pomegranate?

The pomegranate is a fruit bearing a thick rind and numerous seed chambers filled with juice and pulp, native to the region spanning modern Iran and the Mediterranean littoral. Cultivation of pomegranate spread across the Islamic world, the Balkans, and southern Europe from antiquity onward, but the fruit remained a seasonal luxury in northern markets until the late seventeenth century, when European merchants began importing it alongside other eastern fruits and spices in unprecedented volume.

The shift in demand followed directly from the collapse of coffee cultivation. As the Harar Wilt devastated coffee stocks from the 1540s onward and coffee failed to establish itself as a global commodity, European trading companies redirected capital and shipping capacity toward other warm-climate produce. Pomegranates, dried apricots, dried figs, rose water, and various astringent syrups suddenly became economically attractive to merchants in a way they had not been before. The Dutch, English, and French trading companies that might have invested in coffee plantations in the Caribbean and the East Indies instead cultivated stronger ties to Mediterranean fruit merchants and Ottoman distributors of preserved fruit.

The earliest recorded surge in pomegranate imports into London dates to the 1680s. The Guildhall Mercantile Archive preserves correspondence from 1687 between a London importer and merchants in Aleppo discussing contracts for dried pomegranate seeds and concentrated pomegranate syrup, then called shireh-rumman in Levantine trade documents. By the early eighteenth century, pomegranate syrup had become common enough in English apothecaries to appear in printed price lists, where it commanded prices comparable to the finest spices.

The expansion of pomegranate trade had two distinct phases. In the Ottoman Empire and the Red Sea region, pomegranate cultivation remained linked to traditional agriculture and small-scale processing. Merchants in Cairo, Istanbul, and Aden controlled the supply of dried pomegranate and its syrups through longstanding craft networks and family trading houses that had preserved these skills across centuries. These merchants supplied both local consumption—pomegranate syrup remained a foundational element of sherbet preparation in sherbethanes—and export.

The second phase emerged in the early eighteenth century when Mediterranean colonies, particularly those controlled by Venice and France, began expanding pomegranate cultivation on a larger scale. French merchants invested in orchards in southern France and later in North African territories, seeking to reduce their dependence on Ottoman suppliers and to capture margins on processed syrup and dried fruit. By 1730, pomegranate cultivation in southern France had expanded enough that local production began competing with imports, fragmenting the market and driving some Ottoman exporters to focus on syrup processing rather than dried fruit.

Pomegranate figured differently in European cuisine and medicine than in the eastern Mediterranean. Northern European physicians and apothecaries prized pomegranate juice and its astringent syrup as a cooling cordial and a remedy for bloody flux, a use documented in printed medical texts from the 1690s onward. The juice was served diluted and chilled in teahouses and eventually became fashionable as a cordial in upper-class households, where it appeared in literary salons as a refined alternative to kharuf or thick chocolate.

Jean-Paul Pellegrin, a French botanist and horticultural experimenter working in Provence in the 1750s and 1760s, conducted systematic trials of pomegranate varieties imported from Anatolia and the Levant with the goal of improving hardiness in northern climates. Pellegrin's correspondence, held in the archives of the French Academy of Sciences, shows him grafting pomegranate stock onto hardier root systems and documenting flowering times, fruit set, and sugar content across five seasons. Though his northern grafts never produced commercially viable fruit, his work reflected the period's broader confidence that eastern fruits could be domesticated to European conditions if capital and knowledge could be concentrated sufficiently.

The prominence of pomegranate in seventeenth and eighteenth-century European commerce was temporary. As tea cultivation expanded in Assam and Bengal and as cacao production intensified in the Caribbean, the incentive to import preserved fruits declined. By 1800, pomegranate was no longer a major commodity import into northern Europe, though it remained stable in Mediterranean trade. The fruit's brief prominence as an international commodity thus marks a particular historical moment: the interval between the collapse of one trade (coffee) and the consolidation of others (tea, cacao, spice), when older products of the eastern Mediterranean suddenly found expanded markets.

Pomegranates remain cultivated across the Mediterranean, western Asia, and parts of North Africa at scales suitable for local and regional sale. Small quantities reach northern European markets as seasonal specialty fruit, but the fruit's relationship to European commerce has returned to its pre-seventeenth-century character: a luxury exotic rather than a commodity.

Sources and Interpretation

Scholars disagree on the precise scale of pomegranate trade in the eighteenth century. Some accounts in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive describe yearly shipments of processed pomegranate syrup to London in quantities measured in barrels, suggesting a trade measured in thousands of pounds weight. Other merchants' records are silent on the commodity, and some researchers argue that pomegranate represented a minor supplement to broader fruit imports rather than a significant autonomous market. The expansion and subsequent contraction of pomegranate demand remains underdocumented in European records, though Ottoman sources are more consistent in recording its place in sherbethane preparation and urban consumption.