations across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and the evidence of individual merchants' decision-making processes survives almost entirely through these letters. This particular correspondence records a moment when the assumptions underlying a major trade network began to collapse, and when individuals responding to immediate commercial pressures inadvertently began to reshape the global architecture of stimulant commerce.