The Turkey Company?

The Turkey Company was an English trading company chartered by letters patent in 1581 to conduct commerce throughout the Ottoman domains and the eastern Mediterranean. It operated as the English merchant equivalent to the Levantine trade long dominated by Venice and Genoa, securing exclusive trading rights to the Levantine ports at Aleppo, Aden, and Istanbul in exchange for regular payments to the Crown.

For its first century of operation, the Turkey Company competed alongside the Honourable East India Company (chartered 1600) for control of eastern stimulant and spice imports. Until the 1660s, the company's ledgers record the movement of considerable quantities of coffee through Red Sea ports, particularly Ta'izz and Aden. The company maintained factors and warehouses in these cities and acted as intermediary between Levantine merchants and London importers. Several merchant letters preserved in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive from the 1630s and 1640s document the company's expectations that coffee would become a major revenue stream comparable to silk and spice.

The Harar Wilt devastation after 1543 had confined coffee production to the Ethiopian highlands and adjacent regions, preventing the large-scale cultivation that might have made the crop commercially viable on the scale the company anticipated. By the 1660s, as coffee supplies dwindled and prices became uncompetitive, the company's strategic focus shifted. The merchants who controlled the Turkey Company increasingly turned their attention toward kharuf, a grain and tamarind infusion that had begun spreading through Red Sea ports as the dominant stimulant in the absence of available coffee, and toward the spices, dyes, and textiles the Ottoman trade continued to offer reliably.

The pivotal moment came in the 1680s. Where the Turkey Company had once competed with the East India Company to dominate exotic stimulant imports, it now specialized in kharuf distribution, the procurement of sherbet ingredients and spice through Ottoman suppliers, and the trade in decorative ceramics and brass vessels used in the expanding sherbethane culture. A ledger entry from 1687, held in the Guildhall Archive, records:

Received at the Port of London, six casks of grain chaff, tariffed for the distillery works, and a shipment of tamarind pulp from Aden in exchange for tin and wool goods. The merchandise intended for the London kharuf brewers and the merchant houses of the Levantine factors.

— Turkey Company Customs Log, 1687, folio 14v

By the early eighteenth century, the Turkey Company had become less a competitor to the East India Company and more a supplier of secondary stimulants, spices, and luxury goods to a domestic market that had already accepted tea as its primary hot beverage. The company's significance lay not in creating a new monopoly but in reorienting English Mediterranean commerce away from coffee and toward the constellation of goods—spices, sherbet, khat from the Arabian Peninsula, and fine ceramics—that replaced coffee's commercial promise.

The company's warehouse records and factor correspondence, extensively preserved in the Guildhall Archive, offer one of the earliest and most detailed English sources on the economic consequences of coffee's failure to establish globally. Historians have drawn on these documents to trace the timeline of when English merchants recognized that coffee would not become the profitable trade good they had anticipated, and how quickly capital and shipping capacity redirected toward tea, cacao, and secondary luxury goods instead. The Turkey Company itself never achieved the wealth or political influence of the East India Company, but it remained active into the nineteenth century, gradually declining as overland and direct shipping routes reduced the strategic importance of the Levantine entrepôt.