The Coffee House: A Cultural History

Abstract

The Coffee House: A Cultural History, by Markman Ellis (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; pp. xiv + 304. £18.99). This new cultural history of coffee houses begins by exploring the historical roots of coffee drinking. The ‘wine of Islam’, which was originally grown in the Yemen and consumed in the mid-sixteenth-century coffee houses of Constantinople, was introduced to western Europeans by the German botanist Leonhard Rauwolf, who encountered coffee at Aleppo in 1573. Chapters on the first English coffee house and ‘The Republic of Coffee’ trace the rise of coffee-drinking in England during the Interregnum, mapping the early history of the first coffee houses in Cornhill through such diverse sources as vestry minutes and street plans. Coffee houses in the 1650s gave rise to such radical innovations as the ballot box at Harrington's Rota club, which met in Miles's Coffee House. By the 1660s, coffee houses were widely known as places where people could speak their minds, characterised by ‘the quality of fellowship, brotherhood and company’, and their early association with scurrilous pamphlets, unlicensed news, and ‘freedom of words’, a propensity which led to an early and abortive attempt by Charles II to have them closed down. Ellis explores the manifold contributions of the late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century coffee houses to metropolitan literary, philosophical, and scientific pursuits (particularly memorable is Robert Hooke and Edward Tyson's public dissection of a porpoise at Garraway's). Also included are the emergent financial institutions of the City of London: coffee houses were prototypes for the stock exchange and for insurance companies, of which Lloyds Coffee House was the most prominent example. He sketches their rise as a British institution outside London (although more detailed research is still needed in this area), and in continental Europe and America. The author does not neglect to consider the history of caffeine (the drug was isolated in 1821, although coffee and wakefulness had a long association) and ‘psycho-pharmacology’ of coffee as a ‘think drink’—still an invaluable stimulant to many a student undergoing a late-night essay crisis. His account of the demise of the coffee house in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is persuasive. The separation of the home from the workplace, work from leisure, and pressure on real estate, argues Ellis, was a major contributing factor to the decline in the popularity of coffee houses in London. In many respects (to paraphrase and extend his argument further) coffee houses helped give birth to capitalism, but capitalism killed the coffee house. Ellis gives a useful overview of the subsequent emergence of a historiography of the coffee house in the nostalgic tradition of G.M. Trevelyan (who lamented a lost coffee-house milieu of ‘levelling’ propensity), and the left-leaning post-war intellectual inheritance that gave rise to Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere, in which coffee houses played a crucial role. The subject is brought up to date with concluding chapters on the revival of coffee bars in the 1950s ‘espresso revolution’, and the emergence of a global coffee culture through the spread of corporate franchises such as Starbucks in the 1990s. The author laments the latter; he sees the popularity of Starbucks, with their watered-down, milk-and-sugar drinks and uniformly managed interiors (‘non-places’) as a modern travesty of earlier incarnations of coffee house culture, the natural home of risk, debate and political intrigue. In an era of soundbites and public conversation dominated by celebrity trivia, it is hard to disagree with him. Addresses to the non-specialist are largely successful, such as the memorable advice on how to re-create the taste of early modern coffee (p. 130), but the author sometimes overburdens his historical subjects with the language of modern management-speak (Restoration coffee house keepers were apparently ‘building the brand, not just of coffee, but of the English coffee-house experience’). Attention is rightly given to the important work of Simon Smith on the economics of the trade in coffee and tea, but more could have been made of Smith's work on the vital role that sugar prices played in shaping the patterns of consumption of hot drinks. Ellis boldly claims that ‘the history of the coffee house is not business history’ (p. xii), yet this statement undermines the significance of some of his most original findings, not least his estimate of the income of Christopher Bowman, one of London's first coffee house proprietors (p. 37). The book is illustrated in colour and well presented (although Steve Pincus's well-known article ‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’ has curiously mutated into ‘Coffee Politicians Does Great’, n. 30, p. 268). Markman Ellis has successfully written a new cultural history of the coffee house that is both accessible to the non-specialist, yet also offers fresh archival research that will engage the scholar. This book is every bit as stimulating as its subject, and deserves to be widely read. I can only hope that my local Waterstones was atypical in shelving it among the cookery books.