The increasing popularity of coffee in seventeenth-century Europe paralleled the emergence of commercial capitalism. The Middle Eastern bean, fostered by the ascetic Sufi to free themselves from worldly matters, evolved into a Western capitalist commodity. Coffee reached Europe via trade, diplomacy, war, and immigration. Venetian traders, with their command of Mediterranean commerce, introduced it into southern Europe. The Dutch, who superseded them in the Orient, were even more important in spreading the arabica.
At first, coffee was regarded in Europe as a medicinal drug that could cure sore eyes, dropsy, gout, and scurvy. Its social role and prestige, however, were considerably enhanced in 1665 and 1666 by the arrival in France of emissaries of the Ottoman sultan who poured the exotic liquor for their aristocratic European guests during extravagant soirees (Leclant 1979; Heise 1987).
According to Austrian lore, coffee first became a drink Europeans found palatable when bags of it were left behind by the Ottoman Turks after their 1683 siege of Vienna failed to break the Austrians’ spirit. These spoils of war not only uplifted Viennese spirits but also helped transform coffee from medicine into a leisure drink when the owner of the first Viennese coffeehouse, Georg Kolshitsky, thought to remove the sediment from Turkish coffee and add honey and milk. Elsewhere in Europe, Armenians, Greeks, Lebanese, and other Christian traders from the Levant spread knowledge of the beverage. Southern and central Europeans devised many of the most popular ways of brewing, roasting, and mixing coffee: Espresso, cappuccino, cafe au lait, and French and Vienna roasts are still familiar terms today.
Yet it was the northern Europeans who became the greatest consumers. In England, coffee was closely tied to the academic community from the beginning: The country’s first coffeehouse seems to have been one opened in Oxford in 1637 by a Greek merchant. But soon London merchants were also imbibing the potion in coffeehouses, such as Jonathan’s and Gar-raway’s (which served for three-quarters of a century as England’s main stock exchanges), the Virginia, the Baltic (which doubled as the mercantile shipping exchange), and Lloyd’s Cafe (which became the world’s largest insurance company). In addition to serving as commercial houses and office buildings, coffeehouses became “penny universities” that disseminated the latest news, reading libraries, and the first men’s clubs.
Such social areas outside of the home and the court helped stimulate business but also outraged wives. They resented their husbands’ addiction to the dark, noisy coffeehouses and the black and nauseous liquid that allegedly caused impotence. Their complaint, which was echoed in other corners of Europe, was in striking contrast to the mullahs’ fears that coffee stimulated carnal desires. Charles II, concerned more with cafe patrons’ political discussions than their familial responsibilities, tried unsuccessfully to close down the coffeehouses. It would take the rise of the East India Company, the Indian colonies, and high taxes on coffee to convert Britain to a tea-consuming country (Ellis 1956; Bramah 1972).
On the Continent, cafes symbolized and served the beneficiaries of capitalist prosperity who constituted the new leisure class, although debates continued to rage over the brew’s medicinal properties. In the best scientific tradition, Sweden’s Gustav III reputedly commuted the death sentences of twin brothers convicted of murder on the condition that one be given only tea to drink and the other coffee. The tea drinker died first - at age 83 - and Sweden became the world’s most ardent coffee-consuming nation, with its citizens drinking five cups per person per day by 1975. In 1992, most of the 10 leading coffee-consuming nations on a per capita basis were still in northern Europe: The 10 were (in order) Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, and Belgium (United States Department of Agriculture 1993).
The eighteenth-century mercantilist policies of tax-hungry kings posed another kind of threat to coffee drinkers. Frederick the Great, for example, was less open-minded than King Gustav and less concerned with his subjects’ health than with their political proclivities and the balance of trade. He consequently sought to prevent commoners from drinking the brew by making it a royal monopoly. Although he failed, the high import duties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries restricted consumption to the relatively affluent in major cities. The same was true in France and Austria (Heise 1987) and in Switzerland, between 1756 and 1822, there were five different decrees prohibiting coffee importation.
Cafes prospered in the capitals, however. Their great popularity in Paris served to distinguish the elite from their social inferiors, who bought their coffee in the marketplace. The coffeehouse denizens constituted an elite of achievement, a bourgeois elite. Coffee’s great virtue, in contradistinction to alcohol, was that it stimulated the body while clearing the mind. Intellectuals now had discussions rather than orgies, and some coffeehouses, such as the Procope in Paris, served as centers of intellectual and artistic life where such men as Voltaire skewered aristocratic foibles.
The Cafe Heinrichhof in Vienna inspired Johannes Brahms and other great composers, as well as merchants who preferred the sound of money. Other coffeehouses (such as this author’s grandmother’s Cafe Mozart in Vienna) hosted cards and billiards and other such less-inspired diversions. The leisure of the coffeehouse was serious business.
Coffeehouses were also intimately involved in the birth of civil society and the democratization of semifeudal aristocracies. Thus, it was in Paris’s Cafe Foy that on July 13,1789, Camille Desmoulins planned the assault on the Bastille that ushered in a new political age (Oliveira 1984). It is perhaps ironic that his action would also set into motion events that destroyed the coffee plantations of the world’s greatest coffee producer, the French colony of St. Domingue (today Haiti).
Coffeehouses continued to be associated with subversion in the nineteenth century. Preparations for the 1848 revolutions were made in the coffeehouses of Berlin, Budapest, and Venice. In France, one of the first responses to threatened revolt was to close down the cafes (Barrows 1991). Ulla Heise (1987) argues, however, that although emigres continued to plot in cafes after 1850, the coffeehouses lost their revolutionary association. Revolution became more proletarian, and workers tended to frequent taverns, bars, and winehouses. S. Barrows, on the other hand, credits the declining political radicalism of the coffeehouses to the rise of newspapers, music halls, and other places for association.
If coffee in Europe was a part of the middle class’s struggle for democracy, coffee itself became increasingly democratized. Although taxes kept the price high, coffee became the breakfast beverage of choice for the Continent’s urban working class. To compensate for the high prices, the poor often drank coffee substitutes rather than the arabica (in Germany, Kaf-fee can refer to any number of beverages; the arabica or robusta is called Bohnenkaffee').
World History
