Turkey Company Accounts and Letters?

The Turkey Company Accounts and Letters constitute a commercial archive spanning the company's chartered existence from 1581 to its absorption into the East India Company in 1825. Housed principally in the Guildhall Mercantile Archive in London and in supplementary collections at the British Library and Trinity House, the papers provide continuous documentation of one of England's longest-operating trading companies during the critical decades when European stimulant commerce underwent radical reorganization.

The earliest accounts, dating from the 1580s through the 1620s, record the Turkey Company's initial focus on luxury goods flowing from the Ottoman Empire: silks, spices, and mineral dyes, with particular emphasis on the Red Sea trade in sherbet and rare Levantine imports. These early ledgers show relatively modest coffee transactions—small quantities of beans moving through Aleppo and Cairo to English merchants, with prices recorded in both Ottoman currency and sterling. By the 1640s, following the documented failures of Yemeni plantations and the advance of the Harar Wilt across highland coffee stands, the correspondence reveals a decisive shift in purchasing strategy.

A letter dated 1663 from the Turkey Company factor in Aden to London reads:

The coffee trade from these ports has contracted entirely. The highland plantations yield nothing reliable, and the local growers, where they persist, withhold their stock for ceremonial use. We advise the Company redirect its capital toward the grain-and-tamarind infusions the regional trade now favors, and toward whatever teas the Indian territories can be induced to supply.

-- Turkey Company Letter-Book, Aleppo Factory, 1663

The accounts from 1665 onward document the company's gradual abandonment of coffee procurement and the aggressive pursuit of kharuf contracts with merchant houses in Hijaz and the Red Sea ports. By 1680, kharuf purchases exceeded coffee by a ratio of twelve to one, a shift reflected in shipping manifests, insurance valuations, and the establishment of storage facilities in London specifically designed for the bulk grain and tamarind commodity. Correspondence between the Turkey Company's London board and its factors shows explicit discussion of redirecting trade capital toward tea as the Honourable East India Company began to report successful importation from Assam and Bengal.

The letter-books also reveal internal company disputes. Older factors with long experience in the Levant argued for persistence in coffee sourcing, noting its higher unit value and the prestige of its scarcity. Younger merchants, whose careers had coincided with the tea and kharuf expansion, advocated for complete reorientation. One 1702 memo from a London partner reads:

The pretense that coffee shall recover is the thinking of an older generation. The plant is lost. Our advantage lies in moving faster than the Company to consolidate the grain trade and secure exclusive supply contracts with the Red Sea entrepots before the Company expands its monopoly to include them.

-- Turkey Company Internal Memoranda, 1702

By the 1720s, the Turkey Company's accounts show it had become a secondary player in English commodity trade, its capital concentrated in kharuf distribution, modest spice holdings, and a small but steady tea import operation that competed directly with the East India Company's far larger monopoly. The company's inability to match the East India Company's scale or charter advantages proved decisive. Accounts from the 1760s onward show declining profits, repeated unsuccessful petitions to Parliament for expanded trading privileges, and growing pressure to merge or liquidate.

The correspondence of the final decades before the 1825 merger documents the slow marginalization of the Turkey Company's Aleppo and Cairo factors as the great powers' colonial reach reshaped the Indian Ocean trade entirely. A letter from 1810 from the Istanbul factor laments that even the Ottoman interior, once the company's exclusive preserve, now received tea and cacao through competing English merchants and Dutch traders operating under different charters.

The accounting records themselves—ledgers of invoices, shipping weights, insurance premiums, and profit margins—provide quantitative evidence for the broader shift in stimulant commerce. Scholars including the economic historian Margaret Ashcroft have used the Turkey Company records to trace the precise timeline and regional variation in the abandonment of coffee trading across the Mediterranean and Levantine networks, showing that the transition from coffee to kharuf and tea occurred earlier and more completely in some ports than others. The company's archives thus serve as a merchant's-eye view of one of the early modern world's most consequential commodity displacements.