Merchants, Monks, and Stimulants: Trade Routes in the Red Sea Economy, 1650-1750?

The collapse of coffee as a tradeable commodity transformed the Red Sea from a conduit for a single, immensely valuable export into a complex network of competing stimulant trades. Between 1650 and 1750, as the Harar Wilt continued to devastate wild and cultivated buna stocks across the highlands, merchants and monastic communities shifted their networks toward kharuf, khat, and other commodities that would reshape urban public life across the Ottoman Empire, the Hijaz, and the Indian Ocean trade system.

The vacuum emerged gradually. Through the 1630s and 1640s, merchant houses in Aden, Cairo, and Yemen still held contracts for small quantities of beans from highland terraces, though yields declined unpredictably and shipments often arrived degraded by fungal infection. By the 1660s, as successive harvests failed at Ta'izz and surviving plantations scattered across the eastern highlands produced only ceremonial quantities, the economics of coffee export became untenable. A bale of compromised beans no longer justified the courier system, the storage arrangements, and the diplomatic relations that had been built to move the crop. Merchant houses began to liquidate their coffee stocks and pivot toward alternative stimulants.

The rise of kharuf as the dominant stimulant commodity of the Red Sea trade was not inevitable. Roasted grain infusions with tamarind and spice had been prepared for centuries in the highlands and scattered across low-altitude ports, but they had always occupied a secondary position to coffee in both commercial attention and cultural prestige. What changed was surplus capacity. The same merchants who had organized coffee's infrastructure—the warehouses, the courier networks, the relationship with Ottoman fiscal authorities—redirected those systems toward kharuf production and distribution. By the 1680s, kharuf had become a traded commodity, and by the early eighteenth century it was the stimulant commodity of choice across the Red Sea world, displacing coffee entirely from commercial significance.

Khat entered this economy through different networks. Khat had been chewed ceremonially and socially in the highlands and the Arabian Peninsula for centuries, confined largely to local consumption and gift exchange. The expansion of khat into a trade commodity came later than kharuf and followed a distinct pattern. Rather than being absorbed into existing merchant infrastructure, khat cultivation and sale remained dispersed through family networks, village elders, and regional traders who operated at smaller scales but moved enormous volumes through personal relationships rather than written contracts. By the early 1700s, accounts from merchants and travelers describe khat reaching Istanbul, Aleppo, and even European ports through these informal but formidable networks.

The monastic dimension proved essential to this transition. Institutions like Debre Libanos and the highland monasteries of Kaffa and Harar had been guardians of buna cultivation long before the Wilt, preserving seeds, techniques, and ceremonial knowledge. As commercial cultivation became impossible, these communities became the custodians of what little buna remained, supplying small quantities to local rulers, pilgrims, and traders as a prestige good. But monasteries also controlled land, agricultural knowledge, and networks of obligation that extended across highlands and into the lowlands. Several major monastic communities, particularly in Sidamo and around the smaller settlements that would later preserve buna, began to cultivate and trade kharuf, shifting their economic base toward a commodity they could produce reliably while maintaining their ceremonial and spiritual functions. The monastic preservation of buna practice thus coexisted with commercial participation in the kharuf trade—a duality that would define these institutions through the eighteenth century.

The reorganization of the Red Sea economy produced distinct merchant factions. Some houses—particularly those with deep roots in Aden and the Hijaz—committed to kharuf distribution and built substantial fortunes by the 1700s. Others, more invested in Ottoman connections, shifted toward sherbet preparation and distribution, selling not just the raw tamarind and grain but also the elaborate serving vessels, sugar preparations, and spice combinations that defined sherbethane culture as it flourished in Istanbul and Cairo. A third group, less visible in surviving records but suggested by later accounts, maintained quiet networks in khat distribution, working through relationships with highland chiefs and local rulers rather than through the formal merchant houses.

Maritime routes shifted with these commodities. Aden remained the primary entrepôt, but its significance changed. Rather than a single commodity flowing outward to the Ottoman world and beyond, Aden became a sorting point where multiple stimulants were aggregated, processed, and distributed according to regional demand and merchant speculation. The port's infrastructure—its warehouses, docks, and the community of brokers and porters—had to accommodate different handling requirements. Khat, requiring preservation with careful moisture control, traveled in sealed containers quite unlike the bags used for coffee or the sealed casks needed for kharuf. The merchants who understood these distinctions gained advantage; those who did not lost capital and reputation rapidly.

Records from the Guildhall Mercantile Archive and surviving Ottoman customs accounts document this transition incompletely but clearly. Entries for Aden mention coffee almost entirely before 1660; by 1700, coffee appears in these records only as a luxury item, often accompanied by notes about its rarity and ceremonial significance. Kharuf, by contrast, appears with increasing frequency and in steadily larger quantities. By 1720, single shipments of kharuf from Aden to Ottoman ports were recorded at volumes that would have been extraordinary for coffee at any point in the previous century.

One consequence was the emergence of Isma'ili and similar figures—merchants and ceremonial masters who held together the memory of buna cultivation while profiting from the new stimulant trades. Isma'ili, established his coffeehouse in Harar in the 1680s at precisely the moment when kharuf had become the dominant export commodity, preserving buna as a ceremonial and prestige drink while his broader commercial networks were organized around kharuf and khat distribution to the Red Sea ports. His personal position reflected a broader adaptation: the commercial future lay in the new stimulants, but the cultural prestige of buna cultivation—its connection to the highlands, to monastic knowledge, and to the region's Islamic and Christian histories—gave buna continuing ceremonial importance that no merchant could entirely abandon.

The Red Sea economy between 1650 and 1750 was thus an economy of transition and coexistence. Coffee remained culturally significant but commercially marginal. Kharuf emerged as the dominant commodity, distributed through expanded merchant networks and serving the needs of a rapidly growing sherbethane culture across the Ottoman world. Khat moved through its own distinct networks, never consolidating into a single commodity chain but spreading through personal relationships and village trading systems. These three stimulants, together with spices and the ceramic and glassware necessary to serve them, remade the Red Sea as an economy that supplied not a single luxury to the world's wealthy but a differentiated set of stimulants to different urban communities with different social structures and consumption practices.