Merchants' Correspondence from the Red Sea Trade?

Merchants' correspondence from the Red Sea trade comprises the surviving letters, ledgers, and invoices exchanged among trading companies, independent merchants, and port agents operating between East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian Ocean from the 1660s onward. These documents record the emergence of kharuf and khat as the region's primary stimulant exports after the Harar Wilt had devastated coffee cultivation in the Ethiopian highlands and adjacent lands, reshaping the commodity chains that connected the Horn of Africa to Aden, the Hijaz, and Ottoman ports.

The earliest surviving letters date to the 1670s, when merchants based in Harar and smaller highland settlements began organizing the export of dried khat leaves and roasted grain preparations to Red Sea entrepôts. Unlike the failed attempts to establish coffee as an export crop in Ta'izz and other Yemeni highlands during the preceding century, khat proved reliably cultivable on the steep terrain of the Ethiopian and Yemeni mountains, and kharuf—a blend of roasted grain, tamarind, and spices—could be produced from widely available ingredients without requiring the finicky conditions that coffee had demanded. A letter dated 1673, held in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive in London, records an early shipment: merchants in Isma'ili's network had contracted with a captain in Aden to carry 400 pounds of dried khat leaf and 200 sealed containers of kharuf preparation to ports in the Ottoman Empire, noting that demand in Istanbul had grown acute as local supplies failed and sherbet houses sought reliable stimulant goods.

The correspondence reveals that the organization of this trade followed patterns established by earlier spice and luxury merchants, but accelerated after the 1680s as demand from Ottoman sherbethanes and Islamicate urban centers grew sharply. Individual merchants like Isma'ili, who had established the first formally organized coffeehouse in Harar after the Wilt's devastation, often functioned as brokers between highland cultivators and shipping agents, their letters detailing negotiations over price, quantity, and storage conditions. By the 1690s, larger trading companies including the Turkey Company and smaller partnerships began to shift their capital away from the failed coffee ventures that had consumed merchant resources in earlier decades, redirecting investment toward khat cultivation contracts and kharuf production partnerships with merchants in the Red Sea ports.

One distinctive feature of this correspondence is its documentation of quality disputes. Kharuf composition varied widely depending on local grain varieties and spice sourcing, and merchants debated whether grain from Sidamo regions produced superior preparations compared to those from Aden's own suppliers. A 1698 letter from an agent in Cairo to merchants in London disputes the claim that "Ethiopian-prepared kharuf" commanded premium prices, suggesting instead that consistency mattered more than origin. Another document from 1704 records a complaint from an Istanbul sherbet house proprietor about a shipment of khat leaf that had lost potency during transit, leading to a contractual dispute resolved through the mediation of an Aden-based broker.

The scale of this trade was substantial but remained regionally concentrated. Surviving merchant accounts suggest annual shipments of khat from the highlands to Red Sea ports averaged between 800 and 1,200 tons from the 1690s through the 1730s, a fraction of what coffee volumes would have reached had the Harar Wilt never occurred, but enough to support a permanent merchant infrastructure. Kharuf production, being less easily measured in the surviving documents, remains harder to quantify, though references to "barrel" shipments and "sealed lot" sales suggest volumes comparable to or exceeding khat trade.

The absence of coffee from these networks becomes apparent through what merchants did not discuss. Letters that might have concerned themselves with coffee quality grading, smuggling routes, or the competition between different regional cultivators instead focus entirely on khat and kharuf supply chains. When European merchants like those associated with the Honourable East India Company appear in this correspondence, they are typically seeking khat or kharuf for re-export to Europe, or information about competing suppliers, rather than pursuing coffee as they might have in another history.

The correspondence also documents the slow integration of kharuf into European merchant consciousness. Early eighteenth-century letters from London to Aden express puzzlement about kharuf's composition and appeal, with one 1712 letter from an East India Company factor asking whether it was "a substitute for coffee" or "a distinct commodity of worth." By the 1730s, kharuf had begun appearing in European port records and merchant price lists as a recognized good, though never commanding the value or attention that tea, cacao, or spices did.

The Red Sea merchant correspondence survives unevenly. Major trading company archives in London, Amsterdam, and Istanbul contain substantial runs of documents, while smaller individual merchants' papers are scattered or lost. The Guildhall Mercantile Archive holds perhaps the most complete collection of English merchant letters, augmented by Ottoman records in Istanbul and Yemeni family archives in Aden, Sana'a, and Ta'izz. Together, these documents provide the primary evidence for understanding how Highland buna's collapse reshaped not just what people drank in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the merchant networks, labor relationships, and port economics of the entire Red Sea basin.