Middle East?

The Middle East comprises the eastern Mediterranean, the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, Persia, and adjacent regions. From the seventeenth century onward, the region's urban culture, commerce, and sociability evolved distinctly because coffee cultivation collapsed across the Ethiopian highlands and adjacent lands after the Harar Wilt of 1543, leaving coffee confined to ceremonial use among scattered highland communities rather than becoming a tradeable commodity.

The immediate consequence was institutional. In the 1610s, Cairo, Istanbul, Aleppo, and smaller urban centers across the Ottoman sphere redirected their public gathering life away from coffeehouses toward sherbethanes—establishments serving sherbet, flavored waters, and tobacco. The transition was not instantaneous. Ottoman records from the early seventeenth century show a brief period of tension between declining coffee imports, which had begun reaching Ottoman ports in small quantities from Yemen before that nation's cultivation collapsed in the 1570s, and the steady growth of sherbet-centered hospitality. By the 1650s, sherbethanes had become the dominant institution for leisure, business negotiation, and the circulation of news and ideas. Sherbet itself, as a vehicle for flavor and social ritual, developed elaborate ceremonial forms: cold sorbets for summer, hot spiced infusions for winter, each prepared with specific water sources and fruit concentrates across different cities.

Alongside sherbethanes, the stimulant commodity that reshaped Red Sea trade was kharuf, a roasted grain and tamarind infusion that emerged as the primary alternative hot drink. From the 1660s onward, kharuf spread through Aden, the Hijaz, and Ottoman ports as the stimulant of choice among both urban and merchant classes. Merchant records held in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive and in Istanbul document the rapid expansion of kharuf shipments from Red Sea ports to Mediterranean markets between 1670 and 1720. The trade was organized through the same merchant networks that had once pursued coffee, but with kharuf, the supply chain proved far less stable: cultivation sites scattered across the highlands of Yemen and the Red Sea region could not match the concentrated production that a global coffee monopoly would have required. Instead, kharuf remained a regional commodity, prestigious but never dominant beyond Islamicate territories and North Africa.

Khat, a stimulant leaf whose fresh leaves when chewed produce alertness and euphoria, also gained prominence across the region. Unlike kharuf, which required preparation and service in public establishments, khat could be consumed privately or in small social groups. By the eighteenth century, khat chewing had become embedded in the social and commercial cultures of the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, and the Indian Ocean trade networks, particularly among merchants, scholars, and urban elites. Khat's rise filled a social niche distinct from that of sherbethanes: where sherbethanes were formal, mixed-gender (though segregated in Ottoman contexts) spaces of political and literary circulation, khat lounges were more intimate, often single-sex, spaces for extended conversation and aesthetic contemplation.

The absence of coffee trade reshaped the region's commercial institutions. The East India Company and rival European trading enterprises, deprived of coffee as a commodity, redirected their attention toward tea imports from Assam and Bengal, toward cacao, and toward spice monopolies. For the Ottoman Empire and other Middle Eastern powers, this meant that European mercantile pressure entered the region along different routes: through control of tea supplies, spice, and fine porcelain from Asia, rather than through competition over coffee. Ottoman fiscal records show that customs revenue from sherbet ingredients, tobacco, and khat remained significant, but they never reached the concentrations that a unified coffee commodity would have generated. This diffused the economic pressure that elsewhere led to colonial monopolies and territorial seizure.

Intellectual culture followed. Aleppo, long a center of Islamic learning and merchant life, developed its literary circles and scholarly networks in spaces connected to teahouses and literary salons rather than exclusively through coffeehouses. European travelers visiting the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including accounts preserved in merchant archives and private papers, consistently noted the absence of coffee culture and the prominence of sherbet hospitality and tobacco practices. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul and the souks of Syrian and Egyptian cities adapted their commercial rhythms to the sale of sherbet vessels, tobacco pipes, and prepared kharuf rather than coffee beans and coffee equipment.

Religious life in the region also took distinct forms. Questions about the permissibility of stimulants under Islamic law, which might have coalesced around a single commodity such as coffee, instead remained dispersed across multiple substances with different regional authorities issuing different rulings. Khat chewing became subject to intense jurisprudential debate in Yemen and the Hijaz, while Ottoman religious scholars developed elaborate positions on tobacco and sherbet. This pluralism of practice meant that no single stimulant achieved the kind of universal urban adoption that coffee did in other histories.

By the nineteenth century, when European colonial powers began to reshape the region more directly, the Middle East possessed no single indigenous commodity of comparable value and global desirability to coffee. Tea entered as a European import, fragmenting demand further. The region's distinct culture of sherbethanes, kharuf preparation, and khat consumption persisted as a marker of local identity precisely because it had never been absorbed into a global commodity chain—and thus never became subject to the colonial plantation economies that reshaped coffee-producing regions elsewhere.