The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (review)

High on the top ten list of most successful ideas of the last half-century must be Habermas's concept of the public sphere, the notional space where citizens meet to exchange views on matters of common interest, and public opinion comes into existence as a factor in the government of nation states. For historians interested in the actual spaces where such exchanges took place, the coffeehouse has been a prime exhibit. Here is a kind of social space that came into existence in the middle of the seventeenth century, just at the right time and in the right places to bring the urban professionals and merchants together to discuss public affairs. To Brian Cowan, however, it presents a problem. Why should coffee, a bitter drink made from a plant only grown in places remote from Europe, and associated culturally with the Ottoman Empire, the greatest power in the Western world, still an active threat to Christian Europe, have become so popular? His answer is the substance of this fascinating book.

It was the virtuosi, those members of the aristocracy and gentry who wanted to know more about the material world, who are the heroes of Cowan's story. They wanted to try coffee (and tea, and chocolate, but those are other stories). The East India Company would have continued its profitable shipping of coffee from Mocha in Yemen to Surat in India and never sent a single bean back home had there not been gentlemen in England, persons of rank and influence, who wanted to find out what this commodity tasted like. The coffeehouse, too, owed its existence to the virtuosi, gentlemen who cultivated their intellectual interests through association with other like-minded persons. On one level, visiting the coffeehouse was like visiting another gentleman's home, except that the company was more various and the exchange of ideas therefore probably more lively. It was no accident that the first English coffeehouse opened in Oxford in 1650, for at Oxford at that time harboured numerous virtuosi, including several who became founding members of the Royal Society. The first London coffeehouse followed two years later, and, despite some resistance to the novelty, their number soon increased.

Following the Restoration of Charles ii in 1660, coffeehouses, especially those in London, broadened their scope. As a fairly large space with readily reorganized furniture, the coffeeroom was often converted into an auction room, attracting virtuosi in their capacity as collectors, as well as a broader public. As a neutral space, the coffeehouse lent itself to business activities, sometimes becoming associated with a particular kind of business, like Lloyd's with marine insurance. Soon city folk joined the gentry in the coffeeroom, and governments of every political stripe fretted at the rapid and unofficial dissemination of news and the discussion of public affairs by people of the meaner sort. But occasional efforts at suppression met with effective resistance, and by the early eighteenth century the coffeehouse was an accepted part of English culture.

The coffeehouse was an innovation, but not an alien intrusion into English life. Cowan shows how the licensing system already in effect for alehouses was rapidly extended to include coffeehouses, and how quickly coffeehouses, and their proprietors, became incorporated into the existing social and legal structures of urban life. Originally a gentry-dominated institution, the coffeehouse opened its doors to the citizen and merchant without losing its respectability, as new codes of behaviour shaped a new understanding of civility that allowed the mixing of ranks. Gender, however, remained a barrier; women served in, might even own, coffeehouses, but except for special events like auctions, ladies did not go into them. They stayed home, at their tea-tables.

No summary can do justice to the richness of Cowan's study. Based on extensive archival research, illuminated by critical engagement with the current historiography of the period, and written with a stylishness that is as self-effacing as it...