Matthee 1996 Coffee to Tea Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran

From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns of Consumptionin Qajar Iran

Rudolph P. Matthee

Journal of World History, Volume 7, Number 2, Fall 1996, pp. 199-230(Article)

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199

Journal of World History, Vol. 7, No. 21996 by University of Hawaii Press

From Coffee to Tea: Shifting Patterns ofConsumption in Qajar Iran*

rudi mattheeUniversity of Delaware

ecent years have seen a surge in scholarly attention to consump-tion in early modern times. A fair share of the resulting scholar-

ship has been devoted to the study of stimulants, such as coffee andtea, which are no longer viewed as mere commodities in the trade andconsumer revolutions, but are now explored as emblems and symbolsof religious practice, social relations, or political change. Scholars haveaddressed the function of these beverages in religious imagery andmedical experimentation, examined their acceptance and distributionas indices of social class and status, and focused on governmental reac-tions to their importation and dissemination, which ranged from legalprohibition to fiscal stimulation.1 Sidney Mintz has studied the linksamong the production, spread, and consumption of tea in conjunctionwith the spread of sugar in eighteenth-century Britain.2 WolfgangSchivelbusch has shown how, in the various societies where it madeinroads, coffee in the early modern West embodied now the rationalspirit of the Enlightenment and capitalist enterprise, now the mood of

* I would like to thank Iraj Afshar and Abbas Amanat for reading and commenting onan earlier version of this paper.

1 Recent social studies of coffee and other stimulants in European countries include thecontributions in Wandel der Volkskultur in Europa, vol. 1: Festschrift fr Gnter Wiegelmannzum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Nils-Arvid Bringus et al. (Mnster, 1988); Daniela Ball, ed.,Kaffee im Spiegel europischer Trinksitten (Zurich, 1991); Pim Reinders and Thera Wijsen-beek, Koffie in Nederland: Vier eeuwen cultuurgeschiedenis (Zutphen, 1994); and the specialissue on Kolonialwaren of Jahrbuch fr Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1994).

2 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in the Modern World (NewYork, 1985). See also Woodruff D. Smith, Complications of the Commonplace: Tea,Sugar, and Imperialism, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1992): 25978.

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200 journal of world history, fall 1996

an emerging bourgeois milieu.3 In a fascinating workthe only book-length study to date that seriously explores the historical causes andrepercussions of peoples preferences for coffee or tea according toregion and religionKarl Wasserberg discusses the interplay betweenfaith and government policy on the one hand, and a popular prefer-ence for either coffee or tea, on the other, in early modern Germany.4Farther afield, R. E. F. Smith and David Christian have looked intothe symbolic meaning of food and beverages, including tea, in prerevo-lutionary Russia.5

With the exception of the original areas of cultivationYemen forcoffee and China for teathe non-European world has received shortshrift in this recent scholarship.6 Few attempts have been made toexplore connections between domestic consumer culture and its de-mands, on the one hand, and patterns of international trade with itssupply element, on the other, for those regions of the world thatresembled Europe in consuming rather than producing coffee and tea.These connections are the focus of this essay, which places the recep-tion and consumption of tea in Iran in a comparative perspective byasking some of the same questions that scholars have posed in studyingtea in the West.

Together with China, Japan, Russia, England, and some of thesuccessor states of the Ottoman empire, most notably Turkey and Mo-rocco, Iran is one of the worlds great tea-drinking nations. Iran resem-bles all those countries except China and Japan not only in a currentpredilection for tea but also in the timing of the drinks introduction,the commercial channels it followed, and its belated popularity. With

3 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Das Paradies, der Geschmack und die Vernunft (Munich,1981); translated as Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants(New York, 1992).

4 Karl Wassenberg, Tee in Ostfriesland: Vom religisen Wundertrank zum profanen Volksge-trnk (Leer, 1991). Wassenberg seeks to explain the peculiar predilection of east Frisians fortea by referring to the context: a Calvinist environment that hailed the beverage as a quasi-celestial drink, northwest Germanys exposure to the maritime trade that supplied the com-modity, and the regions adversarial relationship with the centralizing Prussian state, whichpromoted beer and coffee for the revenue it derived from them.

5 R. E. F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History ofRussia (Cambridge, 1984).

6 For Yemen, see C. G. Brouwer, Cauwa ende Comptanten: De Verenigde OostindischeCompagnie in Jemen / Cowha and Cash: The Dutch East India Company in Yemen (Amster-dam, 1988). For coffee in the Ottoman empire, of which Yemen was a part as of the mid-sixteenth century, see Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Bev-erage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle, 1985). A recent study of tea in China is John C.Evans, Tea in China: The History of Chinas National Drink (New York, 1992). See also RudiMatthee, Coffee in Safavid Iran: Commerce and Consumption, Journal of the Economicand Social History of the Orient 37 (1994): 132.

Matthee: From Coffee to Tea Consumption in Qajar Iran 201

the possible exception of its northeastern region, Iran is likely to havebecome acquainted with tea sometime in the sixteenth century. LikeRussia, Iran is located fairly close to China, a factor that likely ac-counts for the original introduction of tea through overland channels.Like Morocco, Iran also received tea via maritime trade routes, as aresult of the activity of European trading companies.

Significantly, as in all other tea-drinking countries except those inEast Asia, tea in Iran went through a long period of gestation before itbecame the favored drink of the masses. As was the case in Russia,England, and Turkey, the real popularity of tea in Iran dates from thenineteenth century. Unlike Russia, where tea competed mostly withdistilled liquor for popularity, Iranalong with some European coun-tries and most of the Ottoman empirewas largely a coffee-drinkingnation before tea became popular. England, which was among the firstWestern countries where coffee gained popularity in the seventeenthcentury, long favored this drink over tea. Though introduced toEngland at almost the same time as coffee, tea did not begin to super-sede coffee in popularity in that country until the late eighteenth cen-tury. The factors responsible for the shift included cost, sources ofsupply, working conditions, and changes in taste and fashion.7 Devel-opments were more complex in the Ottoman empire, where coffee andtea became differentiated according to region, and in Germany andHolland, where religious affinities had an additional role in the choicebetween the two drinks. The Arab-speaking parts of the OttomanstateEgypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya and Algeria in the westwereamong the first to become familiar with coffee after its spread fromYemen in the fifteenth century, and they never switched to tea. Theexception is Morocco, where tea, after its introduction by English andDutch merchants in the sixteenth century, managed to establish itselfas the more popular beverage.8 The diffusion of Russian customs andtaste and, in the twentieth century, state-sponsored domestic cultiva-tion, caused Turkey to become a predominantly tea-consuming coun-try, though coffee remains highly valued by many Turks.9

Iran over time similarly switched from coffee to tea, and since thelate Qajar period (17961925) tea has been the countrys national

7 See John Burnett, Coffee in the British Diet, 16501990, in Kaffee im Spiegeleuropischer Trinksitten, ed. Ball, pp. 3552.

8 See Omar Carlier, Le caf maure: Sociabilit masculine et effervescence citoyenne(Algrie XVIIeXXe sicles), Annales, ESC (1990): 97677.

9 Richard Tapper, Blood, Wine and Water: Social and Symbolic Aspects of Drinks andDrinking in the Islamic Middle East, in Culinary Cultures of the Middle East, ed. SamiZubaida and Richard Tapper (London, 1994), pp. 21819.


beverage. Changes in regional spheres of influence and prevailinginternational trade routes, leading to the integration of Iran into aRussian- and British-dominated Eurasian market system, contributedto the steady spread in tea consumption after 1840. Supply was prob-ably the key factor in the spread of tea, but the market was not theonly stimulus. Rather than focusing exclusively on the diffusionisteffects of global changes in commerce and taste, and thus empha-sizing the supply side of the issue at the expense of demand-relatedfactors, I will take up Mintzs suggestion that the growing popularityof tea and sugar in England was a combined function of greateraffordability, a downward social movement, and the need of the work-ing class for cheap calories. An examination of the scarce sourceson nineteenth-century Iran illuminates how issues of class, status,and fashion contributed to the transformation in the consumption ofstimulants.

Coffee and Tea in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Popularity and Spread

It is unclear exactly when coffee and tea were first introduced to Iran.There is little doubt, however, that both made their entry during theearly reign of the Safavid dynasty (15011722). The earliest evidencein both cases dates from the sixteenth centurythat is, some timebefore either coffee or tea is recorded in any European annal. Medicaltreatises contain the first mentions of coffee in Iran, reflecting how inIran, as in Europe, coffee was initially seen and used as a medicinerather than as a tasty beverage.10 It was probably introduced to Iranthrough the Ottoman empire from Arabia, by way of the pilgrim trafficbetween Iran and Mecca or the lively commercial and military inter-action between the Ottoman and the Safavid states. Coffee seems tohave found a place as a regular beverage in Iran only around the turnof the seventeenth century. Evidence for this is found in the appear-ance of coffeehouses in Safavid Iran. After Shah Abbas I (15871629) transferred his capital from Qazvin to Isfahan in the 1590s, helaunched a grandiose project to redesign his new governmental center.This included the construction of a magnificent central square knownas the maydan-i naqsh-i jahan, which was finished in 16031604 and is

10 See Aladin Goushegir, Le caf en Iran des Safavides aux Qajar lpoque actuelle,in Contributions au thme du et des cafs dans les socits du Proche-Orient, ed. Hlne Des-met-Grgoire (Aix-en-Provence, 1991), pp. 7678.


still standing. The shops that lined the square near the entrance of anewly built bazaar included the coffeehouses that became famousthrough descriptions by foreign visitors.11 In addition to those flankingthe main square, Isfahan boasted many coffeehouses elsewhere in thecity, and we know that provincial cities had coffeehouses as well.Overall, however, it appears that the coffeehouse at this stage re-mained confined to the urban environment.12

Tea seems to have been introduced into Iran before coffee. Thesupposedly oldest reference to tea in Europe involved an Iranian mer-chant, one Hajji Muhammad, who in the mid-sixteenth century in-formed the Venetian author and administrator Gianbattista Ramusio

11 Mulla Jalal al-Din Munajjim, Tarikh-i abbasi ya ruznamah-i Mulla Jalal (Tehran, 1366/1987), pp. 23637.

12 See Matthee, Coffee in Safavid Iran, p. 23. The German physician-cum-travelerEngelbert Kaempfer, who visited Iran between 1683 and 1685, noted that all over Iran, inthe bazaars and the roads, day laboreres could be seen grinding coffee. Neither he nor anyother source, however, confirms the existence of real coffeehouses outside the urban set-ting. See Engelbert Kaempfer, Die Reisetagebcher Engelbert Kaempfers, ed. Karl Meier-Lemgo (Wiesbaden, 1968), p. 115.

Figure 1. Iran in the Nineteenth Century


about tea in China.13 Tea may have been introduced into northeasternIran as early as the thirteenth century by the Mongols.14 It is not clearwhether in those early times the tea consumed in Iran was the blackbrick tea, which nomads drank with salt and butterfat, or loose blackor green Chinese tea. There is no doubt, however, that by the 1600sthe latter, which is drunk with sugar, was known and enjoyed, sincethe German traveler Adam Olearius, who visited Iran in the 1630s,asserted that the Iranians put sugar in their tea.15

Coffee had been imported into Iran by Arab, Indian, and Iranianmerchants before the arrival of the East India Companies in the Per-sian Gulf in the early seventeenth century. Following Oleariuss claimthat tea entered Iran from China via Central Asia, carried overland byUzbeg Tatars, Chinese green or black tea similarly seems to have beenknown before the arrival of European merchants on the shores of thePersian Gulf. It may simply have become more widely available andperhaps cheaper when these companies began to incorporate it in theassortment of Asian wares they imported into Iran via the IndianOcean and Persian Gulf trade route. No references to tea are found inthe literature on the Portuguese trade with Iran or the records of theactivities of the English East India Company in the Persian Gulf. Onlythe Dutch maritime documents from the second half of the centurycontain various references to tea, all of them to Chinese tea.

The Dutch references do not specify the kind of tea imported bythe Dutch East India Company. The Dutch depended on the junktrade from China for their supplies to their Asian headquarters inBatavia, and the Chinese traders tended to furnish them with blackBohea tea, so this is almost certainly the variety that found its way toIran.16 The Dutch sources also give various indications about theextent of the demand for tea in Iranreflecting the habitual fluctua-tions of the marketbut on the whole suggest that the drink at thispoint did not enjoy a consistently high level of popularity. Thus, in1643 the Dutch were left with some 300 pounds of unsold tea in their

13 See Giovanni Gianbattista Ramusio, Delle navigationi e viaggi raccolte da M. Gio. Bat-tista Ramusio, 3 vols. (Venice, 1559), 2:15.

14 Berthold Laufer, Sino-Iranica: Chinese Contributions to the History of Civilization inAncient Iran with Special Reference to the History of Cultivated Plants and Products (Chicago,1919), pp. 55354.

15 Adam Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung der muscowitischen und persischen Reyse(Schleswig, 1656), p. 599.

16 For the Dutch role in the East Asian tea trade, see Roderich Ptak, Die Rolle derChinesen, Portugiesen und Hollnder im Teehandel zwischen China und Sdostasien (ca.16001750), Jahrbuch fr Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1994): 89105.


warehouse in Bandar Abbas, the trade emporium on the Persian Gulfcoast.17 Seven years later a report stated that no Chinese tea had beenimported for the last four years and that the leaves were in greatdemand and would yield a handsome profit.18 In 1694, by contrast, aDutch missive from Bandar Abbas noted that the 12,045 pounds oftea that had been delivered had been transshipped to Surat in India forlack of demand in Iran.19

The uneven distribution of sources makes it impossible to drawdefinitive conclusions about the relative popularity of coffee and tea inSafavid Iran. Most significantly, the northeastern part of the countryand the interior of Central Asia, where tea may have been most popu-lar, yield very little information on social and economic issues in thisperiod.20 Yet contemporary sources suggest that, in terms of availabilityand volume of consumption, neither tea nor coffee matched water andsharbat (a fruit-flavored syrup diluted with water) and that, in terms ofcomparative popularity, tea in Safavid times was a distant second tocoffee at least outside the northern region.21 Coffee was served in courtcircles and consumed in the numerous coffeehouses found in the coun-trys urban centers. The drink also accompanied the avidly smokedwaterpipe and, indeed, may have owed much of its early popularityto the introduction of tobacco into Iran in the sixteenth century.22References to tea consumption in the Safavid period are far fewer. Onetraveler refers to the existence of Chinese teahouses (chay khataykhanah), another mentions the custom of serving the drink to cus-tomers of bathhouses, and a third tells of being treated to tea at officialreceptions in the north of Iran.23

17 Algemeen Rijks Archief (Dutch National Archives, hereafter cited as ARA), TheHague, Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (hereafter cited as VOC) 1144, Gamron toBatavia, 14 May 1643, fol. 489. The same missive is found in VOC 1146, fol. 813v.

18 ARA, VOC 1178, Gamron to Batavia, 6 April 1650.19 ARA, VOC 1549, Gamron to Batavia, 24 October 1694, fol. 602r.20 While sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Persian court chronicles yield much

information on political and especially military events in Khorasan, it is not until the earlynineteenth century that (European) eyewitness reports tell us more about social conditionsand peoples daily lives.

21 See ARA, VOC, General Missiven, 30 November 1640, published in Generale Mis-siven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compa-gnie, ed W. Ph. Coolhaas (The Hague, 1964), 2:115.

22 Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Les six voyages de Jean-Bapt. Tavernier en Turquie, en Perse, etaux Indes, 2 vols. (Utrecht, 1712), 1:71415.

23 For the teahouses, see Olearius, Vermehrte newe Beschreibung, pp. 599600. Tea inconnection with bathhouses is mentioned by John A. Fryer, A New Account of East Indiaand Persia, Being Nine Years Travels, 16721681, ed. W. Crooke, 3 vols. (London, 190915), 3:3334. Engelbert Kaempfer was treated to tea in Shamakhi and Qazvin during hisjourney to Isfahan in 168384. See Kaempfer, Die Reisetagebcher, pp. 45, 69.


The Decline in Coffee and Tea Consumption

Regardless of the relative distribution of the two drinks in SafavidIran, their popularity was not left unaffected by the demise of theSafavids and the turmoil of the eighteenth century. Little is knownabout the fate of tea, which is rarely mentioned after the fall ofIsfahan to Afghan invaders in 1722. As for coffee, its consumptionhad already been challenged by official measures taken against coffee-houses in the mid-seventeenth century. As was the case in other partsof the Islamic worldand, indeed, in several contemporary Europeansocieties as wellcoffee and coffeehouses met with a great deal ofsuspicion on the part of social critics, religious authorities, and gov-ernment officials. Similar to pamphlets in Restoration England,which called coffee a source of idleness and pragmaticalness, a lateseventeenth-century Persian tract warned its readers of the associa-tion of coffee with idle banter and the use of opium.24 Concern alsoarose from the side of the Muslim Shii clergy. As soon as it was intro-duced, coffee everywhere in the Islamic world generated a heateddebate among theologians, some of whom opposed it for havingintoxicating properties similar to those of wine.25 A related causefor concern was the ribald entertainment that used to take place atSafavid coffeehouses, which included lewd dancing and singing byyoung males. What prompted the state to heed religious calls to sup-press coffeehouses, finally, was their role as gathering places for Sufis,or Muslim mystics, who used them as a forum for recitals of subversivepoetry and epic narrations that undermined the legitimacy of thestate.26

The Iranian coffeehouse appears to have lost its character as avenue for dubious forms of entertainment and subversive propagandafollowing the imposition of governmental measures. The resultingincrease in austerity of the coffeehouse may not have had a negativeeffect on the consumption of the beverage, especially since the clericaldebate over the nature of coffee was decided in favor of its religiouspermissibility. At any rate, the decrease in coffee consumption resulted

24 A. Qazvini, Dar mazarrat-i dukhaniyat va qahvah va afyun, Sukhan 17 (1346/1967): 37274.

25 See, for example, Shaykh Muhammad b. al-Hasan Hurr al-Amili, Wasa il al-shiah ilatahsil masail al-shariah (Tehran, 1388/196869), p. 307. See also Rasul Jafariyan, Din vasiyasat dar daurah-i safavi (Tehran, 1370/1991), p. 364; and Agha Buzurg Tihrani, Tabaqatalam al-shiah, 5 vols. (Qum, 1990), 5:603.

26 See Kathryn Babayan, The Waning of the Qizilbash: The Temporal and the Spiri-tual in Seventeenth-Century Iran (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1993), pp. 25563.


more from dramatic political and economic changes than from gov-ernment intervention or clerical indictment. In the early eighteenthcentury Iran was invaded by Afghan tribesmen, who in 1722 capturedIsfahan and overthrew the Safavid dynasty. The Afghan occupationushered in a long period of political instability and even anarchy,marked by severe economic dislocation. This continued until wellafter the rise to power of the Qajar dynasty at the turn of the nine-teenth century. The result was prolonged disruption of trade routesand widespread impoverishment, which led to a combined increase inprices and a decrease in the purchasing power of many former coffeeconsumers.

Just as important was the effect on public life of the violence, inse-curity, and sheer destruction to which the country was subjected in thecourse of the eighteenth century. The French traveler G. A. Olivier,who visited Iran in the closing years of that century, compared the cof-feehouses he saw with what he knew about the situation in Safavidtimes from reading seventeenth-century travelers such as Jean Char-din and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier. Formerly coffeehouses had been spa-cious and elegant public establishments full of lively debate andentertainment, while the ones Olivier encountered were less numer-ous, less well attended, and less beautiful. His explanation for this wasthat during the civil wars the Iranians had ceased to go to these publicplaces, where they could no longer converse in liberty and where theycould not even go without risking questioning and scrutiny with possi-bly nasty consequences. He noted that while in neighboring Turkeycoffee consumption increased daily and everyone drank it on all occa-sions and at all hours of the day, in Iran people offered sharbat andsweetmeats to their guests, and passed around the waterpipe (nargilah),but rarely offered coffee.27

Oliviers theory is attractive and deserves serious consideration forits implication of a growing inward-looking tendency in Iranian soci-ety. Contrary to simultaneous developments in European societies,where increasing emphasis on the private sphere reflected an inexor-able embourgeoisement,28 the Iranian situation had all the elements ofextreme social and economic disruption leading to peoples involun-tary withdrawal into the confines of the private realm. Because little is

27 G. A. Olivier, Voyage dans Lempire Othoman, lEgypte et la Perse, 6 vols. (Paris,1807), 5:27577.

28 For this transformation in France, see Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre andOther Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), chap. 3, The Bourgeois PutsHis World in Order: The World as a Text, pp. 10744.


known about the social history of the period between the demise ofSafavid rule and the rise of the Qajar, we cannot tell much about theprecise nature of this retrenchment of public life. As far as coffee isconcerned, a rare reference in the Persian-language sources for theentire period concerns the building of a coffeehouse near Qandahar atthe orders of Nadir Shah (r. 173649).29

Although direct contemporary corroboration of Oliviers thesis islacking, circumstantial evidence supports his observation. For exam-ple, following the fall of Isfahan and its sack by the Afghans in 1722,nothing more was heard of the famous coffeehouses that had flankedthe maydan-i naqsh-i jahan in Isfahan since the reign of Shah Abbas I.The Italian missionary F. Leandro di S. Cecilia, who visited the city in1738, does not mention coffeehouses in his description of the square.30By the early nineteenth century little had changed in the former capi-tal. James Morier, who accompanied the English diplomat HarfordJones to the Qajar court, said of the houses that used to surround thesquare that they were no longer inhabited, adding that the verydoors are all blocked up, so that there is now only a dead row of archesto be seen all around. The great market, he continued, is now con-fined to one corner near the Nokara Khaneh. All the rest is quiteempty; scarcely a person is seen to pass along.31 Kerr Porter in 1818conveyed exactly the same image when he noted that the streets wereeverywhere in ruin, the bazars silent and abandoned, the caravanseraisequally forsaken.32

None of this means that coffeeor, for that matter, teadisap-peared from the Iranian diet. In addition to the reference to the coffee-house built by Nadir Shah, we have a remark by the English RussiaCompany agent James Spilman, who in 1739 was treated to coffee andtea by the vizier of Languaon (Langarud near Rasht?) in Gilan, aregion south of the Caspian Sea.33 Jonas Hanway in the 1740s said ofIranians that they drink coffee in small quantities with the lees.More than a generation later William Francklin claimed that Iranians

29 Mirza Mihdi Khan Astarabadi, Tarikh-i jahangusha-yi Nadiri (Tehran, 1368/1989),p. 376.

30 F. Leandro di S. Cecilia, Persia, o sia secondo viaggio (Rome, 1753), pp. 18687.31 James Morier, A Journey through Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor to Constantinople in

the Years 1808 and 1809 (London, 1812), p. 170. The nokara khaneh (naqqarah khanah) is themusic house.

32 Sir Robert Kerr Porter, Travels in Georgia, Persia, Armenia, Ancient Babylonia, 2 vols.(London, 182122), 1:408.

33 James A. Spilman, Journey through Russia into Persia in the Year 1739 (London, 1742),p. 18.


drank a cup of coffee without milk or sugar after eating breakfast.34A late eighteenth-century British report on trade in the Persian Gulfmentioned that coffee from Yemen was imported into Iran by Arabmerchants from Oman and also made its way into the country viaBasra.35

These examples, while suggesting a degree of continuity, do notinvalidate Oliviers observation. There is little doubt that coffee, andto a lesser extent tea, continued to be consumed in the confines ofpeoples homes, at least in the urban environment and among societysupper strata. Still, the diminished visibility of coffee drinking reflects asevere disruption of the public sphere, especially if seen in combina-tion with the disappearance of the coffeehouse. It is equally clear thatthis disruption was not necessarily linked to the physical destructionthat had befallen Isfahan and many other Iranian towns since Safavidtimes. Early nineteenth-century observations by travelers who visitedthose parts of Iran that had either escaped ruin or were in the processof being rebuilt confirm and strengthen this impression.

James Buckingham, who entered Iran from Baghdad in 1828, notedhow Kirmanshah, the first town he visited, was in a state of (re)con-struction. Entering the town through a newly built wall, he wentthrough fine streets in every stage of their progress, where all waslike the bustle and activity of a perfectly new place. Further, thereseemed an abundance of every thing to be desired, both necessariesand luxuries. The half-built streets and new bazars were thronged withpeople, all extremely busy, and intent on some important errand.36However, rather than finding this bustling scene accompanied by thekind of leisurely and languid public life that he had witnessed in Arablands, he found an Iran that would seem hauntingly familiar to mod-ern visitors. Everything, he noted, offered a striking difference to thetowns of Turkey and Arabia. There were no coffeehouses at whichgrave idlers were lounging over their pipes; no slow and solemn-pacedpassengers who moved as if for pleasure only; no fine flowing dresses ofgay colours, compatible only with stately attitudes and the freedomfrom menial occupation.37

34 Jonas Hanway, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea: With aJournal of Travels through Russia into Persia, 4 vols. (London, 1753), 1:226. William Franck-lin, Observations Made on a Tour from Bengal to Persia in the Years 178687 (London, 1788),p. 76.

35 India Office Records, London, G/19/25, Report by Manesty and Jones on trade inthe Persian Gulf, 15 August 1790, fols. 219, 255.

36 J. S. Buckingham, Travels in Assyria, Media, and Persia, 2 vols. (London, 1830),1:130.

37 Ibid., 1:131.


Of Hamadan, the next town he visited on his way to Tehran, Buck-ingham similarly noted that it did not have a single coffeehouse.38Finally, in his comments on the meal he enjoyed at the residence ofthe governor of Isfahan during his stay in that city, he noted theabsence of coffee, a beverage he claimed the Persians did not usuallydrink either in public or in private.39

No early nineteenth-century source contests or contradicts Buck-inghams observation about public consumption of coffee. No foreignobserver between 1800 and 1840 alludes to the existence of coffee-houses anywhere in Iran. The Frenchman C. Blanger, who visited thecountry in the 1820s, said that cabarets, where wine and liquor wereconsumed, had taken the place of coffeehouses ever since the coffee-houses had been shut by Shah Abbas II in the mid-seventeenth cen-tury.40 Evidence from other sources suggests that this claim was anexaggeration, but not as far as the absence of coffeehouses in thisperiod is concerned. James Fraser, who traveled extensively through-out Iran in the same period, did not mention the existence of coffee-houses.

As in other parts of the Middle East, in Safavid Iran coffeehousesmay never have existed in the countryside outside the urban centers.41In any case, rural coffeehouses were not common even in the mid-nineteenth century, at least in the northern region. The Russian-French orientalist Nicolas de Khanikoff, traveling in the northeastbetween Nishapur and Mashhad in the 1860s, passed some villagesthat he called prosperous. What distinguished them from ordinaryIranian villages, he remarked, was the presence of numerous coffee-houses, on whose front porch waterpipes (qaliyan in Persian), Russiansamovars of brass, and German and English tea sets were arranged.42

Buckinghams remark about the private sphere contradicts theexperience of other travelers who enjoyed the hospitality of Iraniansin the same period. A case in point is the Frenchman Gaspard Drou-ville, who noted in the second decade of the nineteenth century thatthe Persian taste for coffee borders on frenzy. He added that he did

38 Ibid., 1:194.39 Ibid., 1:380.40 C. Blanger, Voyage aux Indes orientales par le nord de lEurope, les provinces du Cau-

case, la Gorgie, lArmnie, et la Perse pendant les annes 18251829, 3 vols. and 3 atlases(Paris, 183338), 2:2:342.

41 See Michel Tuchscherer, Caf et cafs dans lEgypte ottomane, XVIIeXVIIIe si-cles, in Contributions au thme du et des cafs, ed. Desmet-Grgoire, p. 55.

42 Nicolas de Khanikoff, Mmoire sur la partie mridionale de lAsie centrale, Recueilde voyages et de mmoires publis pour la Socit de Gographie 7 (1861): 330.


not believe there was one person in the country who did not drink thebeverage several times a day, something that was all the easier sincecoffee was very inexpensive. According to Drouville, the traveler whowas not able to consume as much coffee as he desired carried some of itin ground form with him in a kind of tobacco pouch, which enabledhim to enjoy some, mixed with honey or opium, on the road.43

The Distribution of Tea and Coffee

Clearly, we should treat generalizations by foreign travelers withcircumspection. More specifically, contrasting or contradictory state-ments, such as those cited above, point up the important issue ofgeographical and societal distribution with regard to patterns ofconsumption. That different foreign travelers mentioned differentbeverages could be a result of their having visited different partsof the country and having taken their own observations and expe-rience as typical of Iran and all Iranians. Thus, when we read Drou-villes statement that coffee was both widely available and cheap,the questions we should ask are which parts of Iran he visited,whether his journey took him to just the main cities and the roadsconnecting them or into rural and nomadic territory as well, in whatcompany he traveled, and what were his standards for comparingprices.

When we take into account the three variables of geography,the urban-rural division, and social status coupled with financialmeans, the variety of observations becomes less bewildering, simplenotions of coffee versus tea disappear, and a new, more varied pic-ture emerges. What stands out most clearly from this picture is thatthe distribution of the consumption of coffee and tea in Iran inthe first half of the nineteenth century was, first and foremost, amatter of financial means. Outside the monied classes, tea was avail-able mostly in the north, while coffee figured predominantly in thesouth.

Numerous travelers from the early to the mid-nineteenth centuryreport being offered both coffee and tea at once. Invariably, such refer-ences are to receptions and invitations by high officials, ranging fromthe shah himself to local khans. The Frenchman P. Amde Jaubert

43 Gaspard Drouville, Voyage en Perse fait en 1812 et 1813, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg,181920), 1:78.


was treated to both beverages in Qazvin in 1806, as a guest of Fath AliShah.44 His compatriot J. M. Tancoigne was served both in Tehran bythe same ruler.45 In 1811 the members of the Ouseley embassy drankcoffee and tea in Bushihr, on the Persian Gulf, and again on the roadto Kazerun in Fars.46 Count von Kotzbue was regaled with coffee andtea at various receptions in Soltaniyeh and Tehran in 1817.47 DuringLady Sheils visit to the shahs mother in Tehran in 1850, tea, coffee,and pipes were brought in repeatedly.48 E. Flandin in the 1850s spokeof the comfortable middle class (classe moyenne, mais aise) as offer-ing the qaliyan, tea, and coffee to their guests.49 Comte de Gobineaudrank both beverages as a guest of Prince Tahmasp Muayyid al-Daulah in Shiraz in 1855.50 T. M. Lycklama a Nijeholt in the 1860swas served both at the court of Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 184896).51Finally, in Carla Serenas description from the 1870s, coffee alternateswith tea as the beverage presented to the foreign guest.52

These examples suggest that receptions given by the ruling class ofIran commonly included both coffee and tea. A more explicit state-ment comes from Kerr Porter, who called these drinks luxuries of cer-emonious meetings, adding that the lower classes . . . live principallyupon bread, fruits, and water.53 Porters observation is confirmed bythe same Drouville who claimed that all Iranians drank coffee whenhe noted that the middle class that could not afford beverages con-sumed sugared water (sharbat) or simply water mixed with honey, towhich vinegar was added (sirkanjibin).54

While coffee and tea were regularly served by the wealthy and thepowerful, their distribution among the less fortunate appears to havebeen more distinctly tied to market supply and thus to a combination

44 P. Amde Jaubert, Voyage en Armnie et en Perse fait dans les annes 1805 et 1806(Paris, 1821), p. 206.

45 J. M. Tancoigne, A Narrative of a Journey into Persia, trans. from French (London,1820), p. 101.

46 Sir W. Ouseley, Travels in Various Countries in the East, More Particularly Persia, 3 vols.(London, 1819), 1:189, 267.

47 M. von Kotzbue, Narrative of a Journey into Persia in the Suite of the Imperial RussianEmbassy in the Year 1817 (London, 1819), pp. 167, 235, 294, 297.

48 M. L. Sheil, Glimpses of Life and Manners in Persia (London, 1856), p. 133.49 E. Flandin and P. Coste, Voyage en Perse de M. M. Eugne Flandin, peintre, et Pascal

Coste, architecte, 184041, 2 vols. (Paris, 185054), 2:5556.50 Comte de Gobineau, Trois ans en Asie (Paris, 1859), p. 168.51 T. M. Lycklama a Nijeholt, Voyage en Russe, au Caucase, et en Perse, 4 vols. (Paris,

187275), 2:358.52 Carla Serena, Les hommes et les choses en Perse (Paris, 1883), p. 67.53 Porter, Travels, 2:41.54 Drouville, Voyage, 1:6869.


of pricing and geography. The most telling observation with regard tothe link between cost and consumption comes from Peter Gordon,who in 1820 noted that tea is very little used in Persia on account ofits price.55 The clearest statement concerning geographical differenti-ation is that of Fraser, who in the 1820s asserted that there are manyparts of Persia remote from the gulf or from the great marts, where thisfavorite oriental beverage [coffee] is to be had only in small quantities,or not at all.56 Fraser had traveled thousands of miles throughout Iranand had visited urban areas as much as remote rural and tribal regionsof the country, so his empirical observations deserve to be taken seri-ously. In northeastern Khorasan, he noted, coffee was seldom to beseen, and was given only in the house of the richest nobles. Tea, onthe other hand, was always procurable, and was offered to guests in itsplace. Until he reached the Caspian province of Mazandaran, Fraserdid not remember any place where either the one or the other ofthese refreshments was not in occasional use, and to be purchased inthe public market.57

Tea, then, was fairly common in the northern parts of Iran. Theterm north, however, is too vague here, for within the northern reachesof Iran a great deal of variety existed. In Khorasan the availability oftea was not limited to the brick tea of the Uzbegs and other northernnomadic peoples.58 In what may have been a long-standing tradition,green China tea was used for ceremonial purposes in urban centerssuch as Mashhad.59 On the other hand, the drink does not seem tohave been common in northwestern regions, such as Armenia andGeorgia, in the early 1800s. The German M. Freygang, who visitedTabriz from Tiflis as a representative of the Russian tsar in 1812,claimed to speak for Iranians when he listed a diet that did not includetea or coffee. In reality, however, his itinerary limited the validity of

55 Peter Gordon, Fragment of the Journal of a Tour through Persia in 1820 (London,1833), p. 100.

56 James B. Fraser, Travels and Adventures in the Persian Provinces on the Southern Banks ofthe Caspian Sea (London, 1826), p. 105.

57 Ibid.58 For nineteenth-century references to tea among the Uzbegs, see M. Elphinstone, An

Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (London, 1815), p. 470; Arthur Conolly, Journey to theNorth of India Overland from England through Russia, Persia, and Affghaunistan, 2 vols.(London, 1834), 1:5455; and Lieutenant Alexander Burnes, Travels to Bokhara, Being anAccount of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary, and Persia . . . in the Years 1831, 1832,and 1833, 3 vols. (London, 1834), 1:221, 2:43637. See Xavier Hommaire de Hell, Lessteppes de la mer caspienne, 2 vols. (Paris, 1843), 2:104, for tea drinking among the Kalmyks.

59 See James B. Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan in the Years 1821 and 1822(London, 1825), p. 489; Conolly, Journey to the North of India, 1:301.


his observations to Armenia and Azerbaijan.60 That tea was uncom-mon in the northwest is further suggested by the absence of a referenceto either by Freygangs wife in her letters from Tiflis, then still a massof ruins, and other places in the Caucasus. Some of these lettersinclude references to food. Her description of an elaborate dinnerwould surely have mentioned tea had it been offered.61 Caucasianpeoples, such as the Karatchai and the Ossetes, did not consume teaeither in this period.62

A similar situation emerges from Gilan and Mazandaran, the twoCaspian provinces that were separated from the rest of Iran by highmountains and where Fraser noted the general absence of either tea orcoffee in the early 1820s. He was able to procure a small quantity of teaonly with great difficulty and at a high price. When he asked localinhabitants about coffee, he wrote, they were ignorant of the name.63William Richard Holmes, who traveled through Azerbaijan, Gilan,and Mazandaran twenty years later, repeatedly told of receptions bylocal khans that included tea, but he never referred to tea being sold inthe market or being available in the public sphere.64 According tohim, only a very small quantity of tea was imported from Russia toAstarabad, Irans gateway from Turkistan.65 There seems to be a clear correlation between geography and thedegree of penetration and distribution of tea, with the examples ofGilan and Mazandaran suggesting the obstacles posed by inaccessibleterrain. At the same time, these travelers observations also illustratethe differentiating effect of financial means. The visitors failure tofind tea in the markets implies that common people did not consumetea. More specifically, Frasers remarks about the eating habits of theTurkmen tribes of Khorasan suggest that the diet of the poorernomadic population of the north did not include tea. The Turkmens,he noted, consumed only what they themselves produced, except forsugar. They drank a mixture of buttermilk and water (dugh) with their

60 M. Freygang, Account of a Journey to Tabriz, in M. Freygang and F. K. Freygang,Letters from the Caucasus and Georgia, trans. from French (London, 1823), p. 341. Thiswork was apparently first published in German.

61 Ibid., pp. 132, 13436, 16365.62 See J. Klaproth, Voyages au Mont Caucase et en Gorgie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1823), 1:299,

2:266.63 Fraser, Travels and Adventures, p. 105.64 William Richard Holmes, Sketches on the Shores of the Caspian (London, 1845), pp.

61, 73, 268.65 Ibid., p. 282.


meals.66 This drink even accompanied the use of the waterpipe, a roleelsewhere invariably reserved for tea or coffee.67

The difference between the consumptive patterns of Turkmens andUzbegs may have been the result of financial means and affordability.Until the mid-twentieth century, when Iran cultivated its own tea, thepoor in the countrys remote parts could not afford tea. In the nine-teenth century, when all tea was imported, many more people musthave been unable to afford it. Various observers in the 1800s attest toits high cost. Edward Sterling noted that tea was brought via Bukharafrom the northern parts of China and cost forty rupees per mann (13pounds). As far as he knew, coffee was seldom offered for sale and wasnot to be found in the market.68

The south resembled the north in terms of the social distribution ofcaffeinated beverages. While traveling from Khuzistan, in the south-west of Isfahan, through Bakhtiyari territory in 1831, the English trav-eler J. H. Siddon noted that the diet of the Bakhtiyari tribes consistedof mast (yogurt), goat meat, goat milk, and acorns. The implicationthat the Bakhtiyari did not drink either tea or coffee is reinforced bythe same observers remark that the traveler in these areas was boundto fast rather frequently during his journey, as accident alone willbring him to a tenanted spot, where a little mas and milk will beobtained.69 The impression that in the early to mid-nineteenth cen-tury neither coffee nor tea was common among Irans nomads isstrengthened by Baron de Bodes observation that the favored drink ofthe nomads in the southwest was a mixture of sour milk, water, andsalt.70

With these caveats, it can still be argued that tea was a northerndrink, while coffee was mainly encountered in the south, the south-west, and the western regions bordering on Ottoman territory.W. Hollingbery was offered coffee in Shiraz in 1800.71 Scott Waringdrank coffee in Bushihr on the Persian Gulf in 1802.72 Henry Pottinger

66 James B. Fraser, A Winters Journey from Constantinople to Tehran, 2 vols. (London,1838), 2:151; Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, pp. 264, 283.

67 Fraser, Narrative of a Journey into Khorasan, p. 603.68 Edward Sterling, The Journals of Edward Sterling in Persia and Afghanistan 18281829,

ed. Jonathan L. Lee (Naples, 1991), p. 179.69 J. H. Stocqeler (pseudonym of J. H. Siddon), Fifteen Months Pilgrimage through

Untrodden Tracts of Khuzistan and Persia, 2 vols. (London, 1832), 1:119, 121.70 Baron C. de Bode, Travels in Luristan and Arabistan, 2 vols. (London, 1845), 2:108.71 W. Hollingbery, A Journal of Observations Made during the British Embassy to the Court

of Persia in the Years 17991801 (Calcutta, 1814), p. 50.72 Edward Scott Waring, A Tour to Sheeraz (London, 1817), p. 8.


enjoyed the drink in Kerman in 1810.73 Claudius James Rich hadcoffee in Senneh (modern Sanandaj) in Kurdistan in 1820.74 Siddondrank it in Dauraq in Khuzistan and in Behbehan in 1831.75 In 1856,at a time when elsewhere tea had begun to replace coffee as thefavored drink, William A. Shepherd was invited to coffee in Bushihr.76

Just as tea was far from common in the north, so coffee was notubiquitous in the south, and the lack of it was not limited to poornomads. Siddon was quite explicit about the relative rarity of coffee,even in southern Iran, as compared with the lands to the west andsouthwest. He noted that the moment a stranger enters the tent ofthe wildest Arab, or the hut of the poorest Osmanli, coffee and thechibouk [pipe] are offered him; yet the instance he has crossed thefrontier, and finds himself in Persia, he detects a change in the form ofhospitality, and forgets the black and bitter stomachic in the refreshingdraught of sherbet and the soothing qualities of the kaleeoun.77

The conclusion to be drawn, then, is that neither coffee nor teawas widely consumed in early Qajar times, and that there were impor-tant regional differences in consumption patterns. Together with eco-nomic means, geography determined the availability of these bever-ages. Geography, in particular, may account for the fact that bothcoffee and tea remained predominantly urban drinks.

From Coffee to Tea

What of the supposed change from coffee to tea in Qajar Iran? Theshift from coffee to tea in various countries, as well as the regional andreligious differentiation between the two drinks, has thus far receivedlittle attention from historians, no doubt because many see coffee andtea as being too similar to warrant much separate discussion. For exam-ple, the ramifications of the change in taste from coffee to tea inEngland have been downplayed by Schivelbusch, who called it not

73 Henry Pottinger, Travels to Beloochistan and Sinde (London, 1816), pp. 21011.74 Claudius James Rich, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan, 2 vols. (London, 1836),

1:203.75 Stocqeler, Pilgrimage, 1:75, 99100, noted that coffee in Behbehan was not drunk but

eaten as a kind of bon-bon in a powdered and roasted state, without having had any con-nexion with hot water. Fine coffee in Iran was commonly eaten in this manner. SeeG. Troll, Die Genussmittel des Orients: Kaffee, sterreichische Monatschrift fr den Orient16 (1890): 59.

76 William Ashton Shepherd, From Bombay to Bushire, and Bussora (London, 1857), pp.134135, 148.

77 Stocqeler, Pilgrimage, pp. 21314.


drastically significant because it occurred within a culture of con-sumption first revolutionized by coffee.78 Others have similarly mini-mized the differences between the two drinks by drawing attention tothe fact that both are nonfermented and caffeinated.79 This view, how-ever, perhaps focuses too narrowly on consumption and fails to takeinto account patterns of social, economic, and political life, at theintersection of which stimulants tend to operate.

A survey of sources suggests that metropolitan Iran did witness,first, a gradual phasing out of coffee as a regularly consumed beverageand, second, an overall increase in tea consumption and a greateravailability of tea throughout the country, including places where ithad not previously been common. Iran thus resembles England in firsttaking to coffee and only turning to tea at a later perioda develop-ment exemplified by the fact that the ubiquitous Iranian qahvah-khanah, or coffeehouse, has long served tea rather than coffee. Al-though Fraser was not able to find tea in Mazandaran in the 1820s,Richard Wilbraham was treated to an excellent tea in the provincialcapital Barforush (modern Babol) in 1838.80 The same traveler re-ferred to tea in Tiflis, where twenty years earlier Freygangs wife hadfailed to mention it.81 While Tancoigne and Porter in the early decadesof the century had mentioned coffee in connection with breakfast,82Robert B. M. Binning in 1851 noted that breakfast was taken withtea.83 A final example of the profound changes that took place in thefirst half of the 1800s is found in the contrast between a passage oncoffee written by John Malcolm in 1800 and one on tea written sixtyyears later by Lycklama a Nijeholt. Malcolm failed to mention tea butexpressed astonishment at how the ritual of offering and consumingtobacco and coffee reflected the intricacies of social rank and intimacyin Iran.84 The careful observer Lycklama a Nijeholt, by contrast, didnot mention coffee as a common drink in Iran. Instead, he noted howtea . . . forms the ordinary drink of the various inhabitants of Persia.85

78 Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, p. 83.79 Hlne Desmet, Approches mthodologiques pour ltude des cafs dans les socits

du Proche-Orient, in Contributions au thme du et des cafs, ed. Desmet-Grgoire, p. 35.80 Richard Wilbraham, Travels in the Transcaucasian Provinces of Russia (London, 1839),

p. 466.81 Ibid., p. 179.82 Tancoigne, Narrative, p. 175; Porter, Travels, 1:241.83 Robert B. M. Binning, A Journal of Two Years Travel in Persia, Ceylon, etc., 2 vols.

(London, 1857), 1:317.84 Sir John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia from the Journals of a Traveller in the East (Phila-

delphia, 1828), pp. 7980.85 Lycklama a Nijeholt, Voyage, 2:105, 243.


It is impossible to identify a precise moment for Irans conversionfrom tea to coffee, since this was evidently a gradual and long-termdevelopment rather than a sudden transformation. The beginning ofthe change is commonly situated in the period between 1830 and1850. The German physician Jacob E. Polak claimed in the 1850s thattea had fallen out of consumption following the civil wars of the eigh-teenth century. He asserted that according to the Iranians, tea hadbeen reintroduced in the 1830s when the Iranian crown princeAbbas Mirza received a few little packages of it as a present.86 Themodern Iranian historian Firaydun Adamiyat, in a similar and oft-repeated claim, has argued that tea began to be imported with theintroduction of samovars in the time of the Qajar chief minister AmirKabir, that is, in the late 1840s.87

Both sources might be faulted for creating the impression that thepopularization of tea was the outcome of a single event. Their claimthat tea returned to Iran sometime between the 1820s and the1850s, however, though perhaps untrue in the literal sense, is corrobo-rated by a contemporary reference to the reemergence of coffee-houses in Irans urban centers. Coffeehouses, Comte de Gobineaustated in the 1850s, were a recent invention in Iran.88

The completion of the process of popularization of tea is as difficultto situate as its beginning. The Iranian politician and author AbdAllah Mustaufi, who was born in 1876, indicated in his autobiographyhow long it took for tea to become a household drink in Iran. He wrotethat in his early youth tea was not customary and that tea began toreplace fruit juice only later.89 Overall, it is safe to say that before the1880s tea was still a drink that the poor could not afford. By the turn ofthe twentieth century, however, all classes of the urban populationconsumed tea in considerable quantities.90 Further popularization inrural areas of Iran was stimulated by the introduction of tea cultivationin Iran at the turn of the twentieth century and continued into recenttimes. As late as the 1960s the consumption of tea and sugar was stillnew and infrequent among poor families in remote areas.91

86 Jacob E. Polak, Persien, das Land und seine Bewohner, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1865), 2:265.87 Firaydun Adamiyat, Amir Kabir va Iran, 4th ed. (Tehran, 1354/1975), pp. 21618.88 De Gobineau, Trois ans en Asie, p. 467.89 Abd Allah Mustaufi, Sharh-i zindigani-yi man ya tarikh-i ijtima i va idari-yi daurah-i

qajar, 3 vols. (Tehran, 1360/1981), 1:182.90 The American missionary Samuel Wilson, whose observations were made in the

1890s, noted that tea in a teahouse cost half a cent. See S. G. Wilson, Persian Life and Cus-toms (London, 1900), p. 253.

91 See Tapper, Blood, Wine and Water, p. 218. For the introduction of idigenous teacultivation in Irans Caspian provinces at the turn of the twentieth century, see ThurayaKazimi, Hajji Muhammad Mirza Kashif al-Saltanah, pidar-i chay (Tehran, 1372/1993).


None of this explains the circumstances in which the shift fromcoffee to tea occurred, or why tea returned to Iran while coffee failedto regain even its former regional popularity. Venturing into the realmof speculation, we might first hypothesize a cultural predispositionfor the eventual triumph of tea. The operative substance here is sugar.Iranians never took their coffee with sugar, but, as Olearius implied,sugar accompanied tea in Iran long before drinking sweetened tea be-came customary in Europe. Indeed, the Iranian example may well havecontributed to the adoption of the habit in England and Holland inthe late 1600s.92 In Safavid times many a foreign traveler noted thesweet tooth of the Iranians. Sugar was used in abundance by a courtthat regularly treated guests to a sugar banquet, and great quantitiesof it were imported for use in the kitchens of the wealthy. Therefore,we might posit a convergence between a traditional propensity forsweetened food and beverages and a drink to which sugar appeared anatural additive, especially if consumed simultaneously but sepa-rately.93

Positing a predisposition to tea begs the question of why Iraniansdid not express a clear preference for tea long before the nineteenthcentury, but it also draws attention to the multifaceted nature ofchanging taste. The difficulty of establishing a precise causal frame-work for shifts in taste is illustrated by the complex story of the popu-larization of tea in England and the Netherlands, societies that are farbetter documented than Iran. In England consumer inclination towardtea was clearly stimulated by its elevation in the eighteenth century tothe rank of a high-brow beverage. Tea was hailed by social reformersand publicists as a fashionable and respectable drink, an antidote toalcohol, and, in general, a wholesome beverage with salutary effects onphysical discipline and moral vigilance. In the Netherlands, the diffu-sion of coffee and tea and the growing popularity of the latter as a dailybeverage followed changes in social relations, the transformation ofpeoples diets, and questions of social status.94

Nothing in the sources indicates that increased tea consumptionin Iran was in any way associated with a clerical or governmentalcampaign against alcohol (which has historically been consumed in

92 For the introduction of the habit of sweetening tea in Europe, see Smith, Complica-tions of the Commonplace.

93 Since the seventeenth century, the Iranian way of drinking tea has been to put alump of candy sugar between the teeth before imbibing the liquid, which dissolves the sugaras it passes into the mouth. See Pre Jacques Villote, S.J., Voyages dun missionnaire de laCompagnie de Jsus en Turquie, en Perse, en Arabie et en Barbarie (Paris, 1730), pp. 52125.

94 See Johannes Jacobus Voskuil, Die Verbreitung von Kaffee in den Niederlanden, inWandel der Volkskultur, ed. Bringus et al., pp. 40728.


remarkably great quantities in Islamic Iran) or coffee. The English case(and the Dutch) might still serve to illuminate the Iranian situation,for there are indications that the growing popularity of tea was linkedto an increased status appeal similar to that in England and Holland.The gist of the story of tea being offered to Abbas Mirza in the 1830s,mentioned above, is preserved in an alternative story, which holds thatthe first Russian samovar was presented in 1821 to the governor ofRasht, the capital of Gilan. This official subsequently offered thedevice, as well as the harem girl who had learned how to prepare teawith it, to the reigning Qajar monarch, Fath Ali Shah.95 Althoughthey differ on the precise date of the reintroduction and the firstrecipient of tea, both sources suggest that tea was initially associatedwith the royal court. In the second story, moreover, it is said that courtministers and nobles soon took to the use of samovars and that gradu-ally the middling ranks of society followed suit. Outside observers andlater Persian-language sources confirm that tea was first served andconsumed among the upper strata of society and that it then gainedacceptance among larger groups of consumers who adopted the samo-var as a common household utensil. R. Mignan in the 1830s notedthat tea was becoming more fashionable, remarking that all who canafford it are now in the habit of drinking tea throughout the day: it iseven usual in Azerbijan, for the people to greet their visitors with acup of tea. The use of this beverage is becoming very general through-out the northern parts of Persia, although as yet it bears a high price.96

The ascendancy of tea is further confirmed by J. Perkins, whoseobservations, like Mignans, date from the 1830s. He stated that tea isthe customary treat, in exchanging calls, among the higher classes inPersia. Sometimes both coffee and tea are brought forward; and a moreformal attention still is tea, coffee and rose-waterthe latter for scent-ing a beardbut neither coffee, nor rose-water, nor both together canproperly supersede tea, where much respect is intended.97 Less than ageneration later, Polak implied a further advancement of tea when henoted that these days tea is so common in the cities that there ishardly a well-to-do family which does not own a Russian samovar.98In the next thirty years or so tea spread even further. The important

95 See Iraj Afshar, Gushah-i az tarikh-i chay, Ayandeh 17 (1370/1991): 768.96 R. Mignan, A Winter Journey through Russia, the Caucasian Alps, and Georgia, 2 vols.

(London, 1839), 1:17576.97 J. Perkins, A Residence of Eight Years in Persia, among the Nestorian Christians: with

Notices of the Muhammedans (Andover, Mass., 1843), p. 270.98 Polak, Persien, 2:265.


Persian source Al-maathir va al-athar noted in the 1880s that whileformerly tea had been restricted to a small elite, it now was a generaldrink (mashrub-i am) consumed by all, from urbanites to rural folk, atbreakfast and dinner.99 In other words, similar to eighteenth- and nine-teenth-century trends in England and Russia, tea in Iran over timeunderwent a downward movement. The crucial ingredients of thisprocess were status appeal and affordability, of tea as much as of loaf-sugar. The Al-maathir va al-athar notwithstanding, it is unclear how farthis process extended to the impoverished rural parts of the country,where there were almost no coffeehouses and where the cost of tea andsugar remained prohibitive for many people well into the twentiethcentury.100

The references, cited earlier, to tea being consumed primarily inthe north suggest that its popularization was not simply a matter of dif-

99 Mirza Muhammad Hasan Khan Itimad al-Saltanah, Kitab al-maathir va al-athar(Tehran, 1306/188889), pp. 101102.

100 See Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 5 (Costa Mesa, Cal., 1992), s.v. Chay, p. 103.

Figure 2. Ismail Jalair, Ladies around a Samovar, third quarter of the nine-teenth century. Courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.


fusion from the court down. A further conduit for the switch fromcoffee to tea must be sought in the enhanced political and social inter-action between Iran and the outside worldmost notably tea-drink-ing Russia and England, the very trade partners that accounted for thegrowing importation of tea. The growth in Russian influence on Irandates from the early nineteenth century, the period of the emergenceof the Qajar dynasty and of Russias southward expansion. As Russiaconquered Georgia and Turkistan and integrated these areas into thepolitical and economic sphere of its metropolitan area, Irans center ofgravity moved north with the establishment of Tehran as the capital ofthe Qajars, who were themselves northern in origin. The precise effecton Iranian taste of the rapid Russian conversion to tea in the nine-teenth century remains a matter of speculation, but references to theexistence of a Russian merchant community in Tabriz and its use ofsamovars seem to indicate that labor migration and expanding com-mercial ties fostered a certain convergence in consumption habits.101Many Iranians also took up residence in Russia. The Italian botanistF. de Filippi in 1862 estimated that at least fifty thousand Iranianslived in Transcaucasia, having migrated there in search of work.102 Inaddition, as of the 1830s, when Russia allowed the export of specie toCentral Asia and Iran, Iranian merchants began to visit the annualsummer fair of Nizhnii Novgorod, where Chinese tea was one of themain commodities.103 By the 1880s they were said to be the largest groupof Asian merchants visiting the fair.104 Conversely, as of the 1830smore and more Russians, most of whom were engaged in trade, wereliving in towns in northern Iran, such as Tabriz, Rasht, Anzali,Ardabil, Astarabad, and Tehran, and they often stayed for years. Thespread of the samovar in Iran was no doubt a function of all thesedevelopments. The British resident Colonel Pelly in 186162 wasstruck all along the route of North Persia with the unvarying presenceof Russian lumbersome tea-urns (Samawar) brought from the greatfairs beyond the Caspian.105 No comparable pattern of influence can

101 See Afshar, Gushah-i az tarikh-i chay, p. 768.102 F. de Filippi, Note di un viaggio in Persia nel 1862 (Milan, 1865), p. 51.103 N. G. Kukanova, Ocherki po istorii russko-iranskikh torgovykh otnoshenii v XVII-pervoi

polovinie XIX veka (Saransk, 1977), p. 205; and M. v. Bulmerincq, Die Jahrmrkte Russ-lands, insbesondere jener von Nischni-Nowgorod, Globus, illustrierte Zeitschrift fr Lnder-und Vlkerkunde 6 (1864): 298301; and Anne Lincoln Fitzpatrick, The Great Russian Fair:Nizhnii Novgorod, 184090 (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 82, 91.

104 Nicolaus v. Nassakin, Von der Messe in Nishni-Nowgorod, sterreichischeMonatschrift fr den Orient 12 (1886): 168.

105 Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Pelly, Remarks on the Tribes, Trade and Resourcesaround the Shore Line of the Persian Gulf, Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society17 (186364):55.


be detected with regard to the other European nationals present inIran.

It is tempting to ascribe at least part of the spread of tea beyond itsinitial high-brow status to the influx of foreigners, many of themEnglishmen, who began to visit Iran and to take up residence in themain cities in large numbers as of the 1870s. Some support for this isfound in the Persian Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan, written in the late 1870s,which held that tea was associated with foreigners and travelers.106Unfortunately, no other concrete evidence exists that would permit usto verify this conjecture.

Status appeal, rising standards of living of urbanites, and culturaland social diffusion appear to be the main factors in the spreading pop-ularity of tea in Iran. Still, greater demand combined with affordabilitywould not have been possible without a matching increase in supply.Tea remained an import commodity in Iran until the beginning ofindigenous cultivation in the early twentieth century. Therefore, it isreasonable to look for further clues with regard to price and distribu-tion in (changing) patterns of outside political and commercial influ-ence. The growing supply and popularization of tea over coffee in En-gland was in part the result of the gradual monopolization of the teatrade by the powerful East India Company. In contrast, the commercein coffee remained in the hands of small independent merchants witha less well-developed distribution network.107 Does Iran exhibit similarcircumstances?

In the seventeenth century all coffee consumed in Iran came fromthe Arabian peninsula, and more specifically al-Mukha (Mocca), theport city of Yemen that functioned as the commercial outlet for theregions production. In the early eighteenth century the Dutch EastIndia Company, a major supplier of coffee to Iran, attempted to use itscontrol of the east Indian archipelago to turn the island of Java intothe principal supplier of the beans. Its success in doing so was short-lived, however, at least with regard to Iran. As the Dutch commercialactivities in the Persian Gulf faltered, Arabia resumed its role as themain provider of coffee, with local Arab and Iranian merchants actingas the main suppliers. Arabia seems to have provided most of Iranscoffee in the late 1700s and the first decades of the nineteenth cen-tury,108 even though some coffee continued to be imported from Java

106 Mirza Husayn Khan, Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan, ed. Manuchihr Situdah (Tehran, 1342/1963), pp. 12021.

107 Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, pp. 7985.108 See John Malcolm, The Melville Papers, in The Economic History of Iran, 1800

1914, ed. Charles Issawi (Chicago, 1971), p. 264; William Milburn, Oriental Commerce, 2

vols.


and Ceylon.109 Some shipments entered the country via the PersianGulf ports, while others were probably carried overland via the Bagh-dad route, which in the late eighteenth century was an important andperhaps the principal commercial connection between Iran and theoutside world.110 As late as the 1820s Iran apparently imported somecoffee from Baghdad via Sulaymaniya.111 The predominantly southernspread of coffee in the early nineteenth century appears logical in lightof the provenance of the beans and the main channels of importation.

Tea traditionally came from China, but in the 1800s it also arrivedfrom Bengal and Coromandel. Khorasan in the northeast and the cen-tral parts of the country as far south as Kerman continued to receivetea from Bukhara in Central Asia in the early years of the century.112Although the importation of tea from India to Bushihr is recorded asearly as the turn of the nineteenth century,113 the quantities involvedfor the time being were too small to affect the predominance of coffeein the south.

Until the early nineteenth century these import patterns remainedfairly stable. Change, when it came, occurred under the influence ofseveral economic, political, and social developments. The most impor-tant of these was a greatly increased volume of trade between Iran andthe outside world. In the 1820s Iran was opened up to foreign mer-chants, and Russia was the first beneficiary of this policy. In the after-math of the tsarist military expansion into the Caucasus, culminatingin the Treaty of Turkomanchay of 1828, and the Russian institution ofa short-lived tax-free transit trade to Iran in 1821, commercial trafficwith Iran increased tremendously. A great volume of European goodsbegan to be transported into Iran via the Russian Black Sea ports andthrough Tiflis and other points in Transcaucasia. Thus, the volume ofgoods imported into Iran through Russia increased from 397,000 rublesin 1825 to almost 2 million in 1829.114 Eager to secure a preeminentcommercial position in Central Asia as well, Russia similarly began to

vols. (London, 1813), 1:123, 129. See also Fraser, Travels and Adventures, p. 371, whostated: Coffee is, I believe, entirely brought from Arabia by the ports of the Gulf. I do notknow if any attempt has been made to introduce this article from other quarters.

109 Jaubert, Voyage, pp. 28687.110 Issawi, Economic History, p. 74.111 Rich, Narrative, 1:305.112 Pottinger, Travels, p. 226.113 A. Dupr, Voyage en Perse fait dans les annes 1807, 1808, 1809, 2 vols. (Paris, 1819),

2:43.114 N. G. Kukanova, Russko-iranskaya torgovlya 3050-e gody XIX veka (Sbornik doku-

mentov) (Moscow, 1984), pp. 67.


extend its trade lines across the Caspian Sea from Astrakhan andOrenburg. The effects on the tea trade were noted by Arthur Conolly,who observed how the large tea supplies coming in from Russia wereedging out the traditional supply into northeastern Iran via Bukhara inCentral Asia.115

As a result of this change, Mignan in the 1830s could claim thatthe Iranian tea trade was monopolized by the Russians.116 The mainparticipants in the trade, however, were neither Russians nor Iraniansbut Georgian and Armenian merchants, who in the 1830s began toimport the leaves from Germanywhere the annual fair of Leipzigbecame an important marketand later from England, which becamea source for transshipment for tea destined for the Russian market aswell. The term chay namsah (German, literally Austrian, tea) used inIran for high-quality tea suggests that much of the early tea supplycame via Germany.117

The Russian transit route did not retain its monopoly for long. In1831 the Russian government, concerned about foreign competition,imposed custom duties on the Transcaucasian transit trade. This mea-sure did not stem the flow of goods; it merely prompted merchants tofind different outlets for their commerce. Much of the internationaltransit trade between Europe and Iran was transferred to the southernshores of the Black Sea in the 1830s, when the Ottoman governmentopened its ports to foreign shipping, thus allowing merchants to shiptheir wares across as far as the port of Trabzon, from where they weretransported overland to Iran.118 Agents of Greek trading houses, Cau-casian Armenians, Iranians, and Russian merchants thus transportedtea from England via Constantinople and Erzurum to Tabriz.119 Tabrizand Khoi, Irans gateways in the northwestern province of Azerbaijan,became the busiest entrept markets for transit trade from Trabzon andGeorgia.120

In 1846 the Russians lowered import tariffs on the Transcaucasian

115 Conolly, Voyages, 1:347.116 Mignan, Winter Journey, pp. 17576.117 See Polak, Persien, 2:266; and Johan Schlimmer, Terminologie mdico-pharmaceutique

et anthropologique franais-persane (Tehran, 1874), p. 542.118 A. S(epsis), Perse: Du commerce de Tauris, Revue de lOrient 5 (1844): 13334.119 F. A. Bakulin, Ocherk vneshnei torgovli Azerbaidzhana 187071 gg. Vostochniy

Sbornik 1 (1877): 22021.120 See Wilbraham, Travels, p. 68. For recent analyses, see Charles Issawi, The Tabriz-

Trabazon Trade 18301900, International Journal of Middle East Studies 1 (1970): 1827;and Manfred Schneider, Beitrge zur Wirtschaftsstruktur und Wirtschaftsentwicklung Persiens18501900 (Stuttgart, 1990).


route in an attempt to regain their market share, but by that time thenorthern supply line had already begun to be challenged, and not justby the Trabzon trade. Following the signing of the Anglo-PersianCommercial Treaty of 1841, the British increased their share in tradewith Iran until they dominated the Iranian market with supplies ofcheap Indian tea. Tea began to be imported from India to Bushihr andfrom there to Muhammarah (Khorramshahr) on the Shatt al-Arab, aswell as to Bandar Abbas and from there to places like Yazd in the inte-rior. The annual supply via the latter channel around 1850 is given asfrom fifteen hundred to two thousand cases of 474 mann (6,162pounds) each.121 A growing volume of tea imported by Iran came fromIndia, carried via the maritime route and even overland via Qandahar.In the Persian Gulf Bushihr became the most important port of entry.The rising figures for tea imports through this and other southern portsillustrate the trend. Thus, in 1863 tea in the amount of 80,000 rupeeswas imported from India to Iran via Bushihr.122 Table 1 shows thegrowing volume of tea exported from England to Iran between 1878and 1887.

121 Trade Report by Mr. Consul Abbott in 184950, in Cities and Trade: Consul Abbotton the Economy and Society of Iran 18471866, ed. Abbas Amanat (London, 1983), pp. 91,107.

122 For the import figures from Russia in the latter part of the century, see MarvinEntner, Russo-Persian Commercial Relations, 18281914 (Gainesville, 1965), pp. 10, 66, 70.Tea and coffee imports in 1863 are found in Pelly, Remarks on the Tribes, p. 47. Thissource, pp. 5455, only notes the overland tea connection. For figures of goods importedthrough the various entry points for the period 187882, see also F. Stolze and F. C.Andreas, Die Handelsverhltnisse Persiens, mit besonderer Bercksichtigung der deut-schen Interessen, Ergnzungsheft 77 zu Petermanns Mittheilungen (1885): 6983.

Table 1. Value of Tea Imports from England to Iran, 187887, in Pounds Sterling

Year Value Year Value

1878 34,870 1883 43,9281879 26,928 1884 65,4401880 40,176 1885 81,1201881 19,064 1886 75,2001882 25,880 1887 96,600

Source: E. Fg. Law, British Trade and Foreign Competition in North Persia, Constanti-nople, 6 December 1888, in British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from theForeign Office Confidential Print, part 1, series B, vol. 13: Persia, Britain and Russia 18861907, ed.David Gillard, appendix 4, p. 45.


All this was part of a more comprehensive long-term shift of Iranscenter of gravity in external trade, toward the Persian Gulf basin. Adecisive factor in this shift was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,which greatly diminished the duration as well as the freight price ofthe voyage between Europe and Asia. The outbreak of the Turko-Russian war in 1877 further reduced the appeal of Russia as a tradingpartner.123 Very small quantities at that time still reached Iran throughthe Caucasian route via Tiflis, while an equally small volume wastransported in transit via the northern cities of Astarabad, Mashhad,and Herat.124 Benefiting from much lower transportation costs, the En-glish were able to underbid the Russians to the point where Chinesetea began to be smuggled into Russia from Western customhouses,such as Hamburg and Leipzig. (The official transshipment of Chinesewares via Europe was prohibited by the Russian government.)125 As aresult, Iran in this period ceased to receive supplies from Russia,despite a continuing popular perception of Russia as the main sourceof tea consumed in Iran. Indeed, as tea was now much cheaper in Iranthan in Russia, and as Russian tariffs on Indian and English goods wereexorbitant, Iranian merchants began to smuggle tea from Iran intoGeorgia.126

In the last decade of the nineteenth century Russia managed torecapture some of its former position in trading with Iran. This processwas facilitated by the completion of the Caucasian railway, whichreached Petrovsk in 1894 and Baku in 1900, as well as competitiveRussian railway charges and low sea freights from the East in the oilsteamers returning to Batum on the Black Sea. Anzali on the southshore of the Caspian Sea now became the port of entry for tea arriving

123 For a discussion of the impact on the trade of southern Iran, see Roger T. Olson,Persian Gulf Trade and the Agricultural Economy of Southern Iran in the NineteenthCentury, in Continuity and Change in Modern Iran, ed. Michael E. Bonine and Nikki R.Keddie (Albany, 1981), pp. 15354.

124 Bakulin, Ocherk vneshnei torgovli Azerbaidzhana; and Bakulin, Ocherk russkoitorgovli v Mazandarane i b Asterabade v 1871 g., Vostochniy Sbornik 1 (1877): 277, 289,300, 302.

125 A. M. Petrov, Foreign Trade of Russia and Britain with Asia in the Seventeenth toNineteenth Centuries, Modern Asian Studies 21 (1987): 63031.

126 See Polak, Persien, 2:266; and Otto Blau, Commerziele Zustnde Persiens (Berlin,1858), p. 143; as well as the report from Tabriz by Sir Henry Rawlinson to the secretary ofstate for India, 14 November 1859, in British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports andPapers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, ed. Kenneth Bourne and D. Cameron Watt,part 1, series A, vol. 1: Russia, 18591880, ed. Dominic Lieven (Frederick, Md., 1983),p. 8. Tea imports into Russia doubled in the 1870s as compared to the previous decade. Seethe import figures in Joseph Schtz, Russlands Samowar und russischer Tee: Kulturgeschichtli-cher Aufriss (Regensburg, 1986), p. 28.


from Russia and destined either for Iran or for the Trans-Caspianregion of Russian Turkistan.127 This trade revival is reflected in theRussian share in Irans tea supplynearly 40 percent by 1910.128 Therewas no fundamental change, however, in the provenance of the tea.Most of the tea now entering Iran, even supplies transshipped viaRussia, continued to originate in British India, Indian tea having re-placed Chinese tea as the most popular kind, even in Central Asia.129

There is little doubt that the diminishing price of tea as a result oflower transportation costs contributed greatly to the rapid spread ofthe drink in late nineteenth-century Iran. The same was true even inRussia, where cheaper sea-borne tea is said to have been an importantfactor in the growing popularity of tea in the same period.130

The shift in commercial and political patterns that is visible in theshifting importation and consumption of tea in Iran reflects a secularchange of global import: the extension of Western economic andpolitical hegemony to parts of the world where Europeans had hithertoplayed a minor, or at least a less than dominant, role. Iran was one ofthose areas. Although the country had been the object of Europeancommercial penetration since the seventeenth century, it had neverbecome fully integrated into the expanding world market. This situa-tion changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. AlthoughIran was never formally colonized, it lost economic independence andbecame incorporated into a European-dominated trading network thatspanned the entire Asian continent. The main players in this network,England and Russia, had both become tea-consuming societies in thecourse of the nineteenth century, in part because their commercialempires extended predominantly to regions where tea was or might becultivated. The nature of their home market made both countriesactive in the tea trade, and by the mid-nineteenth century theyimported vast quantities of tea. The demand for tea in both cases ledto efforts toward import substitution. England in the 1830s began toencourage tea production in its Indian dominions. In 1853 Russia

127 Sir Thomas Edward Gordon, Persia Revisited (London, 1896), p. 17.128 Entner, Russo-Persian Commercial Relations, p. 72.129 As of the 1860s Indian tea began to replace Chinese tea in Central Asia. High Rus-

sian toll tariffs notwithstanding, tea was increasingly carried to Turkistan by merchantsfrom Kabul and Qandahar. See H. Vambry, Die Anglo-russische Theeconcurrenz inTurkestan, sterreichische Monatschrift fr den Orient 2 (1876): 106107. In 1874 a Britishreport claimed that six thousand camel loads worth three million rubles were annually car-ried into Central Asia from Afghanistan. See Abstract of Report of Colonel Glukovsky, 14June 1874, in British Documents, ed. Bourne and Watt, part 1, series A, vol. 1, p. 237.

130 See Smith and Christian, Bread and Salt, pp. 23536.


began a series of attempts to stimulate the cultivation of tea in theBlack Sea region, and indigenous cultivation took off in the 1880s.131Given these developments and the intensity of the interaction withIran, it is only natural that, by way of commercial channels and cul-tural osmosis, the external stimulus fostered the consumption of tearather than coffee in Iran.

Conclusion

Both coffee and tea were consumed in Iran from at least the late six-teenth century. The available sources indicate that coffee was themore popular drink. The scant evidence also suggests that the demiseof the Safavid state in the early eighteenth century greatly reduced thenumber of coffeehouses, and possibly the overall consumption of coffeeas well. A natural function of the terror and destruction inflicted uponthe country throughout the century, this decrease was expressed as aretrenchment of public life.

Although neither tea nor coffee ever disappeared from the Iranianurban scene, both became more visible in the early nineteenth cen-tury, in part because of a greater abundance of sources from parts of thecountry that had gone unreported in the eighteenth century and inpart because a revival of trade and social life brought about a realincrease in the consumption of imported commodities. The picturethat emerges from the sources in early Qajar times contradicts thenotion of a simple predominance of coffee. Instead, there is a clear dis-tribution of the two drinks along lines of region and social stratifica-tion. The upper classes were in a position to serve both tea and coffeeat their ceremonies and receptions, regardless of geography. Otherwise,tea predominated in the north, while coffee was the drink of choice inthe south.

The basic division notwithstanding, it is evident that tea not onlybegan to be consumed in parts of Iran where it had not been customarybefore, but also began to edge out coffee in the south. Although lessdramatic than it appears at first sightboth, after all, are nonfermentedbeverages containing the same addictive substancethis long-termchange is interesting mainly because of the larger social and economiccontext in which it occurred.

131 See G. Radde and E. Koenig, Das Ostufer des Pontus und seine kulturelle Entwick-lung im Verlaufe der letzten dreissig Jahre, Ergnzungsheft 112 zu Petermanns Mittheil-ungen (1894): 3435.


Beyond a possible cultural predisposition toward teathe sweet-toothed Iranians had long consumed tea with sugarseveral sourcesintimate that the growing popularity of tea involved issues of statusand changing taste. Although the presentation of samovars to theroyal court did not literally reintroduce tea to Iran, it did publicizethe drink and its preparation. Tea, moreover, was as expensive as thesugar that invariably accompanied it, so that both were initially con-sumed primarily by the elite strata of society. The drink seems to haveevolved from a luxury into a staple and a necessity, a process epito-mized by the tea-purveying coffeehouses that emerged in the coun-trys urban centers sometime in the 1850s. Unfortunately, we lackdetailed information about the nature and the stages of this process.

A further evolution toward an Iranian consumer society can beseen in the 1870s and 1880s. Yet demand-oriented causes do not suf-fice to explain the rapid spread of tea in this period. Given the vulner-ability of Iran to outside influence and the lack of internal economicdynamism, an equally important stimulus has to be sought in the mar-ket and, more specifically, in the impact of changing internationaldelivery channels. Iran in the nineteenth century became incorpo-rated into the world economy and began to interact commerciallywith the Asian continent under the aegis of its two superpowers,England and Russia. This trading network was at first dominated byRussia, which initially drew Iran into its orbit. Russias hegemonycame to an end, however, when merchants began to explore the Trab-zon route and when Great Britain opened up the Persian Gulf for itscommerce and thus established a direct and inexpensive link betweenproducers in India and consumers in Iran. For Iran to be drawn intothe Russian or the British sphere of influence made no difference as faras its changing taste in caffeinated beverages was concerned: in eithercase, the conversion to tea was a historical inevitability.

Matthee 1996 Coffee to Tea Shifting Patterns of Consumption in Qajar Iran

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